LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly R2P Review – Episode 226 Ft. Justin Smith, PhD

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

In this episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, the new host of the CrimeScience Podcast, Alex Palomar, research project coordinator at the LPRC, talks with Justin Smith, PhD (LPRC), about the most recent research2practice article centered around the effectiveness of Public View Monitors (PVMS). 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. Hi everyone, welcome back to the crime science podcast. If you were unable to catch the last episode, my name is Alex Palmar. I'm a research project coordinator at the LPRC. And you may be wondering where Corey is, but I am filling in for him for now and Diego will be catching up on some of our podcasts as well. So it's nice to have return viewers back. Today I have Dr. Justin Smith with us and he will be reviewing his recent R2P on PVMs. Justin, it's nice to have you. Thank you, Alex. It's nice to be here. I've been looking forward

to this. Great. So if we can start with you telling us a little bit about the study, maybe give a brief overview for those who haven't been able to read your article. Yeah, absolutely. So at At the LPRC, we interview shoplifters to understand their thought processes about how they target stores, certain products that they go after, how they defeat some of the product protection solutions, what they do with stolen merchandise and so forth. So for this particular inquiry, I was interested in knowing about how offenders felt about PVMs, specifically public view monitors. And I'm sure most of our audience knows what they are, but just in case you don't, think

about when you walk into a major retailer and you walk in the entryway and you look up and you see that monitor that is providing a live camera view of the front door, right, of everybody walking in that eye in the sky, if you will, which is what I'd name the article. That's a public view monitor. There's also smaller versions that you might see on the end of aisles and also in self-checkout corrals that just provide a view of the customer as they're going about their business and just provide a level of deterrence. It's like, hey, we're watching you. So I was interested in knowing how those public view monitors affected offender decision making. And so I interviewed 47 offenders and asked them, among other questions, if they viewed public

view monitors as a deterrent. And I showed them two types of public view monitors. One was the entry level that you'd see when you walk into a store. And then the other one was a public view monitor that was situated at the end of an aisle and provided a view of the aisle and some of the products in the aisle. And we asked them to rate on a scale of one to four how much of a deterrent they felt it was with lower numbers like one being strongly disagree with it being a deterrent, a higher numbers like four strongly agree that was a deterrent. And what we found is that most of the offenders we talked to, they rated both types of public

view monitors as deterrence, but the in-isle public view monitor scored a little bit higher suggesting that there was a little bit more of a deterrent value there. Yeah, great. And I think all of those insights are really exciting and we'll get to the nitty-gritty details in a bit. But can you tell me a little bit more about your SRO program, your self-reported offender program? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the initiatives that we have here at the LPRC is to interview retail criminals, specifically shoplifters. And we do this so we can get inside their head understand their thinking, again, about how it is they target certain stores, what merchandise they select, what they're doing with the merchandise, whether they work together with other

offenders or whether they do it solo, what their motivations are, how they're getting merchandise out of the store, product protection solutions, and so forth. And so we recruit offenders a number of different ways. We utilize our law enforcement contacts. We also have community contacts at local homeless shelters here in the Gainesville area at drug rehabilitation facilities here in the Gainesville area. And also recently we got connected with the probation office. And so they send folks to us that have a history of shoplifting and we interview them. We go through that entire journey to crime, if you will, as far as things they consider pre-entry and then what they do when they're inside the store and

what they do with stolen merchandise when they leave. And we also go through a battery of questions about different product protection solutions, which is where this study came from. And kind of as a side note, how did you get interested in running a program like this? That's a great question. I think for me, my background and my dissertation, I've always enjoyed talking with people and doing interviews and really understanding what it is. that makes people tick and what makes people think.

And the best way to get at that information is to just sit down and talk with them like we're talking here, right? Just have a conversation. And so when I was in graduate school for my dissertation, I had a project where I was interviewing and surveying police officers at two departments in the Central Florida area near UCF. And I really enjoyed those interviews. I really enjoyed talking to the officers.

