The crime of the century? An exploratory study into indicators of art theft

There is minimal use of police data in research into art crime and heritage crime, despite the existence of specialised art crime databases within national and international police organisations. This chapter uses precisely these available data and statistics to demonstrate the importance and benefit of examining this data. We first discuss the existing data provisions for art crime, specifically those of INTERPOL and national police agencies. Through an exploratory case study, we show how these databases can be used to investigate pressing questions from the research community concerning art and heritage crime. We combine data from INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database with artist information from ArtFacts to investigate whether certain types of objects are either more (or less) susceptible to theft. Despite the high variability of the output of the analysis, the first careful results show that there are certain groups of objects with a higher risk of theft than others.