LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 70 – Alex Piquero

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Alex R. Piquero is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. He also holds several other academic appointments including: Professor of Criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Adjunct Professor in the Griffith Criminology Institute Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia), Life Course Centre Fellow, University of Queensland, and Fellow of the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles in the areas of criminal careers, crime prevention, criminological theory, and quantitative research methods, and has collaborated on several books. His work has been cited over 44,000 times and he has been ranked as the #1 criminologist in the world since 1996 in terms of scholarly publications in elite criminology/criminal justice journals. His research has also been featured in several national and international television and newspapers including: The New York Times, Reuters, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Miami Herald, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard Magazine, and the Dallas Morning News, and he is a part of the contributor’s network for The Huffington News and the Dallas Morning News. Dr. Piquero has given congressional testimony on evidence-based crime prevention practices and has provided counsel and support to several local, state, national, and international criminal justice agencies, including various police and correctional agencies. During this episode of CrimeScience, Dr. Alex Piquero and the team discuss the impact of COVID-19 on crime trends and what the retail community should keep in mind when assessing their 2020 crime data. Additionally, they discuss the role that retail leaders can play in working with community leaders to enforce change. The post CrimeScience Episode 70 – Alex Piquero appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-s sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to

improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Here we are 21 years later almost. We're at about 70 major chains expanding and doing stuff with overseas ones as well. Probably done about 320 research projects for them in the theft, fraud, and violence area. But about four years ago or so, we founded this crime science podcast. And so we've been able to move between practitioners and criminologists. We've got some really neat stuff from Weisberg and the typical Felsen and Clark and on and on.

And so Mackenzie is helping us spearhead the effort. We're probably about 120 episodes, something like that overall. And she's like, Alex, take care of, you know, and so let me go over to you, Mackenzie, and take it from there. Yeah, awesome. retailers were very interested in learning about was kind of how to understand all the data that they're now seeing for, you know, kind of 2020 and their crime that's going on and everything that happened with COVID, with the whole George Floyd and policing resources kind of shifting and things of that nature. And you had kind of mentioned a few studies that you had going on in terms of really not necessarily how crime has dropped, but how crime has shifted, both in terms of skimming behaviors, doing things like fraud and kind of committing theft via the Internet rather than in-person stores.

And so I was wondering if you can speak a little bit about that. Yeah. So, you know, I would say that, well, the last, the last 20 months of our lives have been a bit of a cluster. And, you know, the first quarter of 2020, when everything was great in the world, you know, crime hadn't started to accelerate. And then what happened in March, when all of us shut down, we started to observe upticks about end of March, beginning of April on homicides, shootings, ag assaults and domestic violence. Those trends have continued now into we're starting quarter four now of 2021. So these are sustained increases, but only in those crime types. If you look at the FBI just released their 2020 data a couple of days ago, because they're

nine months behind, that's really not helpful, but it is what it is. When you look at the overall number of crimes down, those are driven by larcenies and other kinds of crimes. But if you dig into the details, homicides are up and ag assaults are up, if you look at part one versus part two crimes. And so these are sustained trends that have continued, not just on a national level, but also in most big cities, you know, over 30 some out of the largest cities in the United States. But one thing that's really interesting, Mackenzie and Reid, is that the U.S. is an outlier. This isn't happening in Canada and in the U.K. and in Australia. Now, granted, they have more public health restrictions than we do because it seems that quite a bit of the United States thinks the pandemic is over, but the pandemic isn't over with us.

And so those are the sustained in terms of the regular crime types. One of the interesting things that has occurred early on and in the middle of the pandemic, probably, you know, say, you know, April, May, June, July, is you had not only George Floyd's killing on May 25th, 2020, and about a week, week and a half of riots that occurred in the U.S. and around the world, some of those riots had some violence attached to them. The majority didn't. The majority were actually quite peaceful. And we saw some pullback of police officers for a period of time. But that kind of went back to where it was before in terms of their regular patrols and those kinds of things. But what we saw is, I don't want to say the development or identification, it's just that different kinds of crimes started to occur because of the opportunity structures changed. So for example, we have documented that skimmers, which are these little kind of techniques that offenders put into like where

you go to put your credit card in at a gas station, that is put right into the hole for the card. And the offender is just a little bit of ways. And as soon as you put your card in, it just robs all the identification off that card. And people are using the cards instantaneously. Chip cards, obviously the best approach, but not everybody still has a chip card. So we saw increasing in skimming. That was tied to gas prices, primarily in Texas. We had data actually to do that. We saw increases in a new crime type. For example, in San Antonio, Texas, the police department of all departments, just add one more thing to their workload, was in charge of enforcing what are called public health violations. It was also true here in Miami Beach, where if you weren't wearing a mask when