I learned a lot. I felt like they learned a lot, and I got a lot of good information from my study, a lot of good data that way. So when I came to the LPRC and I realized that we interviewed offenders, I thought, what a great opportunity to talk to people, pick their brains, get more information, understand where they're coming from. And with the offender thought process, how do we kind of reverse engineer their thinking? So, in other words, if they walk into a store and a store is an attractive target for, you know, X number of reasons, how do we get them to think not here or not now? How do we get them to make better decisions in terms of thinking that, well, I'm not going to do that here at this store today. So that was the impetus for it. I would say another thing is there was a famous study in criminology that was done in 1994 by Wright and Decker.

where they interviewed about 140 residential burglars and there they wanted to understand how it was that they chose neighborhoods to go and commit burglaries in how they chose specific houses what features in a house and a property that they looked for that signaled hey this is a good place to commit a burglary how they get into the house what kinds of things they would steal how they would dispose of stolen merchandise how they would get around if you know people had a burglar alarm for instance so that study really was an inspiration to me. And I'd like to do something very similar with retail offenders in terms of understanding their thought processes behind that whole journey to and from crime. Yeah, and I think that area is not explored very much right now, so you're definitely making some strides in that field. So it's

very interesting what you're doing. Yeah, it really isn't. And so I want to build a good data set where we can keep adding to it. We can keep building off of it. And maybe every year we can have updates on trends that we learned about from our offenders. Yeah, that's an amazing goal. I really hope we get there. So in your R2P, you had mentioned that both of the PBMs had bounding boxes and some verbiage at the bottom of the screens. I'm not too sure if this is important information, but just for those who are wondering about it, do you think the bounding boxes made any impact on the perception of

deterrence? Well, that's really hard to say, Alex. So, as you noted, both PVMs had a bounding box. And I'll just mention this in case anyone doesn't know what a bounding box is. But picture on the public view monitor, you're seeing an image of yourself, but you're also seeing a red box around your face. That's a bounding box. Also, one of the PVMs had some verbiage saying monitoring in progress. So the question then would be what's having the deterrent effect? Is it just the fact that the PVM is there? Is it the PVM view with the bounding box? Is it the PVM view with the bounding box and with that layered message about monitoring and progress? Unfortunately the answer is we don't really know because we just

looked at the PVMs and there's so many different types of PVMs, but a future study could tease that out. We could show offenders just a blank PVM that just provides a view and see what they think of the deterrent value of that and then add the bounding box and see if that ups the Annie a little bit from a deterrent perspective. It's called dosing. It's something we talk about quite a bit at the LPRC and it's just like think about a medication that you might take to alleviate a headache, for example. At what dose is that medication effective? At what dose is it too much? At what dose is it not enough? So it's the same thing with deterrence, right? A PVM just providing a static image might do it, but you might see enhancements in that deterrent effect when you have the bounding

box. You may not. So I can't really answer that question until we do more research, but it's definitely an interesting future direction. Yeah, for sure. I've definitely been in some stores where I've seen PVMs without the bounding box. And I personally haven't noticed anything too big because I'm not going there with the intention of doing anything wrong, but I would be curious to see what the result of that would be. So that's very interesting. So Justin, why do you think the in-isle PVM scored slightly higher?

In your R2P, you mentioned that the PVM at entrance is slightly lower than the mean-to-turn score than the one in-isle. Yeah, that was an interesting finding. I would have to talk to the offenders a little bit more and get some more feedback from them, but I suspect from a theoretical reason and a logical reason that the in-isle pvm is much more focused on a specific area. So when you walk into a store and you see that PVM at the entrance, it is communicating a deterrent message. It is saying that we're watching you, right? You're being watched.

