Who Cares for the Caged Bird?
“Smart Force." (Dubai Police, 2022)
Pigs in Green
Chapter 4
“How can we argue with them?” One caregiver asked.
“If we argue or say something wrong, it is a problem for us only. We have to listen to them. We cannot help it.”
“Your Safety is Our Happiness." (Dawalibi, 2015)
“To Serve and Protect, We Go Above and Beyond." (Dubai Police, 2022)
A great deal of time, effort, and money has been expended to simultaneously humanize and deify the UAE's police force. Social media feeds are dominated by videos and images of infantry dressed in white and green, throwing up peace signs and patrolling the city streets. In fact, during one of our exploratory visits to the Dubai Courts in the Emirate’s Umm Hurair neighborhood, we witnessed four police officers—machine guns in tow—escorting a young Middle Eastern man in handcuffs to the courthouse. It seemed a royal procession, but in an eerie fashion, it felt as if the soldiers had crowned themselves kings.
The respect and admiration we award police (that which they immodestly accept) is not new or specific to the UAE. The police force are venerated in societies across the world for keeping us “safe.” Countless pop culture phenomena, from the American TV show Brooklyn 99 to the 1999 Bollywood film Sarfarosh, pay heed to the infallibility and upstanding moral character of our watchful custodians. Similarly, the Dubai Police for instance has an active PR and Marketing department diligently focused on the sole motive of maintaining its brand as a modern, tech-forward, and highly-effective sentry of abundantly-armed and super-precise troopers. Its YouTube page, for instance, is a meticulously curated carnival of its newest toys and most explosive drug busts. Of course, there are also the heavily dramatized clips of police officers handing out food packets to construction workers during the holy month of Ramadan or chiefs winning awards for their “humanity” and “excellence” in service.
While the rest of the world seems to awaken to a revived consciousness, one of at least reform if not overhaul, the UAE appears to us as still in slumber. Even those of us deeply harmed by its police officers sing high praise of their refined nature—in comparison to the thugs we know back home, the police in the UAE are but a gentle chokehold, not a rubber boot on a craned neck. For example, one caregiver and her husband (both over the age of 70) were awoken abruptly one night when a crew of police officers and Criminal Investigation Department detectives arrived at their house, incessantly ringing their doorbell and banging on their front door. Shaken by fear, the couple locked themselves inside their bedroom. The crew proceeded to enter their ground-floor balcony, attempting to break down its sliding glass door. Unsuccessful, they returned to the front door, where they used a sledgehammer to gain entry. While her husband was handcuffed, a woman constable “allowed” the caregiver to change her clothes in the bathroom before she too was cuffed and taken to the jailhouse. She claimed that the constable was “considerate enough” when she requested to change from her nightwear into more appropriate clothes. However, the constable stood watch inside the bathroom, surveying the caregiver with an exacting gaze as she stripped down to her underwear in front of her. And this, without so much as an arrest warrant in her name—only one in her husband’s. In our conversations, she thought this too her responsibility, her duty of care as his wife. Yet, we must be quick to acknowledge the obvious human rights violation.
This is not to say that the women we spoke with did not express anger, frustration, or disappointment. One caregiver noted her immense resentment with the police officers tasked with the responsibility of escorting her formerly incarcerated brother to the airport, where he was to be deported on a flight she had disbursed her savings to purchase a ticket for. The officers, having dropped him off at the wrong terminal several minutes late, informed him with much indifference he would have to phone his family so they could arrange for another ticket. His sister explained that the family scampered about at the last moment to arrange the funds for an additional ticket, criticizing the police for their apathy and inefficiency. She, like the other women we spoke to, wanted to mete out her anger at the constable. But this desire was muted, blanketed instead by fear. “How can we argue with them?” One caregiver asked. “If we argue or say something wrong, it is a problem for us only. We have to listen to them. We cannot help it.”
Few laws in the UAE hold police officers accountable, and even fewer still recognize the right residents and citizens have to voice their grief or seek recourse when an infraction has occurred. Particularly in instances of incarceration, there was an aim to please—ironically not by the Dubai Police Force themselves, unlike in the videos their social media team continues to post. Caregivers felt the need to be quiet, meek, and cooperative with police officers lest they escalate the situations they found themselves in. Indeed, many of us cannot—or dare not—dream up alternative mechanisms of safety; the sentinel and his authority are critical to our imagined security despite their glaring complicity in our harm.
“To Serve and Protect, We Go Above and Beyond." (Dubai Police, 2022)
Police seize hidden drugs. (Dubai One, 2022)
Frames from some of the UAE's first police troops in the mid-twentieth century. (Codrai, 1998)