there was a mask policy, cops would actually write a ticket or a citation. So you're literally taking 10, 15 minutes of their time to sit there and write a ticket. So we actually documented public health violations as, quote unquote, a new crime type. We've also seen pretty staggering increases in identity theft, which is not entirely surprising, because when schools shut down and businesses shut down, everybody stayed at home 23 hours a day, and they did nothing but stare at the internet, playing around on the internet. That's what people did. So you automatically increased the ability of hackers and all kinds of trading being done on the dark web.

So there was a little bit of a shift, interestingly enough, in terms of in crime type. So when we look at the FBI and you see larcenies are down, well, maybe larcenies are down of certain kinds of larcenies and burglaries are down because everybody's home. But the crime type shifted. So I can easily spin a story as to why violence of some sort increased. Right. So at the beginning of the pandemic, we're locked down. Everybody's at home 23 hours a day.

People are losing their job. Alcohol sales are increasing. Opioid use and emergency room visits for opioid use are also increasing. People are stressed. They're anxious. They're angry. They can't go to the gym. They can't go to the movies. They can't go to anything. So there was no playbook. There's no book on the wall that says, hey, this is how you deal with a pandemic. This is how you live with your wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever. 23 hours a day, you can't do anything else. And everybody's been in a relationship currently or in the past knows exactly what I'm talking about. But people are pent up anger and it's totally understandable that they feel that way. And so they lash out

and they lashed out at people they live with and they lashed out with guns. We all saw a record increase in gun sales in 2020 and gun thefts. So you're putting, you know, it's like, I try to explain this to people. It's like you put a microwave, a bag of popcorn in the microwave. You're supposed to cook it for a minute. If you cook it for three, it's going to blow up. And so that's what happens. You put all of these ingredients into a microwave bag and the bag just blows up and it makes

the whole microwave dirt like it's happened to all of us in the course of our lives when we cook in a microwave. And so that explains a lot of the early pandemic lockdown related increases that we saw for certain crime types and then shifting away to other crime types. One of the things that I think coming out of that, now that we're still seeing some of those increases, is the absolute lack of a criminal justice system response. I mean, there was no response because there was no playbook of how to respond, not only in terms of police with respect to PPE. Back in March 2020, we had no PPE, right? Everybody went to Costco and bought everything in the world. People were trying to buy N95s and K95s on the internet all day long. And so the criminal justice system wasn't ready to

handle this. Police departments weren't ready to handle this. The correction system wasn't ready to handle this because jails and prisons weren't meant for social distancing. The court system had to shut down. So jails started to decarcerate people. And then of course, there was a huge concern that all these people leaving jails and prisons are going to commit all this crime, yada, yada, yada. And so all of these things presented really interesting research questions for obviously us, the community of scholars who are studying just crime trends and patterns, because 2020 was a bit of an aberration of a year, but, you know, you know, there are blips and then there are blimps. And the way I describe it to people is, you know, in a professional baseball season professional baseball season, there are 160 some odd games.

I could have an overall year batting average of 3-3-3, which is great. You're on base one third of the time. But I could have gone two weeks and batted zero for 20. And so when you look at trends, you have to look at what's happening literally daily and weekly to plot what might be happening in certain places of the city and certain businesses around the city. You know, businesses, for example, big box stores, grocery stores, they stayed open. I mean, it was gasoline and grocery stores. And so there is a whole area of work about fights in grocery stores that we saw early on in the pandemic. People were at their wits end in gas stations when there were gas run-ups, people fighting over gas. People have

all of this letting loose bent up in them. And I think that that really explains the 2021 crime data that we're seeing in the US at the. at the local level and the national level. But, you know, the toughest nut to crack is the international comparisons. We're not like any other country. Now, obviously, gun violence, a little bit of a problem in the United States with our ready access to guns and our permissive use of guns. But that can't be the only answer. And I grant that guns are more lethal than knives and fists. When I was a kid, much, much younger, much older than you all are.

