A third by seniority

Thai has a word, ตั๋ว — a ticket — for a recommendation from someone with pull. In police postings the best-known form of it has its own slang name, ตั๋วช้าง.

This article does not use that term again. It does not go into where the term came from, who it has been attached to, or what has been said under it.

It reads the rulebook instead.

Thirteen grades, and where this article stops

Section 77 of the National Police Act B.E. 2565 (2022) sets out thirteen grades of police post, from assistant squad leader at the bottom to commissioner-general at the top.

The top six, from commander (ผู้บังคับการ) upward, are selected through a national committee and approved by the Police Commission (ก.ตร.). They are not the subject of this article.

The seven grades below are where the officers a member of the public usually meets sit. Inspector (สารวัตร), superintendent (ผู้กำกับการ), the deputy grades between. Those are the grades this article covers.

The clock

The Act sets a minimum time at each grade before promotion to the next.

Seven years as sub-inspector before inspector. Five years as inspector before deputy superintendent. Four years as deputy superintendent before superintendent. Four more as superintendent before deputy commander.

Sixteen years, at the minimum, from sub-inspector to superintendent, which is the grade that runs a large police station. A superintendent heading a station for the first time must be sent to a medium-sized one, under section 85.

The count is strict. Only time actually served counts. No multiplied time. Twelve months make a year. There are two exceptions in the same section. An officer first commissioned at least eight months before 30 September is credited with a full year. An officer promoted in the annual round is credited with a year to 30 September, whenever the order was signed.

Sections 83 and 84 add a second clock. To be promoted within a line of work, such as investigation or crime suppression, an officer generally needs at least half the required tenure in that line at their current grade.

None of this involves judgement. An officer either has the years or does not.

The third

Section 82 governs who gets the vacancies once the clock is satisfied.

First, only officers on an eligibility list can be promoted at all. The list is drawn up under the Police Commission’s rules, must take ability into account, and is ordered by seniority, with the more senior officer placed higher.

Then, from deputy commander down to inspector, not less than 33% of vacancies at each grade in each bureau go to officers taken from that list in seniority order. From commander up to bureau commander, the floor is 50%.

The remaining vacancies are filled “considering seniority and ability together”.

Ability, the Act says, means service record, performance, conduct, and the public’s satisfaction with the service they received. The last item is the only point in the promotion criteria where the public appears.

Section 76 adds skill, willingness and “the necessity of the service” to what an appointment from inspector upward must weigh. And section 80 confines promotion at these grades to officers already serving in the unit.

So the Act turns seniority into a number, and the number is a third. At the grades that run police stations, at least a third of each promotion round is filled in order. Up to two-thirds is filled on judgement.

Who decides

Outside the national headquarters, section 79 puts the signature with the bureau commander. In the provinces that is the commander of the police region. In Bangkok it is the commander of the Metropolitan Police Bureau. Section 12 makes both of them bureau-level commands.

The bureau commander does not choose alone. The unit’s own proposals must be put before them, made in committee form, and may name only officers already in that unit. If the bureau commander departs from those proposals, section 79 requires them to explain why to the appointment committee under section 81.

Section 81 sets up those committees. At bureau level the committee is the bureau’s head and deputies. The bureau commander must choose from the names the committee recommends.

For promotions at these grades, every seat on the committee is held by serving senior police officers. The only other kind of seat below the top grades goes to a representative of the local police-oversight committee. It sits on the division-level committee, which handles sideways moves at the bottom grades, not promotions.

Two further provisions shape the discretion.

Section 23(2) lets the Police Commission make rules on personnel management, but says those rules must not affect the appointment and transfer powers of bureau commanders. The Act protects their discretion from the body that sets the standards.

Section 86 gives the commissioner-general his own power to appoint at these grades if, among other grounds, he considers a bureau commander’s appointment unfair, finds it contrary to the Commission’s rules, or sees strong reason to move an officer out of an area or a duty. It is a correcting power, and it is also a discretion.

The remedy

An officer who believes the seniority ranking or an appointment was unfair has thirty days from learning of the order to complain. The complaint goes to the Police Merit System Protection Commission (ก.พ.ค.ตร.).

That body is built to stand apart. Its seven members work full time and serve a single six-year term. They are chosen by a selection committee chaired by the President of the Supreme Administrative Court and appointed by the Prime Minister. At least one must be a former officer of bureau-commander rank or above, and at least one must come from the judiciary or the prosecution service.

It must decide within thirty days. Its decision is final unless the officer appeals to the Supreme Administrative Court within ninety days.

If the complaint succeeds, the consequences land on the superior responsible. A finding that the rules were not followed counts as a disciplinary offence. The superior must be disciplined as the case warrants within thirty days, without a further inquiry. If the Police Commission resolves that the breach was deliberate, to help someone or to harm someone, it becomes a serious disciplinary offence under section 112.

Section 87 gives this route to the officer who believes they were treated unfairly. It gives the public no route of its own.

The clause

The last paragraph of section 87 is a criminal offence, and it is drafted with unusual care.

