Stewart Johnson’s home may have been burglarized by a musclehead, but he believes it’s the police who robbed him of justice.

Years ago a friend’s house near Võru was burglarized. The thief took everything – dishes, towels, furniture, electrical wiring – though he did leave one lamp that was apparently not to his liking. He didn’t forget to cut off the plug though, and steal that, too. He even felt the need to squat on the floor and relieve himself.

Our friend’s thief was caught, and he confessed. He served a short while in jail and was ordered to pay for damages. He was, and still is, an unemployed alcoholic. He will never reimburse my friend for his crime of desperation, and will eventually die a pauper at the expense of the taxpayer.

Last year I installed a water system at our family’s summerhouse, also near Võru. Just two months later, we went to check up on the place, and discovered the sauna had been burglarized. The thief took everything: the water pump, boiler, shower curtain, faucet, a bucket, almost-empty bottles of shampoo, a bar of soap, the pipes running along the walls, the outside lamp, and half a roll of toilet paper. Thankfully, he was more housebroken than my friend’s thief.

“It’s very unlikely that we’ll catch your thief,” an officer said when the police arrived. “But what can you do?” we pleaded. “We’ll just register what was stolen, and it will enter the official statistics.”

Then I had an amazing idea. It was risky, it probably wouldn’t work, but it could change the course of Võru criminalistics forever. “Take fingerprints!”

“He won’t have left any,” the officer tried to get out of doing his job.

“Take fingerprints anyway!” He reluctantly did, and found some using his special pink powder.

“The prints won’t be on record,” the officer tried again to weasel out of his job.

A few months later, we got a call from the Võru police. The thief had been caught pink-handed, emptying out another house. As it turned out, he had robbed more than twenty houses in the area, leaving prints which – the officer was right were not on record, but which could now be linked to the man himself, because the officer had done his job at our behest.

The thief confessed to all the crimes, and was scheduled for trial. Why a trial would be needed for a confession, versus a simple sentencing, is beyond me, but that is exactly what the police told us.

We drove to the Võru police station to press charges. The detective would only tell us the suspect’s name, but we found out – by chance – that the criminal would have full access to all our personal information, which had been required by the police in their paperwork. Address, email, telephone, children, how often and when we went to our house, and so on. We formally requested that our private information be removed from the case file. “But then you’ll be obstructing justice, as it is required by law.” We tried to explain that the information endangered our safety and property. “The rules are the rules,” came the detective’s reply, but she eventually complied. She just didn’t want to redo the paperwork, and she had to ask for advice. No one had ever wanted privacy, she informed us.

I searched for the thief online and found him. He owed money to half a dozen banks, creditors and casinos. There was no way we were ever going to get any money back from this jerk. Then a couple weeks ago, I looked him up again, just a week before his scheduled trial. He now had a Facebook account, and I could see photographs of him. He was a musclehead, a member of three different gyms and weight-lifting clubs. So that’s how he could single-handedly lift the boiler off the wall while it was still full of water. You could see the tattoos on his arms, many of which were racist in content. I did, however, note the irony in a pink powder catching a criminal covered in white power tattoos.

His trial was last week. He didn’t show up. I sent him a reminder about it on Facebook. He didn’t respond. He did, however, manage to sell his Võru apartment at auction for 11,000 euros. Why the justice system allowed him to keep this – much less sell it – with all his debts and crimes is beyond my comprehension. And doesn’t skipping trial count as obstruction of justice? Shouldn’t the police have immediately gone to arrest him? Apparently the Võru police don’t use Facebook. Two days later, I looked him up again. He’d updated his current city to Madrid, Spain. I Googled several of his Facebook friends. A great many of them also had criminal records, and also resided abroad.

I’m not angry that I won’t get my money back, but I am annoyed that I won’t get my time back. The roughly twenty hours I spent installing the system I will have to invest again. Come to think of it though, I will have paid for the water system twice once it’s replaced, and I probably would have paid its equivalent a third time as well, in the form of tax money spent incarcerating this worthless waste of skin. Now he’s Spain’s problem. He’ll go to jail there eventually, I am sure.

Estonia already has the second-highest percentage of its population in prison in the European Union according to Eurostat. It almost seems that in an effort to cut prison costs, the government has decided to start exporting criminals, allowing other countries to clean up its mess. It’s the opposite of Bring Talent Home.

For those of us who still live in Estonia, we get to be victimized twice: first by the criminals, then by the inaction of the police. A lot of us poor, innocent victims are too scared to press charges. No charges means no crime, and no prison. It’s the perfect crime.

Stewart Johnson lives in southern Estonia. If you'd like to rob him, he suggests you contact the police.