We used to solve fights with, you know, we pushed each other in a playground. We threw a couple of punches and we called it a day. Now kids, you know, they start their fights on phones and they continue them into the street and they just kill each other. And that whole thing is another issue that's lying beneath the surface as we try to figure out how to manage not just the pandemic, but the negative ancillary consequences like child abuse. And when kids were taken out of school, child abuse cases went down. Because why? Because teachers are the first set of people who see child abuse cases. And so, you know, now we have how are how are kids going to readjust to school? And so, you know, now we have how are kids going to readjust to school? You know, we live in counties where there are mask requirements, where the governor's taken away funding for our school boards in Alachua and in Miami-Dade. And so there are fights, people have fights over masks, you know, people have fights over vaccines. It's, you know, we've lost a lot of civility in the world. And I think the pandemic has influenced a lot of our incivilities going forward. So those are just a few thoughts that I kind of will stop there and let you react or ask some other questions.

I like the macro view, Alex, and taking us up and looking down and thinking about these things, right? A big thing, part of what we do at the LPRC is help others learn to catch their own fish. But the place to start is, I think anyway, where you did. And that is, all right, let's kind of think about the dynamics. And we know that Marcus Felsen back in the day, that's where, hey, let's think about human behavior, everybody's routine activities, including those that are out to harm or do harm others. So I thought that was fantastic. Mackenzie, did you have a specific question, follow-up? One question that I have is, what would your advice be for retailers who maybe their LPAP reps have this data, right? They see

these crime trends and they may not know how to control for certain things or how to explain these trends to maybe their higher ups. Yeah, you know, having worked with a couple of retailers nowhere at the level you all have, you know, there's always a reporting issue of what they decide to deal with in house, not code, not collect, not report. That's a whole nother set of layers of discussions. But independent of that, I think loss that they had of products being stolen or products not being on their shelves and the problems that they had with aggravated assaults, not just only within their stores,

but maybe outside of their stores. I think we live in a world, and I think that over the course of the last 19 months for the three of us, where transparency is the most important thing that anybody can do, whether it's a business, a police department, the federal government, is if you're transparent with what's going on, people are going to be much more willing to work with you and to be cognizant of the pressures that you're dealing with. And so, you know, right now, as you know, retailers, half of their goods are sitting on barges in the middle of the Pacific Ocean because they can't get to port. In England, there's plenty of gas. It's at the port, but they can't get to port. In England, there's plenty of gas. It's at the port, but they don't have people to drive trucks. And everywhere, I don't know about in Alachua, but in Miami-Dade, there's help wanted signs like you wouldn't believe everywhere. And so supermarkets and best buys of the world and the targets of the world are having trouble keeping up their stores, the shelves stocked and product being delivered inside and out. So it is a fundamental issue,

but I think what they can do is learn about the patterning of crime within their locations inside and outside, and then to decide what kinds of situational approaches they may need to thwart crime from occurring in the workplace. And obviously a lot of, a lot of businesses are, aren't just occurred, you know, concerned with slippage and, and theft of product. They're also concerned with, you know, an angry person coming in with a weapon and, and, you know, and killing people, whether it's post offices or grocery stores or any kind of business. And so obviously that you can only guard so much against that, but you can at least learn from your patterns. Are you seeing certain days of the week, certain times of the day, certain products, certain aisles that are having this kind of effect in their business?

And not just, you know, I understand the proprietary secrets, but at some point in time, they really can learn from one another. secrets, but at some point in time, they really can learn from one another. So the targets of the world and the best buys of the world and the Home Depots of the world, they all have similar goals, sell product, but they also want public safety. And so they could learn from one another and say, okay, this is what's happening in our store, our industry in terms of crime patterns or types or days of the week and locations and what they've put in, you know, situational crime perspective. You've talked to obviously some of the leading experts on that topic and in Eck and Weisberg and many others about what you can do to alter the environment. And so, as you both know, people act in context. So there's little that stores can

do to affect self-control and self-esteem and negative emotions and all the great theories we have, but they can alter the situation. They can create alternative opportunity structures or limit the opportunity by which people can exercise harm or theft on their facility. So I'm a big fan of transparency to as much as these businesses want to create transparency. I recognize those pressures, but everybody benefits from about as safe as a workplace as possible. Not just you and I when we are customers, but their customers as well when they go to other stores. I think there's a lot of shared space that we all walk in that we should be transparent about.

And so I think there's a lot of shared space that we all walk in that we should be transparent about. You know, real quickly, if I could follow up, Alex, I love that because it's been a big thing. What we can do is we work individually with retailers, but mostly with groups. And so we learned a long time ago and are still learning, of course, but how to get everybody's data and but help them learn. What does that mean? And that's that transparency piece, right? What should you be collecting and how should you even code it or use it, right? You can imagine a lot of it's text or string, but yeah, right? So what happens? That's a great point, Reid. I work with lots of police agencies around the country and they all have a different RMS or record management system.

