Police cameras unveiled … in Dubai

Calls for introducing police cameras to ensure more oversight between police and civilian interactions have been heard ... only thousands of miles away from where that debate has transpired in the United States and for different reasons than one might assume.

In a new program being introduced in Dubai, the glitzy commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates, the police will start piloting the use of video cameras “to ensure transparency” in the dealings between police and the public.

The trial program will see Dubai’s police using 80 miniature digital video cameras, which will be attached to officers’ uniforms. “The cameras will protect the rights of both sides, because sometimes we receive complaints of mistreatment and there is no proof to support any of the sides. The camera’s footage will be the proof,” Colonel Khalid Nasser Al Razooqi, General Director of Smart Services at Dubai Police, told Gulf News. 

“We respect our officers and trust them but this is for precautionary reasons and to ensure transparency. It is also a means to make sure that the officers implement what they have been taught in the field,” Major General Khamis Mattar Al Mazeina, the Dubai Police Chief, told Gulf News.

According to The National, which reported further details the new program: “At the end of a shift the data is transferred to an independent storing unit at Dubai Police Headquarters that cannot be not removed or tampered with.”

Trying to allay concerns over the implications government surveillance and privacy, Razooqi said: “People will be notified that they are being recorded.”

But while the local police in Dubai are portraying the program as a win for government transparency, it is unlikely to change the UAE’s reputation, especially among human rights organizations, for clamping down on democratic freedoms.

“The UAE proclaims itself a beacon of tolerance in the region but the facts reveal a much uglier truth that betrays a disdain for human rights principles and those who support them,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in January report. “Governments and institutions seeking to develop closer ties with the UAE should take a close look at its recent record.”

HRW, whose officials have previously been banned by the government, maintains that the UAE “continued in 2014 to arbitrarily detain individuals it perceives as posing a threat to national security … [and that] UAE courts invoked repressive laws to prosecute government critics.”