LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 100 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Listen to our 100th Episode! Live from 2022 RILA AP Conference, the Podcast team met to record the 100th episode! The podcast is looking for potential guests! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the newest vaccination numbers, a look back at the past two years, the future of the LPRC, new technologies for efficiencies, and a look to the next 100 episodes. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! Thank you for your support and we look forward to another 100 episodes! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 100 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio 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. All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast from the LPRC. This is the latest in our weekend update series, joined today by Tony D'Onofrio, by Tom Ian, and by our producer Diego Rodriguez. The voice. We're playing the voice 100 episode man it's tough

yeah what yeah the 100 episode it's early in the morning on the well the second day or maybe third depending on how you ask

Tuesday at Rila and we're we're like the only people in here right now right yeah everybody's up there listening to Paul Jekyll

one of our LPRC members the former chair of our board of advisors speaking right now. So I guess we should be, too. But in honor of Paul, we want to call him out. Yeah. In a good, positive way. So I front, what, about 4 point, I'm sorry, 5.3 billion humans have now been vaccinated. Around 270 million Americans have been vaccinated. There are some issues with the vaccines, but they seem to, by and large, be extremely safe, very effective against severe disease. And we'll all wait and watch and see on the long-term effects, but presumably the material is absorbed. There's also evidently some breakthroughs with the mRNA technology on cancer. So this type of research has accelerated that.

You know, there's been these spikes around the world, but particularly the United States, in certain counties of young kids getting this pancreatic, I'm sorry, getting this hepatic liver disease spiking, which is almost unheard of. And a British researcher, physician is saying that he believes it's very firmly linked to lockdowns and the reduction of pathogen exposure. And so these kids, their immune systems are so naive. And then they're up against something particularly like this that maybe is very natural and prevalent out there. We just didn't realize it. And their systems are overwhelmed. So we'll have to see all the long term fallouts, good, bad, and different around everything about the pandemic. But I think another

fallout of the pandemic is here we are at the 2022 RELA Asset Protection Conference this year in Orlando. And I mean, the place is bustling. People are so pumped, excited. You don't even see much hesitation on do I fist bump or shake hands, right? Much less approach like you did. And I've seen, I don't know what the attendance is, 800 to 1,000 maybe. I think I've seen maybe a half a dozen people with a mask on. seen I don't know what the attendance is 800 to a thousand maybe um I think I've seen maybe a half a dozen people to mask on and and I don't remember the last time I did see that so it's interesting as people emerge from some of the concerns um you know we won't go into what's going on I guess we did mention last week but with the CDC's mandate airline airliner mandate

um being struck down by a federal district judge. You know, what's going to happen there one way or another? Who knows? I heard some chatter that the administration is going to potentially fight it, but not sure that they want to win and get that thrown out. So we'll have to see. I think the Ukrainian war is still playing a role with everybody. Tony might touch on that a little bit.

In addition to being maybe a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy like many of us, most of us have never seen, but we'll see what the fallout there is. And one of our teams, Sarah, Dr. McFann, spent some good quality time over there in the Ukraine under US DOJ and State Department grants trying to help the police or work with them on better community-oriented and intelligence-led policing. So she's got a lot of ties and keeps us up a little bit on it. So we've got today, after today, this Tuesday, we're all racing back to Gainesville on our team to host an open house in Gainesville at the LPRC lab complex and we've got dozens of chains and or of visitors including several chains coming in to spend some quality time with us and it's not too late if you want

to show up in Gainesville at the LPRC at the UF Innovate Hub on the 27th and 28th of April, because here we are on the 26th, I think it is. So we're moving rapidly on all fronts. More research and actions or RIA briefs coming out. Look for about four of those a month on top of other research reports coming out of LPRC. So people are going to be flooded with a lot of that in a good way. Working groups continue to grow stronger and larger, more active. We're in heavy planning for impact already and have been. The agenda is done. Now it's a matter of starting to fill in speakers and times and those kind of specifics. So you'll see a lot of marking going on starting this week for the LPRC impact. First week in October. And things are buzzing.