And they don't talk to one another. These RMSs don't talk. And I tell them all the time, look, open up an Excel spreadsheet. Column A is date. Column B is number of thefts. Column C is number of assaults. Column D is how many people you walked into the store. That's all you need to do. Every day at the end of the day, just like you count a register, tabulate that up. And then that way, researchers then can provide them the kind of sophisticated analysis like interrupted time series or whatever kind of comparisons, weekday versus weekend or whatever. We can always do that for them. But we're just talking simple Excel file and four columns of data. They already do that stuff for taking care of inventory on shelves. They're scanning a shelf, scanning UPC

to see how many more bags of Doritos they need or whatever. They tally up how many dollar bills they had or how many credit card transactions. They should be just as interested in crime, transactions. So they should be just as interested in crime, lost data for their own perspectives to learn from. And so that would be my number one recommendation. And it's not like they can't afford an Excel file. It's just a matter of, do they want to put the resources, i.e. a person, to tabulate that data, aggregate it, and then send it up to the mothership? And then the mothership can do what it wants to do. But it seems to me, we live in a world of just about every possible kind of data. Airlines, this is all they do. And this is all sports athletes and sports teams do. We live in a world of amazing data. But some agencies that actually need data better to make better decisions

aren't collecting it in a way that they can use it or they don't know how to use it. So this kind of partnership that you all have developed with these agencies is not only great from a research perspective, but there's also a lot of human capital that you're putting into an investment because a lot of trust that goes on between you all and I'll call it that world. But I've always learned, Reid and Mackenzie, that you don't know'll call it that world. But they, you know, I've always learned, Reed and Mackenzie, that you don't know what you don't know. So go find the people who know what they know and solicit their input and advice. And I think that that at the end of the day is what really they need to help each other understand. And you ought to broker those kinds of relationships. But I live in a world of rows and columns. Perfect. So that reinforces, that's a big thing, is we're always looking to get the

learned voice that reinforces that. And that's a big, big key point. So Mackenzie, back over to you. Any thoughts on the data, what we need, or some of your other thoughts. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think it really starts with getting good data and working with people who know how to use that data. Cause at the end of the day, you know, having that Excel sheet and looking at it all confused, isn't going to help anybody. Um, and so I really appreciate kind of all your points there. There was a topic that I kind of wanted to pivot to, if you guys don't mind or don't have anything else you want to add in terms of kind of time patterns. Um, so a few retailers have basically come to me with this issue of, we have this homelessness problem.

We have these homeless encampments on our property. We have homeless people, you know, shoplifting, we have, you know, organized kind of homeless, homeless systems going on. And it's forcing a lot of stores in a multiple locations to basically close down because it's just not profitable for them. And it's not safe for their associates or their customers. And one thing I really appreciate you and your work is that you have this public criminology aspect and that you have this way to work with the public and work with local community leaders to basically say, hey, listen, here's this problem and here's how we should address it. And I was wondering if you could speak to maybe how retailers can kind of get together in some sort of task force system to be able to make those changes in their communities.

Yeah. Homelessness is the biggest failure of any government in the world because it's not a difficult problem to solve and you just have to want to have the political will to solve it. We're dealing with a $3 trillion budget package. It's like you can't find a few billion to, you know, help the homeless. It's somewhat embarrassing. But that opinion aside, you know, it is a lot of time investment when you're working with agencies and businesses or police departments, you know, because what they don't want is they don't want an above the fold headline on the, on the local newspaper or the six o'clock TV news that, you know, run rings them out. And so they have to develop this, these personal relationships that are built on trust, um, where you can start working together. force. And every time there's a new mayor, a new governor, there's a task force for this and task force for that. They write a report, sits on the shelf, and then the next person comes in, there's a new task force, a new blue ribbon and panel, and a new agenda. So those things only work when they have teeth. And by teeth, I mean, I don't do any kind of work. When I work with agencies or the public or anybody like that, is we're going

to come up with a plan. The plan is not going to be 60 pages because no one's going to read it. And something I learned a lot with working with people in DC and testifying in DC was if it has a paperclip or a staple, no one's going to read it. Because that's the way government agencies work. They do not have the time nor interest in nor skill set to go through 66 pages of nonsense. So you have to be really, really brief and say, here's what the problem is. Here are the short-term solutions, medium-term solutions, long-term solutions. And here are the outcomes or benchmarks for the short, medium, and long-term. You know, just here in Miami, I've'm working with the mayor and lots of police departments here about crime prevention, violence prevention, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

