LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 101 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

RILA AP Conference had an amazing turnout! Open House at our Labs was a great success! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the happiest and unhappiest countries by continent, Roe v. Wade leak and potential protests, a summary of organized retail crime data (ORC) for 2021, an Apple lawsuit over NFC use, and a look at the increased digitization of retail. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 101 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. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science the podcast from the LPRC. This is the latest in our weekly update series now at episode 101 and I want to welcome everybody on board and welcome our co-host Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer, Diego Rodriguez. And we'll take a quick look around the world together here, looking again, still starting off with COVID just a little bit. You have COVID infections continue, as we know. I mean, overall, actually, slightly more infections reported and known. It's really

difficult since testing is way down, so that's making us a little bit concerned about the situation as far as spreading, you know, a virus compared to last year at this time. Right now, though, it's interesting. I saw some really interesting research around the fact that now just over three quarters of U.S. children, this is based on sampling now, and just over 50% of U.S. adults now have coronavirus antibodies in their bloodstream as detected by certain testing. uh pretty profoundly circulated amongst us bear in mind some may or may not generate that type of antibody if through natural infection they may or may not generate certainly antibodies as well as other cellular immunity activity from based again on natural infection or vaccines but it's interesting the the prevalence out there but there's other concerning data that are being reported out there too around the fact that both natural immunity and vaccine-generated immunity does continue to wane over time. And so what does that mean?

Dr. Birx, who we saw during repeated press conferences, a very well-known and respected physician, scientist in infectious disease and epidemiology during 2020 and 21. This is now predicting that there will be an infection surge starting in the U.S. South later this spring and into summer, that there are normally four to six month lag periods during the infection as people move and vacation and travel and visit and recreate that there you're going to see some more of a surge going on. But the other research is showing that, again, bolstering the idea that natural and vaccine generated immunity is waning in that now you're seeing more serious disease as well, and even death starting to go up a little bit in people that are vaccinated, not nearly as much as in those that are unvaccinated, but you are seeing that type of immunity has some waning effects. So, it will be interesting to see and stay tuned.

Is a second booster now not only authorized but recommended or not, or a third, or depending on where you are? And again, starting typically with those that are particularly elderly or vulnerable because of a myriad of other diseases that they might have or any of us might have. So we'll stay tuned and report on anything that we see there. And so we see also some DNA studies, really neat research going on, studying huge samples of people that are known to have had COVID versus those that are known not to have ever been naturally infected with COVID-19 disease to get an idea of what is there a systematic difference in those that never got it? Was there some particular resistance? What might those factors be about

their monocular makeup? Maybe some other functions that they can study or other variables that they can measure to better understand resistance and resistance factors and things for future, uh, immunity for all of us from viruses, uh, whether they're a Corona virus or another type. So good research across the board. Um, you know, looking at the vaccine front, it looks like still just over 260 million Americans have now been vaccinated, uh, over 5.2 billion humans on Earth have been vaccinated now,

again, with relatively few side effects, negative side effects. Some positive side effects are neutral, but negative, relatively few. But there have been people that have suffered or have had something that was seemingly simultaneous. Again, whether it's co-relating or correlated or it's causal remains to be seen. Some are and some may not be. So we'll have to see how that rolls. But an interesting, you know, aspect there. There's still just about 120 additional coronavirus clinical trials going on. And for vaccines alone, that does include another 50 to 100, it looks like, therapies that are in trials. But again, in human clinical phase one, two, or three trials, there are 54 in phase one, early trials. Phase two, significant trials, phase three that are very rigorous, large-scale,

randomized, and double-blinded studies. We've got 49, almost 50 vaccine candidates, additional candidates in there. We talked about the different delivery methods, nasal mist to pills to arm patches, additional injection types and things like that. So a lot of delivery as well as mechanisms, internal mechanisms of action research going on right there. Switching fronts now, we'll go over to the Loss Prevention Research Council, LPRC. A crew of us went down to the RELA Retail Industry Leaders Association Asset Protection Conference, the RELA AP conference down in Orlando last week. We got in on Sunday, left on Tuesday afternoon late and had a fantastic time. We're so grateful to the RELA team.