We've got people up in there today. We had them all last week. We had them the week before installing new technologies throughout our labs. There's a big redo, I think I mentioned before, with our infrastructure to start to put in real fiber throughout the ceilings with switches on both ends instead of all the Ethernet cable and other things that are being run through the ceiling ceilings there so that we can continue to add but have faster connections and reduce the chance of

fire code violations and things like that so at the infrastructure on the infrastructure side we continue to add new members. We talked about Intel and some of the other technology guys that are joining and getting heavily engaged with us. Multiple retailers that have joined, many more coming it looks like over the next six months or so. But we're excited about, you know, guys like JCPenney re-engaging and Kohl's and Saks and Neiman Marcus and Ross Stores and Wawa and many more. So we'll be also working with the National Association of Convenience Stores, NAX. And I've got actually set travel today. That'll be coming up in May.

It'll be the CEOs for almost all the major C-stores in North America coming together in Chicago in May and so I'll be talking with them a lot about what's going on our research around aggressive street behavior by those that happen to be homeless what's what's it look like you know what's the typologies of the type of harm that's created what are some of the measures being taken out what's upcoming research on that so let me go ahead with further ado, turn it over to Tony, and Tony D'Onofrio, take it away. Well, I'm just going to add some comments. First of all, say congratulations to all of us on our 100th episode. It's been an amazing journey. Think about when we started and

what was going on around us with the pandemic and, you know, not traveling, getting to learn Zoom and doing things on Zoom, like only wearing the top and not the bottom and doing those kind of things. So the world is changing. Here we are at Rila and seeing old friends again. And that really was the biggest things. I saw a lot of people hugging that had really hadn't seen each other for a long time. So it's really good. I'm going to open with just say with some of the words that Lisa Lerbruno put on a recap that she did yesterday. So she said it's been three years since our last conference. Today's sessions reminded us how important personal relationships are and the jobs that we do.

Technology makes our job easier, helps us solve problems, and hopefully makes us more productive. But the foundation of our industry is the trust and relationships we build across companies and communities. And then the topics that are important to retail did come up really across the board. So organized retail crime, fictional shopping, and store safety were prominent topics. Really, from what I heard already, the agenda was well organized and very senior folks are here from the loss prevention industry, which is great to see the re-engagement. Again, I have some other comments, but let me have my counterpart here talk about the 100th episode

and where we're at on this journey yeah so I think you kind of hit it on the head I remember we all talked about doing this weekly and I think we've been through it's been a crazy time protests civil unrest election a war I mean like if you really wrote it all down you would almost uh not believe it you know to think that that throughout the podcast all of the things that occurred just the pandemic alone but you know i i remember uh if you really think about it we we taped during multiple literally multiple shooting events while we were taping um you know some of the most prolific civil unrest in decades. And so I think the platform has really helped

and a lot of folks follow us, which is great. You know, to hear that people are doing the, listening to the weekly and coming through. But I, this morning kind of sat down and said, it's been a hundred weeks. And if you hear the background noise, it's because we are at a real conference. Although it's the, I have no idea what that is but uh someone's testing a system it sounds like

but uh yeah i think i think that's really what i resonate the most with is that if you're really the the idea of the all prc is to get information out and do the research but the podcast was it's almost like a current events weekly update and uh man i it it is hard to even fathom all of the things that happened in these 100 episodes it's unbelievable and i was going to bring up to your point tom that um we mentioned paul jacob meyer um and he and his team have been buckled down and been briefing us and we've stood up on our platform on discord our fusion net um you know a channel around grand rapids michigan right there was an officer involved shooting um you know they the chief has released all the video footage that he can get his hold hands on um he's experienced