And I always tell them, look, you're investing right now for the 15-year-old who has a gun in his hand. So that's the short, that's the right now problem. And then you're investing for five years from now, which is the 10-year-old who's going to be 15 years old. And then you're investing 15 years from now for the kid who's born today. So you have things that are going to take time to fruition. That's the long-term prevention plan. And then you have the intervention plan because people in the real world and a CEO of one business is in that job for his or her next job. That's just the world we live in. So they need to have tangible wins. And that's the reality of the situation. I'm not

boiling it down to wins and losses, but they need to show that, hey, I observed this problem. I can't solve all the problems, but I can move the needle in this direction, or I can move the Titanic a little bit to the right today, but I'm not going to move it all the way to the right. And so I think when you tell people, look, there's there's there's a window here of time. Here's what we can do right now. Here's how we're going to know we did it well for right now. And so the more you are and again, transparency and benchmarking about solutions that just aren't knee jerk. And, oh, well, I feel this. And the public always has the single answer to everything. The world is not that easy. But bringing together a constituent

group, right? So when you're bringing forth a task force, you have a CEO or a high-level manager of an organization. You have to have community members. You have to have one or know, one or two normal academics on there and someone from the chamber of commerce and someone from the government office of some sort. You can't have 30 people at a table. That's just never going to happen. You're not going to get anything done because by the time you go through introductions, it's already coffee break. And so, you know, you need to have the right people who aren't going to waste time and who can get the job done. So the key is identifying those people, giving them outcome measurements that they can attain at different points in time. And, you know, to have the sword of Damocles over their head that says, OK, if we if we fail, you know, here's what we're going to do. Here's how we will know when we fail and we'll be transparent.

Hey, folks, we didn't succeed in this, but we succeeded in this. And I think that, you know, people, even I'm a regular community person too, when I'm no longer the criminologist in the day, I'm just like everybody else. And so if you're honest with me, fine, you know, you're not, you're not going to, you're not going to win every game in the swamp, but you know, you tried and you gave it a shot. And, you know, it's always easy for all of us to say, you know, you tried and you gave it a shot. And you know, it's always easy for all of us to say, you know, you should have called that play on third and five, that guy was wide open at the at the five yard line. Well, you know, quarterbacks have 2.4 seconds to make a decision. You know, this is not that easy. The world is not that easy. So if you think if you

if you keep reminding people that you're honest and sincere about trying to find the solutions. The solutions aren't going to please everybody, but you have to do what's right. Follow your moral compass. And that's all you can do at the end of the day. Yeah, and I think you made really great points. I've spoken to retailers and they're saying, well, you know, how do we protect our people and our property right now? And I said, well, you know, you can do these target hardening practices, you can add security, you can do these things. But at

the end of the day, they're still homeless, and they're still in your community. And if you clean up their encampment right now, they're just going to end up coming back. So you need this mix of, of short term solutions and long term solutions. And, and you're not going to be able to accomplish that on your own, you need local government. You need local service providers. The ability for a retail organization to have a list of, these are the service providers in my community that I can call instead of calling law enforcement who may or may not show up. said about the target hardening, it reminded me of a homicide that occurred here in South Beach about two, three weeks ago, where a guy from Denver, 21 year old was at an outdoor cafe sitting on South Beach. And he had his wife and kid, they were there on vacation. And a guy came up to them, shot him. He was high on mushrooms. And now a wife doesn't have a husband and a kid doesn't have a father. It is almost impossible for us to prevent that specific kind of incident.

It's just the reality of the world we live in. But there are things that we can do that try to harden those kinds of things from occurring in the first place. We're going to be okay sometimes. We're going to fail all the times. And I think the lessons learned from 9-11 is a good example of target hardening. I grant that some of that stuff might be theater, but there was target hardening going on. We live in a world of, you know, I flew on 9-10. I was in Gainesville. I'll give you an example. I was teaching. I flew on 9-10 from Toronto to Gainesville. The cockpit door was wide open the entire flight home.

