LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly R2P Review – Episode 225 Ft. Christina Burton, PhD

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

In this episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, we have a new host of the CrimeScience Podcast, Alex Palomar, research project coordinator at the LPRC! Alex talks with Christina Burton, PhD (LPRC), about the most recent research2practice article centered around the Voice of the Victim study. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at this latest article!

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. Well, hello everyone. My name is Alex Palmar and I'm a research project coordinator with the LPRC. You're probably wondering where Dr. Lowe is today, but I am taking over with the help of Diego Rodriguez, our marketing manager, also here at the LPRC. I will be starting off today with Dr. Christina Burton talking about her voice of the victim R2P results.

So Christina, it's great to have you here. Hey there, yeah, you just call me Christina, doctors from my mother and they keep telling people, but appreciated that you had me on here today. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and what got you interested in doing something like this. Yeah, so the voice of the victim was actually one,

of the first initiatives I got involved in here at LPRC. It was one of the projects that I was given when I first started. And not to say that it's not necessarily my background because it's not, but it's been a very interesting ride to learn more about victimization and how it impacts people more broadly. And so part of this is a continuation of some prior work that had been done by other members of the team, but then it's also been something that, you know, I've kind of taken and made a little bit my own to see kind of where we go from here. That's awesome. So let's start by you telling

me a little bit about what the voice of the victim survey is and what the details are of this report. Absolutely. So this particular iteration of the project stemmed from some conversations we had with one of our NAA partners were caught up and they were interested in doing nationwide surveys to get kind of just a lay of the land of what's happening out there among retail workers and so this study started last year actually and so this RTP actually explores some of that of that survey and we did take 2025 results as well but they're not included in this particular RTP and so they were very curious to see what is the extent of violence victimization among retail workers. And so we collaborated with the Harris Poll to survey and at that time

interview some retail workers about their experiences. And so the results of this particular study are from the 2024 analysis of it, although I do have 2025 results that I can also explore. And they are shaping to be different than in 2024, which has been kind of interesting to see. Well, given that this is technically not the first report for voice of the victim, is there any information that we should know going into this second report from the first one? Sure. I think you're safe in reading either or out of order. I don't think it particularly matters which ones you read because they kind of cover different topics. So the first one covered more of the regional differences of victimization. So what are people experiencing on the West Coast that might be different from the South, right? In this case, we're exploring more of the race and gender effects, so does being, you know, a woman versus a man affect your feelings of fear of victimization or being black versus white? But both studies do utilize the same data sets, so the 2024 data set where we collected 1,012 survey respondents that are representative of the United States, as well as 10 interviews that were conducted, although the interviews are not. not necessarily discussed in either of the paper. So you should be fine reading in that order.

Okay, that's great. So what are the general findings, if you can just sum it up real quick, for those who didn't have the time to read the R2P yet? Sure. I mean, essentially, the bottom line is that there are differences in feelings of fear among those in different gender groups and racial groups, but at the core of it, they generally want the same things when it comes to keeping them safe. And I know we'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later, but that's the general finding is that, yes, there are race and gender differences, but at the end of the day, they want the same things to keep them safe.

Okay, great. And then I'm looking through your report as well. I read it before this podcast, but I noticed that females generally have a higher percentage of concern for theft, sexual harassment, and it seems to be that way for a lot of other things, but what kind of confused me was that vandalism was higher for males versus female. Do you have a theory as to why that is? Yeah, it was interesting because it was an opposite direction than what we would anticipate. I mean, prior literature would tend to suggest that women tend to have higher fear of crime in certain contexts than men. But this does

suggest that there might be certain things that kind of freak out men than others. And it might be, if I'm hypothesizing, I don't have actual facts about this, so just bear with me here. It could be simple exposure to vandalism, right? And so women might not go in areas where vandalism is more prevalent, right? And so they might not be going towards, you know,

the dark alleys or those kinds of places. So they're not as exposed to those kinds of things and thus it might not elicit the same fears. Or it could be that men are interpreting vandalism a way that would encourage a fear of something, right? And so possibly like, hey, these are valuable things that I have and I don't want to be a victim of vandalism just because it's costly and I don't want to deal with it

versus maybe women are thinking more in terms of like, it's just property, so it's okay. So there might be some differences there. But it's a good follow-up question that we might be able to tease out in further studies. And kind of to piggyback off of that, I know you also mentioned a possible reason for this in your report,

But it seems like black females were also the only demographic group to want weapons detection as their top three technology. Can you kind of touch on that a little bit? Yeah. So generally for the other category groups, I think black male, white, female, white male, not Hispanic, Hispanic male and females. Generally, the top three were video security monitoring, so some kind of security camera feed. And in the 2024 data set, we didn't separate live monitoring versus just recording. We did that in the 2025 data set. So, you know, bear with us on this particular analysis.

