Dubai Police’s Crime Scene Department collected 269,707 physical and digital traces from crime scenes between 2023 and August 2026, according to Emirates News Agency (WAM), which published the figures on 1 October 2026. The department sits within the General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology. WAM says the collected material supported investigations and helped identify suspects in a number of cases, but it does not quantify how many cases, identifications or prosecutions resulted. The 269,707 figure is an exact cumulative count for the period stated in the release, not an annual rate and not a count of crimes. Physical and digital traces are combined in the published total; no category split or definition of a separately countable trace is provided.

The report also states that institutional assessment reports recorded a 17 percent improvement in performance. It does not specify the indicator, baseline, weighting, assessment period or calculation method behind that percentage. Separately, average field response time in Deira and Bur Dubai fell from 18 minutes to 16 minutes over four years. That is a two-minute reduction in the reported average for those named districts, not a citywide measure and not a response-time figure for every incident. The report does not give annual values, incident counts, the precise start and end dates of the four-year window, or a comparison group. Because the data are not accompanied by a technical methodology, the percentage and time measures should be repeated as attributed statements, not treated as independently calculated performance statistics.

Operational readiness was described through additional counts and programmes. The department conducted 39 field scenarios designed to simulate different crime scenes. The exercises were intended to let teams apply knowledge under conditions resembling actual work; the release does not report a score, pass rate or resulting change in case outcomes. More than 1,200 people benefited from specialist workshops, according to WAM. Participants came from police stations, Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services, transport security, hotels, Hemaya Schools, colleges and universities, and customs. The release gives no participant breakdown, attendance definition, course duration or follow-up measure, so the total should not be interpreted as 1,200 certified forensic specialists. It is an audience count associated with workshops, as described by the agency.

The initiatives listed include a Crime Scene Diploma, Soil Fingerprinting and Smart Crime Scene, along with specialist teams for bloodstain pattern analysis, forensic archaeology, post-blast investigation, crisis and disaster evidence, forensic entomology and crime-scene investigation. WAM says the general department adopted operational procedures aligned with ISO 17020 and that external bodies conduct annual audits of field and administrative procedures. It also mentions digital-twin devices, three-dimensional imaging, an integrated case-management system, tablets, barcodes for evidence and the Athar Digital Platform. These are reported institutional capabilities. The article does not identify certification scope, audit findings, technology deployment rates, system uptime, or whether all teams use every tool. Those details would be needed to assess implementation depth and consistency across cases.

Evidence collection is only one stage in a justice process. The department’s quoted description emphasizes inspection, documentation, collection, preservation, transfer and chain of custody, but the figures do not show the accuracy of individual examinations or whether evidence was admitted in court. Nor do they measure crime incidence, public safety outcomes or the causal effect of forensic capacity. A rising number of traces could reflect workload, collection practice, case complexity or reporting coverage; the release does not distinguish among those possibilities. For a data record, the cumulative trace count and scenario count can be stored as observed counts, while the performance percentage can be stored as a reported change with its scope caveat. The response-time unit “minutes” is not in the current registry and is therefore left in the article text rather than added as a machine metric. This is a single institutional release, not a longitudinal dataset suitable for prediction.