Where have all the burglars gone?

THE Old Town in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, does not look like a den of thieves. On a summer afternoon, herds of elderly tourists—American, Japanese, British—wander between the gift shops and sip lagers at pavement cafés beneath the gothic town hall. In a park, teenagers chat and smoke cigarettes in the sun.

Valdo Pôder, a local police officer, remembers when it was quite different. In the mid-1990s curtains rose at the city’s theatres at six o’clock so that the audience could get home before sunset. Young men hung around selling bootleg vodka. The streetlights were always smashed. Pointing to one smart-looking bar Mr Pôder says he would have needed a team of at least ten officers to raid it. “We’d have to put everyone inside on the floor,” he says. “Or else we might get shot at.”