It's a hard knock life

  • 2002-11-21
  • Toomas Aarand Orav
Crime figured prominently in Estonian headlines last week. "Addicts terrorize Tallinn." "There's a war going on." "Who will protect citizens?"

The sensationalization of violence is nothing special. Crime is always an audience grabber no matter where you are in the world. But coverage in Estonia has leapt from the back pages of tabloids to the editorial pages of the country's major publications.

And its tone has an urgent and somewhat plaintive quality: This is a society that is seriously fed up with rampant criminality and bitterly cynical in its hope for something better.

Two separate yet similar incidents have propelled crime to the forefront of the domestic political agenda.

Two weeks ago, two-time presidential candidate Andres Tarand was robbed and physically assaulted by two young males at night near Viru Gate in Tallinn. The next day an assault in broad daylight occurred in another part of the Old Town. The victim was Anneli Randla, head of the Heritage Protection Society. Worse, she was five-months pregnant. Both victims are expected to make a full recovery.

The media seized on the violent assaults of two high-profile individuals in Tallinn's tourist hub. SL Ohtuleht called it a "condition of war on the streets of the capital." Postimees quoted a deputy mayor saying that drug addicts have run amok. Pevaleht sounded the alarm claiming that police were 20 percent understaffed. And in an innovation you're unlikely to find elsewhere, one local paper solicited opinions from the criminals themselves for an online discussion of the issue.

Critics of the media's new-found interest in crime blame the "celebrity element." A Tallinn police spokesperson pointed out that the number of violent crime has actually been on a downward trend in recent years. However, the same spokesperson admits that official data is spotty at best, since polling suggests that the reporting of criminal incidents is way down.

Public safety is a long-standing issue for Estonia and throughout Eastern Europe. It is hard not to see the rationale behind the current governing Center-Reform coalition and its very popular "get tough" approach to crime. In the run-up to municipal elections, Interior Minister Ain Seppik boasted that putting more police on the streets was working and rhymed off statistics to back his claim.

But the recent attacks have burst the minister's bubble, and now he is promising a "war" on crime, which is to say the doctor is prescribing more medicine.

For the media elite and the opposition parties, the public safety flap comes at a perfect time. With parliamentary elections due in the spring, both forces will combine to investigate and condemn the government's handling of crime. Estonia's major publishers, for their part, do not hide their disdain for the populist politics of the current government.

Politicking aside, what should be done to ensure public safety? It doesn't seem that anybody is ready to advocate anything other than more police and harsher penalties. The leading opposition party, Res Publica, is attacking management of the issue, rather than the assumptions behind the policies.

Estonians seem consigned to the fact that theirs is a high-crime society. (This writer has had the misfortune of a meeting with a couple of guys with really short hair and really big hands.) The issue is how to most efficiently deal with the problem. There is a concern that people might take matters in their own hands. I'm hoping that SL Ohtuleht contributor Tarmo Michelson is way off when he argues that security is a pocketful of pepper spray.