Formerly a haven of small-town trust, UAE sees rise in crime

I recently stepped out of my apartment in Sharjah and absentmindedly forgot to lock the door behind me. I have always lived in places where doors lock automatically. I wasn’t gone for very long, but long enough for someone to enter and rifle through all the drawers and take any money that was lying loose. Fortunately, the burglar only got away a bunch of spare change left on a table and both my children’s wallets We live in a big complex—33 floors with over 100apartments—lived in by relatively well-to-do, conservative expatriate families from the Arab world and Indian sub-continent. I thought the building was secure, but what surprised me the most was that someone would risk being caught in a country that comes down hard on crime. I’m sure that after serving the sentence, the perpetrator (if he were a foreigner) would never be let back into the country again—a