9-11, I'm teaching class in Walker Hall because that's where the crim department was at the time. And at 845 in the morning, a kid's beeper comes off. Mackenzie doesn't know what a beeper is, but a beeper goes off and he comes up to me and says, Professor Picaro, the World Trade Center just had an explosion. I'm like, what are you talking about? I was in the World Trade Center like a week ago eating dinner. And he said, no, this happened. So I run over to Nikki and Karen Parker's office when we were all there. And they told me what happened. And so we were supposed to fly from Gainesville to Miami, actually, ironically, that day to a meeting. But then the world changed. The world changed. Flying changed, right? So now we have metal detectors. TSA was created. Air marshals were created. I mean, you know, tons of stuff was created to target hardening. Again, You're not going to be able to stop crazy.

And people are not going to be satisfied with that, but that's the realistic world we live in. So there are things that we can do to limit the opportunity to target harden and to keep people as safe as we possibly can keep them. But we can only do so much in a democratic free society. So that is the world we live in when we're giving up a little bit to get a little bit, but we can't have it all both ways. That's the realistic situation we are in right now. have you have those anomalies I think you know I had recently seen it was um a shoplifter in I think it was a it was some kind of like store out in San Francisco was just riding a bike and just like had this bag of things that they just took and I think that that person was eventually caught right but you have these so outrageous so brazen out in the open anomalies, and the whole world, the public's just kind of looking at this like, okay, is somebody not doing their job? What exactly is happening? Should I be concerned? You know, should I change my own behaviors? And, you know, to really be able

to explain to the public, you know, this is what crime looks like. We're not all those, you know, crazy people that are doing these crazy things, right? And, you know, continue to shop in your supermarkets. Mass shootings are horrible and horrific, you know, but in reality, they're not as common in the public that we think, right? You know, the whole idea of, I think, a mass shooting is three or more people. And you should be more concerned about just like normal street violence in some communities and be less concerned about, you know, just going to buy your daily groceries. But I think kind of needing something to, to calm the public down, to show them, you know, we are trying to address these problems. It's not a quick fix and it's,

there's just no immediate answer, but. Yeah. You should film a PSA because that, you know, I was just in a Miami Herald a couple of days ago about the South Beach crime problem. And it's a big thing because the election's coming up for mayor, new commissioners, and people are freaked out because they see these videos on the internet. elections coming up for mayor, new commissioners, and people are freaked out because they see these videos on the internet. They see a white woman who was raped and killed. They see violence, they see partying, they see drugs, they see alcohol, yada, yada, yada. And residents believe crime is out of control. Ironically, the data show the opposite. And so there needs to be an education component. But obviously, at the end of the day, Mackenzie, you're spot on, right? You know, I remember this great quote by W.I. Thomas, if you perceive a situation is real, it's real and its consequences.

to solve the problem for some people. And we're living, you know, not to talk about COVID and vaccines, but we're literally living almost the exact same thing with science or people not believing in the science. Right. And so regardless of what people believe on these issues or not, we have a base of scientific evidence on something. Now, if people choose not to believe it, well, okay, there's not much I can do about that. But I think we want to live in a world where we make decisions based on science. And when I talk to people or legislatures, I always talk about, you know, when you go to the dentist, do you want your dentist to have gone to a reputable dental school? Yes, of course. Do you want your dentist to use the correct instruments and to not make a mistake in your

mouth? Yes, of course. Do you want your dentist to have read the latest scientific literature to know the new technologies that will make you feel pain, that will give you the right medication so it doesn't interact with another one? Well, yes, of course. Well, then why wouldn't we want to do the same thing for crime prevention? It is no different. And I think when you can talk to people at a level that they can appreciate and understand and say, look, the world is not what the first thing you popped up on your YouTube or Instagram channel was or what the lead headline was in the Gainesville Sun or the Florida Alligator or, you know, the local TV news. It's that's not the norm. Breaking that is is is a tough nut to crack.

But our job is to continue to try to crack that nut. Absolutely. Alex, can you talk for just a second? This is good stuff. As you know, we're translational criminologists. We are pivoting from theory to method and then doing the thing and then getting with them and helping them implement it even and execute measure again. And that's what you're doing, though, on this bigger scale. And that's one reason that McKinsey really wanted us to be able to talk to you today. One concept, one concept that the retailers are talking to us about, particularly the vice presidents,

are desperately or definitely trying to protect their total enterprise. And as you know, they're under attack all day, every day, 360, from 360 degrees, whether it's online or in person at their corporate offices, their vehicles, their fulfillment or distribution centers, and of course, the stores and their people. Erosion of consequences, right? That one concept here is that, and McKinsey mentioned the bite push out. Now, I've been around as long or longer probably on earth as you, Alex, but, and so that's not the first time I've seen that kind of thing. In fact, I've seen it, you know, for 30 or 40 years. But the idea is that there are fewer law enforcement officers. They may or may not be focused properly, probably not in most cases. There are reluctant

prosecutors and there are all these dynamics happening everywhere. You can get on CNN and it's never, ever, ever pretty when you're trying to detain someone, whether you're a loss prevention officer or a law enforcement officer, and you don't want to end up on TV. But they're afraid and concerned that there might be this construct out there called erosion of consequences that offenders may in fact be a little, even a little less sensitive to some of the things we've been doing situationally, like you said, to create that environment that's less inviting for the would-be offender. Yeah.

