Worldwide analysis of crimes by the traces of their online media coverage: The case of jewellery store robberies

This empirical study aims to determine whether online media coverage can be used to gather intelligence on specific crimes worldwide. The quality of online news is evaluated as an indicator of the worldwide distribution of jewelry store robberies. This phenomenon was selected because evaluating the risk of criminal events at the global level is a challenge for private companies, who need to settle and prioritize protection strategies to determine the actual risk within each country. Online media coverage is thus scrutinized for its ability to reveal spatiotemporal trends of this phenomenon. Based upon a dataset of online news gathered between 2015 and 2017 from the news aggregator website EMM (Europa Media Monitor - NewsBrief), the results show that online news may be a cost-effective method to analyze risks worldwide - though a cross-check with different data sources is still necessary to validate its accuracy. The developed approach shows that (1) while a multilingual approach is required, (2) cases can be detected and automatically classified with good accuracy; (3) moreover, dates and countries of published news articles are generally reliable indicators of the actual times and places of the events, which reduce the need for complex text analysis methods. This study demonstrates how a simple monitoring approach can be used to support the worldwide spatiotemporal analysis of serious crimes such as jewelry store robberies.