We've got a booth space that they provide us, but interaction with just literally 200 to 400 people, who knows, depending on the count, that we were able to personally talk to through the conference. I love the conference, love the people. That's why I've really enjoyed my years here in the loss prevention asset protection field. Just great, great people doing the work that we all need done to protect the vulnerable, those people and places. So a lot of dialogue, a lot of interaction. I believe we'll have quite a few new members coming out of this, potentially those that knew very little or those that knew some, but now know a lot more about the LPRC, this, our large and growing and productive community and how they

can get involved. We're doing a lot of follow-up. Additionally, on that Wednesday and Thursday after RELA, we had the LPRC open house. It was awesome. We had multiple people come by on Wednesday, multiple people come by on Thursday, both retail chains and solution partners alike. We got to spend a lot of quality time with them, doing tours, whiteboarding, brainstorming, looking at what all is going on with the SOC lab and all the new technologies and the servers

that have been hooked up and the mapping that's going on. We're grateful for Serverly coming in here and SureView coming in here to help us set up, as well as the support from Axis and Sensormatic, our LPRC tech team, Darren Parsons, and Ricky as well. You guys are huge, and we appreciate you. Asri coming in and helping us put together all kinds of demonstrations on mapping, leveraging their ArcPro, ArcGIS platforms, with James Martin and Orion San Angelo, with Sarah on our team, Dr. McFann, with Diego and Rochelle and many others. Amazing interaction with so many

valued members. And you guys are always welcome to come into LPRC. Come visit our five labs, our ecosystem outside, and the other places we're connected to. You're not going to believe it. And we had several of them saying, you just got to be here. You got to come to Gainesville, come into the UF Innovate Hub, and spend some quality time with us and all the labs and see all the things that are happening here. It's fairly inspiring. And I can say that after almost 22 years of being involved in this and weekly, probably even daily now, you're seeing new research being conducted, new technologies going in and being integrated here, new projects that are being done. And of course, all the working group

calls with the seven working groups and all the positive fallout there. We're looking forward to the summits that are upcoming, Supply Chain Protection Working Group, the Innovation Working Group, the Product Protection Working Group, and the Violent Crime Working Group. All four of those have summits that are coming up. Stay tuned in the LPRC's weekly Connect e-newsletter. Look on social media, listen to Crime Science Podcast. Look on social media, listen to Crime Science Podcast. We'll be putting that out as well as special emails to you all. We also conducted our first solution partner only, even though we had retailers on there.

Thank you. Going through how to get more involved and engaged in LPRC. What are we doing? Where are we going? How are all the ways that you can get engaged with us more deeply and broadly? So that's recorded. You can get that from the LPRC Knowledge Center or reach out to Diego at lpresearch.org. We can send you the links to get into that and watch that. We're going to look forward now. You're going to see probably bi-monthly webinars coming out from LPRC for our solution partners, demonstrating more and more

ways to get more involved, get more value, increasing value out of your membership, get to know more and more people, build better and deeper and broader relationships, do testing of your technologies with us and around us and on and on. So we're excited about it. We ask every one of you, each and every one of you, put down impact 22. That is going to be, again, that first week in October every year. It's October 3rd through 5th here in Gainesville. We're anticipating record enrollment. And I noticed at RELA, it was not only fantastic content and atmosphere, but there was a lot of cabin fever. A lot of people felt like they were

being released. And so stay tuned on that. Some of the aggressive street behavior research that Sarah McFann, Dr. McFann's conducting. Thank you to everybody that's participating and looking at the harm that some homeless people are causing as far as disruption, as far as impediments to good behavior there, to shopping and otherwise to intimidation and worse. What do we need to know about it? What can we do about it? There's several studies happening here. Thank you to you all that are participating in those. And I'm excited to work with NACS, the National Association of Convenience Stores. We'll be up in Chicago on May 18th at the CEO Summit. So the CEOs of the major convenience stores in North America, many, many, many, many of them will be there. And we're going to spend an

hour discussing aggressive street behavior and the harm coming from homeless activity on the properties and things that are being done and will be done in the future coming up. As part of what I mentioned, S3, the Innovation Working Group Summit, we're already doing a lot of planning. We're putting together interactive maps on crime and things that are going on and testing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Gainesville, Florida. We're going to continue to expand that and add more and more layers. We're going through an armed robbery sequence, a crew that's been hitting in Dayton, Broward County, Florida, using mapping to better understand those dynamics.

