Retrospective news event detection (RED) has been studied for many years in order to discover previous unidentified events. There are ongoing works done to improve RED techniques such as distance measure and clustering approaches to overcome issues such as huge dimensionality of data. This paper discusses three major sequential stages in RED (data preprocessing, data representation and data organization) and reports the limitation in each stage. Finally we present the suggested RED with respect to crimes domain. Keywords: Retrospective news event detection, crime.