Incident on Marina Walk: how Dubai responds to crime

Last weekend, over a café breakfast at Dubai Marina, I witnessed something rarely seen in the UAE: crime in progress.

It began as noise: raised voices somewhere along the promenade, a distant commotion as heads turned and conversations stopped.

Then it played out at speed.

A man was sprinting along Marina Walk as if for his life, pursued by a crowd shouting “stop him”. A passer-by stepped bravely into his path and knocked him off balance, sending him headlong into the metal rail that runs the length of the waterfront. 

The runner struck it with a shocking thud, headfirst, at full pace. For a moment he stumbled around, groggy, before resuming his escape bid.

In desperation, he tried to vault the café’s low terrace barrier, but crashed onto a breakfast table where a family with two small children sat eating. 

Tables, chairs and plates went flying as the children screamed and their parents leapt to shield them.

For a few seconds there was an air of real panic: was he armed? Would he take hostages? Were the children in danger?

But very quickly, café staff and nearby security had restrained him and were calling police. Order had reasserted itself.

I never learned what the alleged offence was – one man arrived on the scene very agitated, shouting, “What did you do to my wife?”

But what struck me most was not the act itself but the collective reaction around it: shock, disbelief, and then immediate intervention by ordinary bystanders.

This was not a community accustomed to street crime, but one responding to an anomaly.

Dubai’s global reputation for safety is so well established that it can slip into cliché. How many times have we heard, “You can leave your wallet/bag/laptop all day and nobody would steal it”?

But that reputation also rests on the absence of experiences like the one I had just witnessed.

Official data underlines how unusual such scenes are. Dubai Police report a murder rate of around 0.2 per 100,000 population – among the lowest recorded in any major city. By comparison, rates in London and Paris are roughly six or seven times higher and in large US cities more than 20 times higher.

Equally telling is perception. Global safety surveys consistently place the UAE among the countries where residents report feeling safest walking alone at night.

Dubai’s Crime Index – based on public perception of crime risk – sits near 16, compared with 45-65 for cities such as London, Paris and New York. Diplomatic security assessments note that street crimes such as pickpocketing and petty theft occur very infrequently.

In a city of more than 2 million people, with vast tourism flows and a transient multicultural workforce, that is significant.

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How does Dubai do it?

Part of the answer is structural: strict laws, rapid judicial processes and visible policing create a high-deterrence environment. Surveillance technology is extensive and sophisticated, and the probability of being identified after committing a public offence is unusually high.

Whatever the Marina runner had done would have been caught somewhere on camera.

But the deeper factor may be social. Dubai’s population is overwhelmingly composed of people who have come to the city for opportunity and self-improvement. The collective incentive is order, because disorder threatens everyone’s aspirations.

There is also a strong public consensus around safety norms. You saw it in microcosm on Marina Walk: strangers intervening, staff acting decisively, security responding instantly.

The modern social convention to ignore wrongdoing – commonplace in some large cities – is absent here. The default is compliance with rules that are widely seen as tough – but just and predictable.

None of this means crime does not exist in Dubai. Theft, fraud, domestic disputes and occasional violent incidents occur, as they do in any urban society.

Dubai Police publish periodic crime bulletins and warnings, and the local media savours court cases involving assault, robbery and other felonies. Dubai prisons are not empty, nor are all the inmates of the “white collar” variety.

But Dubai does not suffer the background noise of petty crime and public disorder that forms part of everyday urban experience elsewhere.

Which brings me back to Marina Walk.

Within minutes of the incident, tables were reset, crockery replaced, children comforted and breakfast resumed. The promenade returned to its usual rhythm of joggers, tourists and families.

Surely that is the point. Public safety in Dubai is not the absence of all crime – no city could do that – but rather the attainment of a system in which it remains exceptional, rather than routine.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia