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Entering the world’s most-visited art institution in broad daylight, taking eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Specialists who observe patterns in international art crime, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a series of smash-and-grab thefts centered more on the monetary worth of valuable gems or materials than the artifacts’ significance, perpetuating a trend that has emerged over the last ten years in Europe, the UK and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of secondary concern to the thieves.

“You may ask why criminals who want to take expensive jewellery are entering a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” stated Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is better protected.”

A spate of violent jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have beefed up their protection in recent years, with security personnel on their premises and merchandise no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, meanwhile, look more exposed, in part because of the inherent factor of being public-facing institutions in older structures, and partly the financial situation in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, governments across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how at risk our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – including jewelry pieces made up of precious stones and 631 diamonds, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring thousands of diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once possessed by a royal that the robbers left by the street on their way out – has naturally been compared with the historical theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed by the Italian handyman the thief.

Better comparisons may be the 2019 theft of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the theft of a multi-million pound gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the that year, the recent robbery of a large gold coin from a European museum or even a spate of robberies of collector items from American institutions.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to stay whole, experts say, the criminals would find it hard to sell them. “There’s no way to sell something as immediately identifiable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, said an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, especially given the cultural authorities has released images of the pieces. Even a individual buyer or an sales venue would want to see paperwork confirming proper ownership before touching such striking pieces.”

In the past, museums were often hesitant to go public about the disappearance of well-known art pieces and would remain quiet out of embarrassment. Now, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the keeping and sale of taken items is dangerous for any criminal.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a plan to conceal it, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an partner informing authorities to collect a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was highly improbable that the theft had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the media. If you acquire these, if you get caught, you end up in prison. You can't display it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Altering taken items by melting down or reshaping does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because modern cutting techniques give stones a larger and brighter appearance, and older-style stones would either attract notice or barter the price down for a coverup.

Importantly, however, dismantling or re-cutting removes the proof of the theft. “My guess is that the robbers will try to bring the stolen goods to locations with gem knowledge like a country, another nation or even as close as a city, and find someone to cut out the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized state auditor report expected to be released next month pointing out “significant” and “persistent” slow progress in modernizing systems and observing that security cameras were lacking in many rooms. But specialists say displaying valuable objects in historic buildings with a constant flow of visitors comes with dangers that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Historic buildings are more difficult to protect,” explained an art crime professor. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to escape, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The most solid protective measures for buildings should be designed “like a fortress”, said Peter Stürmann. “It should include several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that alert about a smashed window in real time, but historic institutions may be reluctant to alter their appearance. Detection devices can be hard to install to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be disabled during the daytime as crowds stomp through a museum.

The schedule of the robbery, which took place between 9.30am and 9.40am in Paris, was typical of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “There’s a good reason why robberies tend to happen at either start or end of day. Frequently when security change their shifts and before the museum is full of visitors who actually act as additional security staff.”

Advances in technology may have thrown up new gadgets that can raise the alarm more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also given robbers new methods with which to bypass security measures. In Paris, the thieves reached the museum’s first-floor window with a mobile equipment and breached a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the conversation in France about the 232-year-old building had mostly centered on crowd control in the past decade, and less on protection.

The museum has an on-site team of about 50 permanent firefighters, but their purpose is mostly to protect the collection from fires and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and at present the nation lacks sufficient money.”