Using Shoeprint to Efficiently Solve a Gold Robbery Case

1. Case Overview

On September 25, 2025, a violent daytime robbery occurred at a gold jewelry store in a certain city. After the incident, the police used a rapid tracking method that combined shoeprint evidence with video footage to quickly locate the suspect's hiding place. Within just three days, they successfully arrested the suspect.

2. Case Details

At afternoon on September 25, 2025, the jewelry store was open for business when a man dressed in black and wearing a black hat entered. The clerk was about to greet him as usual, but the man suddenly pulled a homemade single-barreled firearm from his bag and forced the clerk to take the jewelry from the display cases and put it into his shoulder bag. After grabbing several bracelets, bangles, and necklaces from three jewelry trays, he quickly fled the crime scene. The entire robbery took less than 60 seconds. Later, when the clerk checked the inventory, the stolen jewelry was valued at over 1 million RMB.

After receiving the report, the police quickly dispatched crime scene officers to collect physical evidence and to obtain detailed information from the clerk about the robber’s appearance. After careful questioning, the clerk could only provide a brief description: the robber did not have a local accent, was dressed entirely in black, and wore a black hat. Because the offender had a firearm, the clerk was extremely nervous, and the police were unable to obtain further case details from them.

During a careful on-site inspection, investigators recovered three sets of suspect shoeprints but did not find fingerprints, DNA, or other physical evidence. Finally, the police seized the store’s indoor surveillance footage. Because this is a commercial area, many street-front shops have cameras and there are numerous public area cameras along the road, the police mobilized more than 20 officers to collect all surrounding video footage and brought it back to the station for further analysis.

After returning to the police station, technicians quickly searched the shoeprint database using the shoeprints collected at the crime scene. By combining the results with the shoe color observed in the surveillance footage, they determined that the suspect was wearing a pair of black sneakers of a certain brand. These shoes had a distinctive feature, reflective stripes on both sides which greatly aided the video based tracking of the suspect.

The officers in charge of video analysis quickly conducted an automated search across the large amount of footage collected, focusing mainly on cameras at key inter sections to look for the suspect’s shoes. After a full day and night of continuous effort, they were finally able to trace the suspect’s escape route through various traffic surveillance videos. 

After fleeing the jewelry store, the suspect ran into an old residential compound, exited through another gate, and changed his clothes. However, his pants were still black, and he had not changed his shoes.Upon leaving the compound, he quickly took a taxi and escaped from the area. Based on the taxi’s GPS data, he got off about five kilometers away and then transferred to a bus. Bus surveillance footage showed that he got off in a densely populated urban village. 

Because the public infrastructure in the urban village was relatively outdated, the police had to visit key local shops to obtain their street-facing surveillance videos for further analysis, a process that required considerable manpower. 

After automatically analyzing a massive amount of video footage, the police finally captured an image of the suspect entering an old residential building in front of a grocery store. This discovery greatly excited the investigation team, after two days and nights of hard work, their efforts had finally paid off.

The police quickly set up covert surveillance around the residential building and obtained the grocery store’s recent CCTV footage to check who had entered and exited the building recently, and to verify whether the suspect had already fled. The suspect did not appear in the footage. The police also contacted community workers to learn about the building’s residents; the workers reported that the building is mostly rentedby a mobile population and they were not very familiar with the occupants, so that information was of little help to the investigation. 

To prevent the suspect from escaping, the police decided to conduct a thorough screening of everyone in the building. They secured the perimeter and checked all residents. When they inspected apartment 301, the man inside behaved oddly, he was extremely nervous upon seeing the officers and answered questions unnaturally. Officers searched the bedroom and found the suspicious pair of shoes. The police quickly detained the suspect and took him to the station for detailed questioning.

The forensic officers immediately conducted a feature comparison of the shoes and found that the outsole pattern matched the shoeprints collected at the scene. After a full day and night of interrogation, the suspect finally confessed to the crime. Following the suspect’s guidance, the stolen gold and the gun were recovered from a hidden location in a nearby residential complex, and the gold robbery case was successfully solved.

3. Summary of Experience

The crime scene occurred in an open area, which made it very difficult to collect trace evidence. The suspect took careful measures to disguise himself, rendering conventional investigative methods less effective. The investigators, without limiting their thinking, made full use of the shoeprints at the crime scene, matched them to shoe patterns, and combined this with video tracking to locate the suspect’s hiding place, thereby creating favorable conditions for the arrest. This case represents a typical application of shoe pattern evidence inreal investigations and demonstrates the importance of shoeprint evidence insolving crimes.