Dubai Police

Oyoon — Arabic for 'eyes' — pools camera feeds from tourist sites, public transport, the road network and public buildings into a Dubai Police command centre, where software matches faces against police records and reads vehicle registration plates to flag wanted people and vehicles. Dubai Police run it with partner bodies including the State Security Agency, Dubai Municipality and the Roads and Transport Authority.

Figures, each with its source. In March 2019 Gulf News quoted First Lieutenant Ali Al Shehi of the Dubai Police Criminal Investigation Department saying the cameras 'helped arrest 319 suspects in different areas in Dubai through their automatic facial recognition technology' in the preceding year, and gave 5,000 cameras in the Metro system alone. In July 2021 Gulf News reported Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, briefed on the programme alongside the Dubai Police Commander-in-Chief, saying Dubai is monitored by more than 300,000 cameras, and reported emergency response times falling from 6.46 minutes to under three minutes. The Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice, in a country study current to March 2026, describes Oyoon as using facial recognition and behaviour analysis to identify suspects and track vehicles and plates across more than 5,000 cameras at tourist sites, public transport and traffic.

Legal position. The Oxford study states that there is no dedicated legislation in the UAE governing the use of AI in criminal proceedings, and that the framework rests on general instruments — the Charter for the Development and Use of AI (2024), the AI Ethics Principles and Guidelines (2022) and the AI Adoption Guideline in Government Services (2023). 'legalBasis' and 'oversight' are therefore omitted rather than filled: the honest statement is that neither is established.

Weaknesses, stated plainly. No Dubai Police publication was read directly in this run; dubaipolice.gov.ae could not be reached. Everything above is official statement relayed by reputable regional journalism, plus one academic source. The camera counts are not consistent with one another and are not treated as a single figure: 5,000 is the Metro estate, 300,000 is the ruler's figure for the emirate as a whole, and the two are reported five years apart. No independent accuracy or false-match figure exists for the facial recognition component, and none is asserted here.