Explaining offenders’ longitudinal product-specific target selection through changes in disposability, availability, and value: an open-source intelligence web-scraping approach

Objective To address the gap in the literature and using a novel open-source intelligence web-scraping approach, this paper investigates the longitudinal relationships between availability, value, and disposability, and stealing counts of specific makes and models of gaming consoles. Methods Using data from Western Australia (2012–2019) and focusing on specific makes/models of gaming consoles, the relationships between product-specific stealing counts, availability, value, and disposability were examined using time series and cross-sectional analyses. Results Support was found for a positive relationship between the changing disposability of specific makes/models of gaming consoles over their lifecycle with corresponding stealing counts, above and beyond changes in availability and value. However, when these attributes were analysed statically, both disposability and value were important. Conclusions The results highlight the importance of measuring correlates of ‘hot products’ longitudinally to better understand offenders’ target selection preferences over time—with important implications for theft risk assessment and crime prevention policy and practice. These findings also provide support for the use of similar open-source intelligence web-scraping strategies as a suitable technique for capturing time-specific proxies for product-specific value and disposability.