I'm also looking forward to discussing organized retail crime, ORC research that Dr. Corey Lowe on our team, our senior research scientist here has been conducting. I'm going to be the mouthpiece there with Terry Sullivan and the group at the LP Foundation Town Hall, Charlotte, North Carolina. May 19th, we'll be going through that research and conducting more. And thank you to everybody that conducted or took part in Corey Lowe's facial recognition feature matching research that was conducted at RELA. We had 96 LPAP executives participate in that research. We're going to continue to expand that sample, including a lot of people that are not experts, running that against different AI models, computer vision models, looking at and seeing and understanding what is bias, how does it play out, but more importantly, how it looks

like that any types of bias and mistakes are being dramatically reduced by leveraging some of these computer vision technologies, not the other way around. So, stay tuned on that, and it's much more research. Those that have interest in body-worn camera research, please get a hold of Orion, O-R-I-O-N, orionatlpresearch.org. So, with no further ado, I'm going to turn it over to a friend and colleague, Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid. First of all, congratulations again on 100 episodes and looking forward to the next 100. So let's go with 101. And second, great pleasure seeing so many of you at the Retail Industry Leaders Association Conference in Orlando. And looking forward to seeing you again at the NRF Loss Prevention in Cleveland in June to continue the discussion.

loss prevention in Cleveland in June to continue the discussion. But let me start this week by looking at a recently published research from Visual Capitalist on the global happiness levels for 2022. The report does a regression analysis to look at a happiness course, could be explained by looking at tangible and intangible factors such as social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, GDP per capita, perception of corruption, and positive and negative effects. Like last year, Canada ranks first as the happiest country in North America. However, it's lost some ground in the global ranking, placing 15th this year compared to 14th a year prior. In contrast, the U.S. climbed three places in this year's report and ranked just under Canada with a score at about 6.97. The Dominican Republic came in last in North America. In South

America, Uruguay is the top and happiest place in the continent. It continues to rank high on the list because of the high income per capita, relatively low levels of poverty, and strong middle class. In last year's World Happiness Report, Colombia was the most improved country in the region, but this year it dropped 14 places in the global ranking, making it the least improved country in the region. region. In Europe, Finland is not only the happiest country for the continent, but it also takes the happiest country in the world for the fifth year in a row. Finland is one of five Nordic countries to place in the top 10. Denmark comes in second, followed by Iceland in third, Romania was the most improved in Europe, climbing 18 spots on the global ranking since last year. In this year's report, China climbed 12 places on the global ranking, making it the most

improved country in East Asia and Oceania. On the flip side, Thailand has improved the least in the region, likely because of the significant toll that COVID had on the country's economy. With a regional score of 4.5, Africa ranks as the unhappiest continent worldwide, and Zimbabwe remains the most unhappy country in the region as it continues to struggle with the high levels of poverty. This was probably done prior to all the challenges with the Ukraine war and also inflation. So my God tells me that some of this has changed, but it's good to see what countries are trending where in the world. Let me switch next to Euromonitor, which also recently released new research that they title, What's New in Retail and What are Some of the New Emerging Global Concepts? The report lists 10 competing forces that are reshaping retail, and they are accessibility versus exclusivity,

choice versus curation, consumers versus companies, consumption versus minimalism, efficiency versus effectiveness, human versus bot, personalization versus privacy, physical versus virtual, retailer versus brands,