No, I like it. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I agree. You know, the last narrative, you know, the CEO of any retailer once is one of their security guards beating someone up, a cop come in and shooting someone. And the person's poor and homeless and is just trying to steal something to make ends meet. That's the worst narrative in the world. And so there's a lot of risk aversion to people of how you handle that. So you want to handle it as about an informal way as possible. And probably for the majority of times that that's probably a good thing to do. I would not trade my position with any CEO or

general manager of any large real teller in the United States, given the pressures that they're under because nothing they can do. People are going to remember the bad things and they're never going to remember the good things. And it only takes one bad thing to happen to create the narrative that it's now a bad thing. You know, we saw this a bit with respect to targeting of minorities in certain stores. And, you know, you detain a minority for whatever reason. And then now you're no longer a safe place for those people to shop at. Whereas the majority of time that never happens, right? And so we got to be very careful about creating a narrative based on some isolated cases, assuming that they are isolated cases, not patterned cases. But it is a really tricky

thing because, as you said, there are constant pressures, not patterned cases. But it is a really tricky thing because, as you said, there are constant pressures, not just on the industry, but the people at the industry has to work with local police departments, state attorneys, what kinds of cases they want to put to the system. And we've seen, Reed, since last April, there's a lot less police attention and attorney attention to minor crimes. They just don't want to deal with shoplifting anymore. They don't want to put those people in prison or jail anymore. And so there's now a movement towards citations over arrests. So that may trickle down to the industry level about how they manage the situation, what they tell their security staff to

deal with on a day-to-day basis. Okay, look, you can do it this way, you can do it that way. The problem is that you have different ways of doing it across the whole industry. And so the more the industry can kind of come up with a very similar protocol, I think it's going to be all the better. And if you don't have a similar protocol, you basically have what the United States had last year and this year with its response to COVID. You have 50 different states and thousands of counties all doing something entirely differently. And no one knows who to follow or what to do. And it changes every day.

And so that's confusing to people. So the more consistency and agreement that the industry can have with itself, because, look, the people who shop at Publix are also shopping at Albertsons. They're also going to Winn-Dixie. So they all have the same kind of interest in mind. And so the more standardization that they can deal with on all those levels, including security, because that way when the police department shows up, they know I don't have to treat Publix differently than I need to treat Albertsons or whatever, right? So it just makes everybody's life easier. So the more they can get on the same page,

you know, the easier it will be. And that will take, you know, them, you know, the conglomerates to do that. That's some good stuff, good insight. And because we all live in the real world. And so that's what we're all dealing with. But, you know, I remember one time somebody sent a consultant

as somebody that tells you what time it is with your own watch. But I think that's where we are a little bit. You talked about police data. We talk about other public data, of course, the data that the retailers do or don't collect. You're right. But we are telling you time, but what we're doing is helping you use your own watch, in other words, your own data. Let me go over to you, Mackenzie, other questions. own watch, in other words, your own data. Let me go over to you, Mackenzie, other questions. Yeah. So I guess my last question that I really had was where do you see evidence-based and crime prevention going moving forward? I think, you know, I like to think of COVID as this restart point, whether it's for better or for worse. So kind of, if you were to kind of

look into your crystal ball, where do you see just this field moving in general? Where I want it to move is one thing. Where it's going to move is an entirely different thing. Yeah. I'm glad that you brought that up. I was tasked with a really hard assignment a month ago. The editors of Criminology and Public Policy were getting all these submissions for their special issue on COVID and crime and criminal justice system, broadly defined. And they said that they were incredibly frustrated because they got nothing that dealt with what do we do going forward with policy, with evidence, with anything. And so they called me up and said, would you want to do this? I'm like, that's a big, big question.

