Or even visit there. I do not live in Pattaya and I have only been there by my own choice once. I wanted to see what it was all about even though it is well-known throughout the expat community that it is a place for tourists that should be avoided. It continues to be popular for mostly re-light district reasons and also because it is the closes beach area to Bangkok.
I hated it, and can find no good reason to ever go there. It is filled with criminality and doesn't even have the decency to be a nice looking beach. The local news is constantly filled with stories about bad happenings but a lot of this news is repressed or "filtered" so as to protect the good image of the tourist destination. Some of the information makes its way through the embargo though, so to speak.
The first story involves someone accidentally getting shot who had nothing to do with whatever the altercation was. It was almost certainly gang and drug or human-trafficking oriented, but an innocent 7-11 worker was struck. There is a lot of information provided to police that may or may not be fabricated but basically they are looking for a black sedan with several Thai teenagers in it. No tags. Seems legit as far as movie is concerned but since it is Pattaya, I would be willing to bet that the police, or at least the highers ups in the police, know exactly who did this.
The next thing is something that I had never heard of up until lately but has become popular with motorcycle gangs that are all over the country and even here in Chiang Mai. But here in Chiang Mai the motorcycle punks don't last long because the police up here are rather ruthless towards anyone with a modified scooter since oddly, the members of these gangs all seem to soup-up their bikes in the same, illegal fashion.
They are called ping-pong bombs and they are basically just huge firecrackers. Just like regular fire-crackers they don't have any sort of destructive capabilities unless contained and you have probably heard the story about how you can hold a firecracker in the palm of your hand and maybe get a slight burn, but if you close your hand you will lose all your fingers. Well these "bombs" which are legally sold to farmers for the sake of scaring off birds in fields, can be encased in something such as a can and when the bomb goes off it throws shrapnel in all directions. This has become popular with various motorcycle gangs as a method of terrorizing the other gang.
This rarely results in serious injury but some gangs have been stepping up their engineering game and filling the cans with nails and other sorts of things that actually can seriously injure people.
Every now and then the police will raid an "illegal fireworks" stand but at the end of the day this is just another one of those things that they cannot possibly stop. The gangs flock to places like Pattaya where they can make a living being part of a criminal enterprise as fearless enforcers (this is a guess on my part) because teenagers are "invincible", right?
Well this can and will result in yet another blemish for Pattaya as the prevalence of ping-pong bombs start to become more and more common.
So there you have it. Two more reasons to go to other parts of Thailand if you are visiting here. If you are a "red light" sort of person I do not have a problem with that sort of life although I do not participate in it. It might be unpopular to think this but I think it should be legal. You can find that almost anywhere else in the country as well and you won't have to deal with the violence and all-around ugly atmosphere that is the Pattaya area.