and value versus values. In the most recent survey of retail professionals, 96% point to digitization, 89% point to channel shift, and 89% point to emerging retail changes as key trends that will change how the industry will look like in 2025. Three teams emerged out of these studies and trends that are expected the most have the most influence near term and they are rethinking the store. So looking at creative brick and mortar concept, including but not limited to store formats, displays, unattended commerce, collection services,

checker prices, and in-store services. The second one is digital shopping and engagement. And this includes innovative online shopping concept, including but not limited to digital shopping experiences, new apps or digitally loyal programs, live streaming shopping, last mile delivery, and integration of new technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. And finally, the third theme is social and environmental reality. And finally, the third team is social and environmental responsibility.

Retail concept with a core of social and environmental purpose, including but not limited to recycling and reselling, reducing the use of waste, of plastic and other waste, transparency in the supply chain, services for underserved demographics, and promotion of minority-owned business. Those are key trends under that theme.

The top three storefront more changes in 2021 are there any more space to digital fulfillment options, and that's a 48% shifting to our opening expiry experiential formats that's 44 percent and reducing in-store inventory 31 percent the greatest impact of augmented reality and virtual reality in the next five years will be in enhancing the path to purchase, creating a virtual showroom, and purchase through transaction. So lots of changes, a lot of digitization will continue for retail going forward, and it's good to see what some of those trends are going forward. And finally, let me close with the latest organized retail crime report for 2021 for the D&D Daily.

Their analysis found that organized retail crime cases were up 10% in 2021 over 2020, while dollar amounts dropped 34%. The average case value for 2021 was just over $145,000. value for 2021 was just over $145,000. 73% of the cases were theft and shoplifting, 12% were robberies and burglaries, 8% were fraud, and 7% were from employee theft. Hardware and clothing were the highest categories stolen by ORC, both at 18% in 2021. Electronic was second at 17%, and pharmacy, tobacco, and marijuana followed at 12%. By comparison, the highest categories in 2020 were electronics at nearly 25%, followed by clothing and 19 nearly 20 19% and Hardware and nearly 14% the top three states in 2021 for organized retail crime or California Florida and Pennsylvania and the top three cities for 2021 for organized retail crime with Chicago

New York City, and San Francisco. I share that data because a good place to learn more how to fight ORC or organized retail crime is here at the Laws Prevention Research Council. So join us. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reed. Always interesting information. I would also like to just mention our 100th episode. I think it was great to be in person. Rela was a successful show from a whole bunch of standpoints. The foot traffic was amazing. It was great to see old

friends and catch up with colleagues. So I think some of the things I'm going to talk today about really directly relate to that. One of them is that Amazon released its earnings and had the first quarter loss since 2015. And I'm not going to spend that much time on that piece. There was a whole bunch of reasons why that that occurred. But what I really wanted to focus more on is some of the trends that were mentioned in some of the news around Amazon. But it's important to state that this isn't unique to Amazon. U.S. retail sales that happened online rose dramatically during the pandemic, as we spoke about so many times. And it really depends on which report you read. But I'll reference the Wall Street Journal article here that was referring to Amazon. You went from a nominal percentage of about 9% to 15% in the second quarter of 2020 during the pandemic. And those numbers were all over the place and sometimes it was even higher.

And that had to do with what we all know is that in some cases you had no alternative shopping. to do with what we all know is that in some cases you had no alternative shopping. An interesting point, and I think something that is important to talk about, is currently in the last three months, online sales have fell to 12.9%. So you're seeing a drop. And the great part here is we're not seeing a drop in spend. We're seeing a more balanced approach. So MasterCard's Spending Plus report is a great report. It has a lot of information here and what it really is, it's a survey that goes out and talks about estimations for cash checks and credit card payments. And what it really showed is that customers are now starting to take a more balanced approach and return to brick and mortar stores. And it was reminiscent of while we're