So I figured out a couple of things to say, and I did. So one of the things I said is that there has to be, so crime policy at the federal level is, you know, it's really hard and it hardly gets done at the federal level. It all happens at the local level. That's where that's where change takes place. So it means a local judge moving a new direction or a police department moving in a new direction. And then the county moves and then the city moves. And then eventually, if the stars are aligned, the state moves. And that last part is the real, real hard thing is getting everybody aligned. Because I've been in cities, Mackenzie, where the mayor and the police chief and the DA and the city manager don't get along. And when the key actors aren't getting along, ain't no amount of evidence they're not going to want to have a meeting with me. So you have windows of opportunity, but windows closed.

Perfect case in point, the three of us lived through. Congress wanted to have the George Floyd Act, right? So Democrats came up with their part. Republicans came up with their part. There was agreement on several parts of each of their parts. There was disagreement. And guess what they did? They did nothing. They did nothing. So there's this window. There's this momentum. This is right to do. And nothing gets done. And it frustrates people. So I tend to think about moving the needle on an evidence-based policy is you have to have the stars aligned. Some administrations, whether at the federal, state or local level, are more in tune with evidence-based policy than not. You still have commissioners and mayors and governors who will say, we're going to do this because that's what we're going to do. will say, we're going to do this because that's what we're going to do. And based on nothing,

I mean, just based on whatever it is or whatever expert they want to find who will support their particular policy. And so for people like us who are trying to translate and really try to help people, we're going to bang our heads against the wall, but we have to continue to bang our heads against the wall. Because I think you don know, you don't know right now what will stick. It might stick six months from now or six years from now in a different context. And so we have to keep putting the science out there. But look, different people need different data and different ways for different reasons. So we have to be able to talk to my uncle, my 18-year-old undergrad, my 24-year-old PhD student, and my 38-year-old colleague. I got to talk about the same exact thing in four different ways for everybody to understand.

And so that is a real key part of translating, but also saying, look, you know, we can't come in with an iron fist. But we can come in and say, here are your alternatives. Here's the strengths and weaknesses of your options. And here's the cost benefit of your options because the world operates on cost benefit analysis. And you and I know that numbers go into those things and numbers come out. And who knows what all that stuff really means? But the world operates on that way because budgets have to be made and budgets have to be balanced. So the more we can give them information about those kinds of things, the better off we'll be.

I think with respect to the criminal justice system, we have an opportunity right now for the federal government to say, what was the criminal justice response or lack thereof? response or lack thereof, and to really have an eye opening about where we're moving forward in policing, courts, corrections, and also the crime types that we've never cared about. I was on a National Academy of Science panel called Modernizing Crime Statistics a few years ago, and we basically lamented that our crime data in the United States is exactly the same way it was in 1929 when the UCR was created. And the UCR was created for journalists. That's when the UCR was created. And the UCR was created for journalists. That's why the UCR was created because newspaper reporters were asking for crime data. And here we are doing the exact same thing. I can, you know, Elon Musk can put a,

and Jeff Bezos can put rockets into the, into the moon in like two minutes. And I, I can't get the police department to code something normal. And so, you know, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta fix that. And then we can move from there. But, but no, there are, there are things that have worked. You know, we, we always, there are, there are times when evidence has been used for effective policy. There are times when it hasn't, you know, I'll give you two cases in point as we wrap up. When I was at uf i i did an evaluation of florida's 10 20 life law charlie chris was the governor at that time and i i i did the analysis about every possible way that you can do an analysis and found no effect for 10 20 like zero

none none and press release came out uh charlie chris didn't like it too much. And he said, he goes, I know in my heart the law works. Okay, congratulations. The data from your office doesn't say that. So you're not going to win those sometimes. But then I come to my juvenile fine study that showed that fines adversely affected minorities and an increased recidivism risk makes the cover of New York Times. And then it gets implemented in policies around the country. So sometimes you get wins that are based on science and we just got to keep the momentum going. You know, we got to, we got to follow the same modicum that the public health people do is

do no harm or do as little harm as possible. You know, your mentors there at UF have a history in labeling research and Marvin, my dear friend Marvin. And so I think that that's what we have to focus on. And we have a window opportunity right now, whether it's not a Republican thing or a liberal thing. But right now, this administration is a science forward administration. But here we are, several months into Biden's presidency, we still do not have a named NIJ director. Now, granted, a lot of balls in the air, COVID, immigration. So crime is not on the agenda right now or as high on the agenda at the federal level. It is at the local level in some places. And so that's why you got to catch these things. There are moments in time and you just got to be right there, ready to pounce.

Good stuff. And I want to really thank you, Alex, for spending some quality time with us. And thank you, Mackenzie. Great job. Well, thank you very much for joining. You bet. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.