Mid-East Police

We've had numerous occasions for visits with the police already, and if we keep it up at this rate, we'll have six or seven more before the end of my contract in 2011. Let's cross our fingers I am wrong on this, since the general theme of these encounters is less than uplifting.

Since August, both Billy and I have dented up our insured rental cars, and had to file reports with police. Funnily enough, both of us, in our separate cars, rammed our tires into medians, damaging only our cars (and nobody else) in the process. The main problem in my case was that the multiple officers I got on the phone could not figure out where I was, even though I was at the intersection of two major roads (Emirates Road and Univercity City). An hour and a half after my initial call, the officer finally arrived, saw the exact spot where I rammed the curb, filled in a report, fined me 200 dirhams and actually apologized for making me pay.

Billy's incident was similar, but the police were far less nice, and actually accused him of drinking at the time of the accident, and not calling the police till the next day, to avoid jail. He also was fined 200 dirhams for damaging city property. We wonder if it might help to be a blue-eyed female in this country.

The details of our third police-worthy incident we'll share later. Just bear in mind that none of our family were physically hurt, only Brady witnessed something violent. While we waited to give our statement at the police station, we sat in a narrow corridor directly next to a steel padlocked door labeled 'DETENTION'. After sitting a short while, we could hear a faint knock on it from the other side, like a pencil tapping on a car. It came and went and eventually it was accompanied by some moaning and mumbling in Arabic, followed by the door being noisily shaken from the inside. Every time the noise started up again, Brady gave me a look with an uneasy grin and a shake of his head. Maybe he needs the bathroom, we thought. Finally a police officer came along with a Barney Fife-style ring of keyes, unlocked the door, escorted the dusty, tattered AND SHACKLED prisoner off to one of the ante-rooms adjacent to our seating area. We never heard from this man again.

A while later, another guy with a huge sturdy plastic sack was led in by an officer, who unlocked the little peep-door near the top of the steel door, where he peered in and sent food through the hole, prisoner by prisoner. At first we assumed this was the routine catering provided by the police. But as we had nothing better to do than to carefully watch this transaction, we realized that for each 'schwarma pack' being sent through, a fee in dirhams was being collected by 'the caterer'.

Finally, on another evening when I was at the police alone, finalizing our report, I was sitting at an officer's desk and right across from me was another tattered-dusty but FEMALE detainee, handcuffed to her chair. She wore a muslim headscarf, was barefoot, and appeared to be from Asia. She sat quitely in front of an empty desk, only to weep and shake her head when an officer occasionally came in to interrogate her, getting right in her face and screaming what were apparently accuastions. The only word in Arabic I understood was 'La' or 'No' which she cried over and over again as the police got back into her face. I do hope this was my last visit to the station.