But that was generally either top three with alarm systems and security guards. But for some reason, black women were not as enthused with alarm systems and instead of weapons detection. And we don't really know exactly why this is. There could be some mechanism in which perhaps they're thinking about violence within their communities and they don't want that encroaching into their workplaces. There could be some of that happening. But it's unclear why black females would feel that and not black males, right? And so there might be some intersecting connection happening here where it's both black and female having some kind of effect in causing this, but it's not entirely clear.

but those are just some hypotheses that are kind of emerging from the data. Yeah, that makes complete sense. And it seems like sexual harassment in this R2P is also, the concern for sexual harassment is also higher amongst females. I'm wondering, is that a finding that's specific to retail, the retail industry, or do you think that's kind of just generally across the board here? Yeah, and it's interesting because I'm actually working on an academic paper with some UCF students who were interested in sexual harassment, and they did a meta-analysis,

but they were looking at qualitative reports, meaning they were mostly focused on research that was very thought-heavy or word-heavy or feeling and emotion-heavy, as opposed to, like, data and statistics. And so they were looking for general themes within retail. And so broadly speaking, yes, women are going to probably be more concerned about sexual harassment regardless of industry. However, there are some specific things that are happening in retail that might mitigate or encourage sexual harassment within their stories. So one of them that we can say is that having a customer is always right or very customer-focused

industry increases interactions between retail workers and customers, and being friendly and inviting in order to achieve sales might unfortunately increase potential sexual harassment as well, right? Because there might be some mixed signals or people taking it too far. And that might be context that is retail specific, that might be increasing those feelings of concern with sexual harassment. That's not to say that, you know, practitioners are accepting of that. I'm not saying that at all. It's just that the context of retail might be encouraging these kinds of behaviors accidentally, right, that they need to be considerate of for their employees as well. Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm looking at the top three technologies that

were common across the board here for all of your demographics, and it seems like video security monitoring is a top one. Do you think that that may be the reason why video security monitoring is so high up on the list? Because it shows in footage what's going on versus just alarming authorities when something has already happened. Yeah, and there could be some different things that are happening here. So it could be that it's like, hey, proof that something happened. So one of the things that kind of came out actually in the interviews that I didn't put in the RTP was that in the interviews, they kind of mentioned that a lot of these kind of

violent incidences, unless they're severe, right? We're talking about someone got physically injured on the job. A lot of them kind of either they kind of happen so quickly and then disappear or, you know, it's so relatively minor that what are police going to do if I'm going to put it, you know, like an analogy to this. And so perhaps there's some peace of mind happening because, hey, there's proof that something happened. What we saw actually in the 2025 data set where we separated out, is it the live monitoring? component or the fact that you're just recording it.

Realist actually what happened in that particular study is that it was the live monitoring that was important, not necessarily the reporting feature of video security monitoring. So what might also be happening there is that they feel like they're being watched. And so maybe someone can intervene in places where they're not necessarily having their managers watch them constantly, right? So it would be different if you didn't have a camera looking at you with a sock, right, where someone could intervene and send an alert to the list. say a manager to you'll do with the situation versus they're not in the presence of a manager

so they can't intervene in a separate way. So it might be some of that too where they feel a safety in they know they're being watched and thus if something gets really bad, hopefully there's an intervention. So that might be what's happening here too. And how realistic is it do you think to be reliant on a service like that where is someone really watching them do you think or someone there to help them? Well, I mean, it depends. I think with AI, it's going to get a little easier because, you know, imagine if you have multiple cameras that a person has to monitor, realistically, their attention can only

be focused so much, right? But if we start using other technologies like AI to kind of signal, hey, an incident is happening here, right, that might improve those situations. But it's also a question of what does an employee know is happening, right? So an employee might have these assumptions that, nope, someone is always watching, and thus we want these systems. Or it could be the complete opposite. Maybe they don't trust that someone is watching either. It's going to probably be very context-specific of that specific store as well.