chief i understand from chicago it's used to dealing with some pretty wild things that happen there but al sharpton sharpton has come in he's made the visit he's laid down challenges because they weren't going to release the officer's name until they had some idea of what happened um which is customary anyway um and so that's you know stay tuned on that but the point is while they seem fewer and far between we still have had you know in recent months some of these um civil unrest situations exploded active killer and things like that so buckle in but like you say i don't think any any any other generation they've lived through wars but they haven't lived through wars and everything else it seems like yeah and adding to some of your comments i mean one of the mantras

that i've been pushing for a long time is really that loss prevention really needs a seat at the C-suite. And as a function, it's becoming more and more important, not just because retail is changing, but also the risks in retail is changing. And one of the stats that I quote, and actually is one of the updates that I wanted to provide this week, is that violence is not stopping in retail stores. So the latest D&D Daily report on violence just came out for last year. And in 2021, there were 595 people killed in retail, which was up 14% in the previous year, and up 59% in 2016. 53%, unfortunately, were customers, 26% were associates,

3% were law enforcement and LP professionals, and 18% were suspects. And really what's alarming, the customers and associate debts were up 24% from the previous year. So the world is getting violent. Parking lot is still a problem. It's 45%. And stores is the other big problem at 50%. So loss prevention in terms of mitigating those types of extreme risks are important. But also more importantly, if you look at how crime

is changing and some of the topics that are being discussed here, I do fully believe that we need to keep helping the industry. And in my view, these podcasts hopefully are helping in educating and really providing intelligence in terms of what's happening in the broader industry to help us move the industry forward. Absolutely. I think one of the things that I was thinking about also was that we actually, and we tape on Tuesdays, and a lot of things, we were the breaking news. I mean, we were days, sometimes weeks ahead of things, and that has to do with us spending the time chatting. And I actually, we even talked about the January 6th event. I think it was the weekend before, but we were talking about how the chatter, that something could occur.

And so to your point, Tony, the whole idea is to how do we get a platform that's easy to consume, quick, and that you can listen to and kind of get a download of what's going on. Certainly the pandemic drove it, but again, I still think there was just so much that occurred in between that. And I also think it's important, the flavor of the LPRC. A lot of people who know about it don't actually get that lens of it. So it's awesome to do it every week. I think there is enough, unfortunately, there's enough current events now that every week there's something to talk about. And so, Tony, your point about the violence is I don't know that if you went over that hundredth episode

that we had a time where there wasn't an event ever, where there wasn't something occurring that we needed to talk about. So definitely, I echo what you say. I hope that the listenership gets something out of it. I know people are listening to it because people are mentioning it, which is always great when people come up. To me, that's the biggest and best thing when someone comes up and says, I heard this, and that means that we're actually making a difference. And also, one of the things I'd say is even at the show here,

some of the regional and field folks listening to it, that's actually what really is exciting to me, is someone who's early in their career saying it's helping me. That's a big win. I mean, for all of us, you know, that probably makes me feel the best when it's someone who's in their first multi-store role going, like the podcast I listen to every week and citing things that they heard, and I think that's fantastic.

That's exciting. I'm looking forward to maybe, we've talked about this, getting some guests on like Tony was great. I think we're going to restart that again. I think I'll get that restarted again. So I think that's a goal to get that going. Integration. That's important.

Integration to me is one of the top things we hear. They want to integrate it and have a real integrated strategy in place first of all that like maybe that never before and secondly of course that what they do and how they do it is integrated as well and then we know with fusion and lprc rela interaf and other places trying to integrate companies together but just the action there so to me i thought maybe we look for somebody that's a practitioner and then we look at a solution partner to maybe get two or so to balance it and talk about what are you thinking about and doing to better integrate solutions for more impact. It might be one theme.

The other thing I wanted to let you guys, another big theme for us this year is real harm, crime harm, and just better helping all of us understand and explain, articulate the harm that's created by an offender to individuals, to places, to enterprises, and to the community where they occur. And I just don't know that that narrative's out there and well defined. So it's a big area of operational research that we're doing right now. Sarah's leading the charge. We're kind of doing some focus on Santa Fe, New Mexico just because some people there asked us to. But that's just two themes I want to let you know that I thought might be of great

interest in addition to the other research and the other world news. And just to add to some of your comments, I mean one of the things that's been refreshing to see is how LPRC is really a state ahead of creating these labs and these innovation centers and then really helping retailers figure out where to go next with technology, such a topic, to integration.