But it's also very general because it's literally just focused at the entrance of the store. So if I'm a shoplifter, and that's how a lot of times when I think about the turns, I try to put myself in the offender's shoes as much as I can and think about what they might be thinking as they're going into a store. So if I'm a shoplifter and I know that I'm going to go into the store to steal a particular item, Let's say it's a power tool. I'm probably not going to put a whole lot of weight in a PVM that's just at the entrance that shows me walking into the store, right? However, if I go to that aisle where that power tool is and I see a PVM that's directed right at that aisle, right at the area where I know I'm going to be going in for my product of choice, then that's a lot more focused. It's a lot more directed on the offense that I'm contemplating committing.

So that might make me think twice. Again, we need more feedback from the offenders to really understand the thought process here. But I think just logically it makes sense. It makes sense from a theoretical perspective, from a C-Git fear perspective, that that in aisle PVM is more in your face. It's going to be easier to see, easier to get what it's doing. There's probably going to be more fear associated with it because you know you're there to shoplift at that specifically. location. Something we learned in grad school with respect to different policing strategies, for example, is that focused approaches tend to work better than more broad approaches.

And I think that that kind of logic applies here as well. So with the PVMs at the entrance, that's very general, it's very broad, but with the in-isle PVMs, it's a lot more focused. Yeah, and for myself, I think reading through your report, that really was an aha moment for me. it just pulled everything together that that entrance pvm is really just capturing everyone walking through the store it doesn't necessarily mean they're capturing someone who's going there to commit a crime more so just general so that was that was really important to me tell me a bit more about the significance of the pvm angle and how that plays into everything yeah so that was really interesting some of the feedback that we got from offenders suggested that the angle of the in-isle pvm really

mattered in terms of whether it had a turn effect or not. So for example, one offender I talked to mentioned that he always was aware of where his hands were and whether or not his hands were on camera. So if the PVM was angled in such a way that you could see his face, it might not be that big a deal. But if you can see his face and his hands and you can see what his hands are doing, that's a problem because then you could see him take the item, have physical contact with the item, the product, and possibly even conceal it. So a key piece of advice to take away from this would be when you set up your PVM, watch the angle and make sure that you're providing a view of the product and the aisle and you're not just getting

people's heads and their faces. So they can check their makeup and their hair? Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and also I'm thinking back to COVID days when, you know, folks were wearing masks. Yeah. So again, having that in-isle view of the whole aisle and their hands so you can see what they're doing. Hypothetically, it should have more of an effect. Yeah, for sure. So what can industry leaders do with all of this information? Well, for one thing, I would say that we have some strong evidence that PVMs do have a deterrent effect. We saw this in our offender interviews, talking with 47 offenders, that there was a high level of agreement that PVMs do have a deterrent effect. And also, it does seem that the in-isle PVMs have slightly more of a deterrent effect.

Now, I would say that we probably need more interviews, bigger samples to really be able to tease this out. But I think an interesting preliminary finding would be that PBN, are effective. Yeah, for sure. And where would you like to go from here? What can we do to provide even more value? So I think the next natural step would be a store trial. So I would like to partner with one of our retail members to see if they would let us install different PVMs in their store, maybe some in-isle pvms, maybe some entry-level PVMs, and then also have some control stores that don't have PVMs at all. And then we can see the effect on that. and compare it in our stores that have PVMs to those that don't.

I think another interesting direction would be, as you pointed out earlier, what is the effect of the bounding box? What is the effect of the deterrent messaging on the PVM? What is the effect of SCO self-checkout PVMs that actually show the item being ringed up in addition to a view of the customer and what they're doing? We don't know the answers to these questions, questions, but we could definitely figure them out through more research and specifically more

offender interviews. I'm definitely looking forward to reading all of that. It's been a productive conversation thus far, and I look forward to the next one. Thank you so much for being here, Justin. And those of you who are listening, I appreciate you staying for the entire episode. If you are interested in reading the entire report from Dr. Justin Smith, please head over to our knowledge Center or a website LPRsearch.org. Thanks again, everyone. See you next time. Thanks, thanks. 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. 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.