And I would be interested to know, did any of your technologies that you offered include body cameras? We did actually ask. So there were like 17 or so, don't quote me on that number. Different technologies we asked. I only listed to the top three in this particular RTP, but we did ask if bodyware cameras would get them peace in mind, and only about 10% said that it would. And so it might be an issue of it's an emergent technology.

They haven't seen it very often. Or it could be a situation where it's a technology where the only exposure they've had to it is in a law enforcement capacity, and so they might have thoughts and preconceptions in those kinds of interactions versus in retail. it's unclear and we didn't necessarily ask in this particular survey, you know, why do you feel that way? I wish we did, but, you know, we can only have so much bandwidth to ask questions

in a survey like this. Yeah, that's a great consideration. I would have never thought it would have the connotation of law enforcement and maybe some negative negativity there. Yeah, and most people probably have only ever been exposed to bodyboard camera footage from a newsreel where something happened in a law enforcement situation. So they might have those negative feelings coming into the thought of, well, if it's in retail, is that going to happen to me, right? And so there might be some pre-existing feelings, but that's what research is for, just to confirm or deny that those are the actual kind of feelings and connotations associated with it. Yeah, of course. And since we spoke about the different technologies you had, just as a side note, how did you come up with the

categories that you listed in the report? Yeah, so we had, you know, different offense categories, and though we were very primarily focused on violent behaviors, we also did include some property crimes, so theft, vandalism, break-ins, those kinds of things. For two kind of reasons. One, we wanted to contrast with some of the violent crimes to kind of compare and contrast. Retail workers are probably going to be mostly exposed

to theft as an example as opposed to violence. So we wanted to see if those had any impacts on what the differences were between them. But we were also interested in terms of that those physical or those property kinds of offenses could lead to a violent interaction. So for example, if someone is trying to shoplift in a store and an employee intervenes, it could turn violent, right? And so some of the questions that we then asked in the 2025 survey was we wanted to see, well, what was, preceded that violent interaction that you had? Was it that a customer was already angry? Was it that you were intervening in a shoplifter case? Like those kinds of things to, again, kind of tease us out a little bit better, but we didn't do that in the 2024 survey here. But those items in

the offense categories came from prior work with voice of the victim, as well as conversations with Verkata and Harris to see, you know, what kinds of commonplace experiences or severe experiences might retail employees experience. And then for the technologies, we have a lot of technologies in our lab, for example, so we kind of took some of those broad categories and applied it here, as well as we also asked different working group members and some of you all to see, like, are there certain technologies that you would want us to see? So that's why, for example, facial recognition and bodywork cameras were actually included in the solutions categories here for that particular reason.

So that's why your feedback is really important. Yeah, for sure. Feedback is always important. And kind of on that note, what do these findings mean for LP, AP, and security practitioners? Yeah, and it's kind of what I alluded to at the beginning when you asked what are the broad findings of this particular paper, which is just that, yes, you're going to have. differences and experiences of your retail workers. I mean we saw that in some of the race findings right and so just a quick recap there we compare or I looked at different categories of race so people of color it just meant that were you white or non-white and as

coded in the survey if you were Hispanic and then if you were black to see if there were differences and feelings associated with that then we did find that yes, Hispanic retail workers had different experiences or fears than black retail workers. And so what that indicates is that your retail workers are going to have differences and experiences with customers, right? They're just going to have different experiences of fear simply by their skin color or their gender. And that's kind of beyond what you all can do, and that's understandably so.

But the hope or the light at the end of the tunnel is that they all want the same things to keep them safe. They want someone to keep them watched, right, as they're working and intervene if it gets too ugly. They want this feeling that you all care, right? That they're not just a statistic in your books, that they are human beings and that they can, you know, ask for assistance when they need it. As well as to have that intervention piece, right? So again, security guards worrying up, you know, a top concern for them. And I know that they're necessarily expensive, and we're not suggesting that you have to empoise you.

security guards everywhere, but it might be a useful intervention tool, regardless of the type of experiences that those retail workers are having. If you're having a particularly problematic store, it might be a useful short-term solution to at least get things back under control that everyone in that store might be more willing to appreciate if that makes sense. Yeah, it definitely makes sense, and I think that's all extremely important. Well, I appreciate you being with us today, Christina, and going over your voice. of the victim report.

Thanks so much. We're looking forward to the next one. And if you all want to get the full report, please visit our knowledge center or our website, LPRCECECE.org. And until then, we'll catch you on the next one. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast, presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at LPRsearch.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 Lost Prevention Research Council.