And really, the podcast is where we've exposed some of these events. And there were actually two that had just happened this week. For example, Meta is opening their first metaverse physical store so where they're going to sell all virtual reality and augmented reality guess what there's one already live at lprc where we're showcasing some of this technology because that function is going to be extremely important and then though with the other one time you've talked a lot about crypto and where crypto is going and all the risk and all those kind of things. Well, AMC Teeters this week just announced that they're going to be accepting cryptocurrencies for the movies. So you can play

with crypto to go with the movie. So the world is changing. And really what's been refreshing is how LPRC has really taken the helm on this technology view of it and then helping really the loss prevention function really understand and actually turn that into practical things that they can actually do it. Yeah, I think the evolution, the digital transformation, we've talked about the rapid acceleration due to COVID, but I don't think that's going away. We talked about the rapid acceleration due to COVID, but I don't think that's going away. As a matter of fact, I think we're going to continue to see exponentially speed compared to what we've seen in the past when it comes to digital transformation.

And I don't think we've, however much I think we talk about all the things we're seeing here today, it isn't a definitive roadmap, right? It's going to change based on the customer and, you know, talk about friction and so on. What that means today will be very different in two years. And adding in the crypto side is, you know, I would say this and I've said this before, is, you know, you remember when the check fraud was the thing and then credit card fraud and then, you know, chip comes out and now you have crypto. So what happens when people start using crypto and you're sort of, what are the implications?

What does it mean for me from a regulatory standpoint? It isn't really defined yet. And when you think of any Monday laundering, everybody understands if it's over $10,000, you have to fill out that form. Well, what happens when someone comes in and uses $50,000 of crypto at a store? What do you do? Well, you don't know. There is no definitive. So a lot of those things are happening rapidly.

store what do you do well you don't know there is no definitive so a lot of those things are happening rapidly in the amc thing i think amc has really done a good job of of taking advantage of some of the things that happen with their with their stock and then they have a following and it's kind of this trendy thing now so they're taking advantage of that one of the big things that is happening now is this we talked about it since it happened the whole twitter piece of elon musk you know uh basically tendering a real offer it's funny some of the news says he bought it it's not done yet so but the reality is that will I believe that will change social media it really will change social media because social media throughout the political landscape has been in this impossible situation where they don't actually have any right. They're not a government to

protect free speech, but then they're this middleman that if they make a decision, no matter what they do, there's somebody that's upset about it. And now the pendulum may swing the other way. So it becomes this kind of dangerous game of these huge influential companies that are making decisions that affect us. And we know it affects politics. We know it affects the way people consume media. So I do think that in the next, if this acquisition actually fully goes through, they've accepted the offer. I don't know that the Federal Trade Commission could say anything. I don't see any, you know, any SEC. The SEC, I know, is not happy about some of the things, but I think it will change the landscape and it really will put some of the

other social media platforms on notice of how do we do it? How do we balance misinformation? How some of the things, but I think it will change the landscape and it really will put some of the other social media platforms on notice of how do we do it? How do we balance misinformation? How do we balance hate speech? How do we balance, you know, all the things that have occurred? And, you know, for us in this space, social media has changed the way we operate, right? I was speaking to someone yesterday on the floor. When I started, I never had the concern that someone was going to videotape me. So people actually put themselves in danger because they're concerned what will happen as an LP person. We know that happens in LP. We know it happens for law enforcement.

