Looking for trouble

Sweden faces a growing crime epidemic, but public access to detailed crime data remains limited despite extensive media coverage, particularly of gang violence. I'm excited to launch a new project, Signal-Sifter, that seeks to address this gap by using alternative data sources to map crimes and their locations.

One of the key resources explored is Flashback Forum, a popular Swedish platform where users discuss crime, share media links, and analyse court cases.

These discussions offer raw, unfiltered insights into incidents, potentially revealing patterns and connections not easily accessible through traditional sources. Potentially useful information include:

• Crime
• Location(s) mentioned
• Date(s) mentioned
• Public interest in crime (replies/views)
• Sentiment analysis

So far the project has crawled one board and collected metadata on 66,000 threads posted between 2007-2025. As of now a preliminary roadmap could include:

• Rank threads by probability of crime related data based on thread title.
• Collect crime data from posts and replies on threads.
• Analyse sources present in threads.
• Geolocate and map incidents

You can find an early iteration of the project on Github: https://github.com/AlbinTouma/Signal-Sifter​

What do you think could be an interesting outcome from crawling an online forum where there is a lot of noise in the data?