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Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in the middle of the day, taking eight items of invaluable historical gems and disappearing into Paris traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and ensuing movie adaptations.

Specialists who study patterns in international art crime, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the monetary worth of valuable gems or metals than the historical importance, continuing a trend that has appeared over the last ten years in Europe, Britain and the US. The venue, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“You may ask why thieves who want to steal expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because nowadays a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A series of aggressive retail store thefts indicate that many outlets have beefed up their security in recent years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer shown overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look vulnerable, in part because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and partly the financial situation in many western countries.

“After the pandemic, governments across the world have cut back on police and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it shows how at risk our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The theft of the items – including jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a hugely valuable crown once owned by Napoleon III’s wife that the robbers left by the street on their way out – has naturally been compared with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed by the worker the thief.

Better points of reference may be the recent 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 same year, the 2017 heist of a large gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of robberies of collector items from US mining museums.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as quickly as possible.”

If the artefacts were to stay whole, specialists say, the thieves would struggle to sell them. “There’s no way to trade something as recognizable as the Louvre’s jewels on the licit market”, said an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, especially given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the items. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see paperwork confirming legal possession before handling such remarkable pieces.”

In the previous years, institutions were often reluctant to go public about the loss of well-known works of art and would stay silent out of embarrassment. These days, as cultural robberies are more reported on, the storage and selling of taken items is risky business for any criminal.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a scheme to keep it in hiding, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the danger of an partner informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the robbery had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It’s all around the world and in all the media. If you acquire these, if you are apprehended, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Altering taken items by dismantling or re-cutting does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because contemporary methods give stones a larger and brighter surface area, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Importantly, however, melting down or re-cutting removes the evidence of the crime. “My guess is that the Louvre thieves will try to bring the items to places with gem knowledge like Israel, another nation or even as close as a city, and find someone to remove the gems,” said Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the museum, with a unauthorized official review expected to be published next month criticising “considerable” and “persistent” delays in modernizing systems and observing that security cameras were missing in many rooms. But security experts say displaying valuable objects in older structures with a steady stream of guests comes with dangers that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Older structures are much harder to secure,” said an art crime professor. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for thieves to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid protective measures for buildings should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, said Peter Stürmann. “There should be multiple levels to deter attackers.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or in-built vibration sensors that alert about a smashed window in immediately, but old museums may be hesitant to alter their appearance. Laser scanners can be difficult to install to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the day as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which took place between morning hours local time, was typical of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when guards change their shifts and prior to the museum is full of visitors who actually act as additional security staff.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new gadgets that can raise the alarm more quickly and efficiently, but it has also provided robbers new methods with which to bypass security measures. In Paris, the robbers reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a window with a electric tool.

An author said the conversation in France about the 232-year-old building had mostly focused on crowd control in the past decade, and not as much on protection.

The museum has an on-site brigade of about 50 permanent firefighters, but their mission is mostly to protect the collection from fires and water damage. “There is no quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to political will and funding, and at present the nation lacks sufficient resources.”