I mean, you know, that people are actually making decisions because they're more concerned about well the perception that i can't control and i think there's going to be a pretty significant swing if twitter really it becomes back opened up to what it was before and i don't know if it's good or bad yet i'm not sure like you know that balanced approach of you don't want misinformation out there but i think the biggest challenge is big tech can't be the governor. Like, how do you how do you have you can't have a person or people governing because they the inherent bias that they have, regardless if they say they're neutral. It's not possible. None of us can be neutral. We know that. And so I think that's going to really change the landscape for us. And I think I actually think for us at this table, it's going to be a very interesting ride to see what happens from the political standpoint.

And we know that. And then what happens from some of the global geopolitical things if this gets opened up. Yeah, and I would actually add one of the topics that you come in full circle to where you started, which is the Ukraine war, the inflation that's all going on in Rwanda, the risk of recession either later this year into next year. We are in uncertain times and this is really a time for everyone to get informed and really find the places where you can find information and test ideas. I mean, that's really what we're all about. So this is really for us.

I do think there's a lot of global risk right now because of the Ukraine war and what's happening in Europe and how much reliance, for example, they have. Like Germany, 40% of their natural gas comes from Russia. So they have a high reliance. Same thing for Italy, very high reliance. So there's a lot of global risks that we need to deal with. And there's a huge risk of a recession coming up so stay informed it's really all one of our key mantra i don't know if you want to wrap it up no i think that's it and i think part of it is real quickly some of the research we're doing to inform some of the narratives um in these debates and that you know

so often everybody's relying on on their own narrative and their own echo chamber we all do and that's like you mentioned Twitter that that's an echo chamber where people on all the extremes and middles and everywhere in between on all these different issues that are out there but I think like for facial recognition or feature matching that you know we're now learning just how many retailers and other businesses are truly testing the technology to safeguard their people, to better serve their best customers, to make life more convenient, easier, a better experience for their employees. And so you're going to see it, I think, going a lot farther.

Corey Lowe, Dr. Lowe, and our team is conducting research here as we speak at Rela. And he's got it he's done I think he's constructed an amazing experimental design here but he's having at least 150 people experts if you will in our field and he's got about 60 now so far done look at all these faces you look at a face and he's got male female and everything else and he's got you know different races skin colors everything else but they're very got different races, skin colors, everything else, but they're very, very difficult to pick out. So you see the face, you linger on it, and then you see the rest of them,

and you've got to pick that face out. And it's not the exact same photo of the individual, right? Just enough, and we're going to be comparing that with different facial recognition models or algorithms to get an idea which is the most accurate on these you know based on these types of research so you see a lot of baseline research going on to understand the technology and then how people are using it body worn cameras we're getting ready to launch a big initiative there we've got four excellent solution partners in the

area in that space but how does that become a real way to better serve customers, a better way to keep the store squared away, and a better way to safeguard everybody in that space, and how do you really do it right, so we'll be tying in with the Brits and going forward, so I just want everyone to know that LPRC, we are trying to stay ahead, and that's just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit of everything that's going on. So go ahead. I was going to, for the 100th episode, if you're listening, we talk about guests, just reach out. If you want to jump on, if you have something you want to talk about, I think

when we originally did the first podcast, which wasn't the weekly, we had people reach out, and I think this is still the same type of platform. It is for the members and even non-members. If you want to jump on and chat about something, absolutely. Or if you have a question you can email it in or a topic that you want us to talk about um i think we will evolve the weekly into having some guests and topic driven but

um until uh the craziness calms down we're probably just going to be talking about things that are going on so probably for a long time we're just going to be talking about some of the events that are occurring well i'm going to close with an italian toast so in italy when we do a wedding we always used to say a chan dan which means to a hundred years and this is our 100 episode but when that i did a toast of watching for my daughter's wedding where i reminded everybody that's really old news because new news there's a lot of people living to 100 so you now need to step it up so we're gonna go a 200 which is 200 years so looking forward to the next 100 episode with all of you and learning more so

and I can't top that I just want to thank everybody on the team here, Tony, Tom, Diego, for everything to make this thing happen. But most of all, you all the listeners, stay safe, stay connected. Operations at LPResearch.org. 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.