I have been giving some thought to the arguments about safety in Dubai discussed on this thread. Certainly, in general terms, my family feels safer here than at home. However, I know of a family that has been the subject of a burglary and a bomb threat and of villas in my area that have been burgled. Of course many burglaries and rapes occur at home but generally they are reported by the media and the authorities. In Dubai we can only postulate on the number and types of crimes that are committed. Anything else is closer to guessing because the media cannot, or choose not to report all of the crimes that occur. Similarly, the police don’t publicize their statistics on all crimes because they are not held accountable to their government by voters.
Is it quirk of human nature that everyone who comes to the UAE suddenly becomes a law abiding citizen? No, it’s because the police have absolute power. A young bloke has been jailed recently because his pregnant wife died during the night of a brain hemorrhage. She’d had to go off her medication because she was pregnant and died as a result. The police locked him up for two months, while his young son and family mourned and then released him without his passport.
I am much happier letting my kids ride their bikes at home as I don’t trust many people on the roads and certainly anyone using Sheikh Zayed Rd regularly must feel that they endanger themselves and their families every time they do so.
The ‘sod off you whining git’ argument doesn’t hold that much water either. If I worked in western Sydney, for example, I might not like living there but if that’s where my job was then I’d have little choice but to stay. Then my options would be to try and find a new job that allowed me a choice of where I lived or to try and improve the circumstances of my current employment. I think people here are looking at both of those options though some will say ‘I love it and therefore they can screw around with my employment conditions because the lifestyle is worth so much to me’ and others will be of the opinion that ‘to stay I need to protect my interests’ and do this by expressing opinions and writing to the bosses. These theories have an endgame and at that point a life in Dubai is no longer viable, of course this point will be different for most people.