It punishes anyone who gives, offers or agrees to give any property or benefit, or who falsely invokes the authority of any person, or who demands, accepts or agrees to accept any property or benefit, or who does any other wrongful act, to cause a person to be appointed or not appointed to any post.

The maximum is five years’ imprisonment.

Then come the words that matter: “whether or not the appointment or non-appointment accords with the criteria under this Act”.

That closes the obvious defence. It makes no difference that the officer had the years, was on the list, and would have been a lawful choice anyway. The offence is in the arrangement, not in the outcome.

Section 112 makes the same conduct a serious disciplinary offence for any officer who commits it.

Why the one-third

The number did not arrive with the 2022 Act.

The 2017 Constitution, in section 258 D(4), required a reform of police personnel law. Appointments were to consider seniority and ability together, so that officers could work independently, “not under the command of any individual”. The Act repeats that phrase in its own statement of reasons.

Section 260 gave a reform committee one year from the Constitution’s promulgation to finish the job. If it failed, police appointments were to proceed “according to the seniority principle”, under criteria the Cabinet would publish in the Gazette.

The law was not revised in time. The deadline passed in April 2018.

The Cabinet’s criteria, published in the Gazette on 31 July 2018 and backdated to 6 April, defined seniority as holding the required tenure at each grade. Officers with the years were to be considered in seniority order for 33% of the vacancies at each grade. Otherwise appointments were to weigh seniority and ability together, with performance and the good of the service. When the Constitution said “by seniority”, the rule that carried it out said a third.

The Act took effect on 17 October 2022, four and a half years after the deadline. It kept the third, now as a floor, for the grades that run police stations, and set a floor of half at commander grades.

The detailed appointment rules the Act requires under section 88 followed later. The Police Commission Rule on the Appointment of Police Officers B.E. 2567 (2024) was signed in February 2024 and came into force 180 days after its publication in the Gazette, which MGR Online reported in April 2024. It repeats the Act’s floors: seniority order for at least half the vacancies at commander grades, across the whole force, and at least a third at each grade from inspector to deputy commander, within each unit.

What is not written down

The Act names the factors that make up ability. It does not weight them.

Nor does the rule made under it. The Police Commission’s 2024 rule lists what the judgement must take in: service record, performance and conduct. It describes each, and it adds the results of public-satisfaction assessments. For stations and commands responsible for an area, those results are to count “as a principal consideration”. It has committees at each level rank eligible officers “from the most able to the least”, and it requires written reasons for anyone judged not yet fit for promotion. It gives no points, no weights and no scale.

In July 2026 Thai PBS reported an analysis by a serving officer in the police’s own administrative-litigation division. It argued that the Police Commission has never issued concrete criteria, a scoring system or weights for those factors. The argument was made about the national chief’s appointment, but the factors are the same ones section 82 applies at every grade.

On weights, the rule’s text bears that out. The rule does let the national police office issue detailed guidance under it, and Bangkok Lad has not read any. As written, the two-thirds share is judged against named factors with no published scale.

What this adds up to

The Act does not leave police appointments unregulated. It regulates them in two very different ways.

Eligibility is regulated tightly. Minimum years at each grade, counted strictly. A second clock for time in the line of work. An eligibility list in seniority order. A floor of a third.

Choice is regulated loosely. Up to two-thirds of each round at station-level grades goes on “seniority and ability together”. Those promotions are recommended by committees of the unit’s own senior officers and signed by a bureau commander whose appointing power the Commission’s rules may not touch. The commissioner-general can override the result, and the scale for ability is, on the one account available, unpublished.

The drafters plainly saw where that leaves room. Their answer was not a tighter formula. It was a criminal offence that applies “whether or not the appointment accords with the criteria”, alongside a thirty-day complaint route that only the officer passed over can use.

Those are real protections, but they work differently from a formula. A formula can be checked against the order that was signed. A criminal offence has to be proved: a payment, a promise, or a false invocation of someone’s authority. A complaint has to be brought, within thirty days, by the officer with the most to lose from bringing it.

At the grades a member of the public meets, a third of every promotion round is arithmetic. The rest is judgement, and the law’s answer to misused judgement is prosecution after the fact.

Nothing in this article suggests that any appointment was improper, or that the offence in section 87 is committed at any particular rate. No evidence on either was sought or obtained.

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Common misconceptions

“Thai police promotion is strictly by seniority.” At the grades from inspector to deputy commander, at least 33% of vacancies in each round are filled in seniority order. The rest are filled considering seniority and ability together.

“There are no rules, it’s all connections.” The Act sets minimum tenures at every grade, an eligibility list, a seniority floor, committee recommendation, written reasons for departing from a unit’s proposals, a complaint route and a criminal offence.

“If the officer was qualified anyway, nothing illegal happened.” Section 87 applies whether or not the appointment accords with the Act’s criteria.

“The public can complain about a posting.” The complaint route in section 87 belongs to the officer who believes the ranking or appointment was unfair.

“The Police Commission can override a commander’s choices.” It sets personnel standards and supervises compliance. Section 23(2) says its rules must not affect the appointment and transfer powers of bureau commanders. The override power in section 86 belongs to the commissioner-general.