at Relo, we saw a packed floor because human interaction is important. The ability to touch and feel things are important. And I think the journal also wrote a really interesting article and is the pandemic was supposed to push all shopping online and it didn't. And I think one of the things in this article, it's the same numbers using the same information. And it really was a great kind of overview of what was occurring. But there was a, you know, a comment made and I'll actually read it because I thought it was really interesting. We've got over 100 years of society going into stores and buying something. And this is from the Bernstein Research Analyst Report, that muscle memory doesn't just switch off because you're forced to buy things online

a couple of times during a pandemic. And it's a really, while it's a very simplistic statement, I think it leads us back to, you know, we talked a lot about this on the podcast of making assumptions of what the long term effect would be on retail for COVID. There's no doubt that there is a digitization and a rapid digitization. Tony and I talk about it often and sort of read as well. But Tony and I have actually spoken about this, the rapid digitization that has been accelerated by COVID. have actually spoken about is the rapid digitization that has been accelerated by COVID. But if you look at the trajectory and the plan and the roadmap, the theoretical roadmap, these things were already occurring.

Contactless payment, curbside pickup, buy a line pickup in store, pay and go. These were all things that have been occurring for many years. It's just the pandemic pushed them at a trajectory that wouldn't before that. We also know that during the pandemic, there were a lot of retail establishments that tried things and realized that it wasn't the best for their business. And there was a couple of very large, I mean, huge retailers that tried drive up windows and spent millions of dollars and realized that their customers didn't want that, that that wasn't the same shopping experience as curbside pickup. There were also retailers that very clearly understood that delivery was not the best option for them. They offered it, but it wasn't the best option for them from a cost standpoint, wasn't the best option for them from a customer

service standpoint. I think we will continue to see the digitization, but the MasterCard report and the Wall Street Journal articles really should be refreshing and also reminding to all of our listeners that are in Brooker Motor Retail is that there's an evolution that's been occurring over many years. It doesn't mean that there's a death of retail. And I think as places open up, as someone that travels extensively throughout the U.S. and the world, what we're seeing is we are seeing people going back into stores. I also think it's important to note that we are in a very unique and challenging economical environment with inflation. So we definitely need to watch the space because I think that there will be more to come with that. And in an upcoming episode, I'm definitely going to talk about inflation.

Next topic I wanted to just talk about very, very high level because it's kind of breaking news happening right now. I actually think it broke last night. So it's Tuesday morning, May 3rd, and I am recording this now. 3rd, and I am recording this now. And so this was, I think, late last night, it broke, where there was a leaked report from the Supreme Court about a Roe versus Wade potential decision to overturn it. I think there are two things to really, really highlight here. One is that the report has not been validated yet. We don't know that it's real. And two, that this is one of those things that we often talk about is early information often changes. One thing we are starting to see, and if needed, we'll activate the fusion net,

is even though this has not been a substantiated report, the power of media and social media that's been spread all over the globe, there are already groups online discussing potential protests. And with anything related to civil unrest, if we need to, we will activate the fusion net and we will continue to watch the space. That is really the most information that I have right now. So really what I would say is we're definitely going to look at and watch this to make sure that civil unrest, if it occurs, that we're here to help support that. And that leads me to my next story, which is just an update. So Twitter, we've been talking about it.

Twitter has officially accepted a tender offer from Elon Musk. What does that mean? Well, it doesn't mean a heck of a lot. What it really means is that we will see Elon Musk potentially own Twitter. And I think we'll just continue to watch the space because as we know, big tech and censorship did occur. Whether you believe it, that was appropriate or not. It's a challenging environment for everybody when your company is a massive, massive subscribership, hundreds of millions of people see it, and there's misinformation or hate speech being spread. So there's this fine balance of how do we monitor it without stifling it. So we'll definitely, definitely keep an eye on that. And then last, but certainly not least, there was an interesting out of the European Commission is filing a lawsuit against Apple because of its restriction of NFC payments on

an Apple device. So today you can use your Apple wallet to use NFC, which is the touch pay feature, but they restrict other payment apps from that. This is not the first time Apple has been defending its payment ecosystem with the EU. The last time it was basically an enter trust suit. Apple has kind of went back and said, hey, plenty of payments services have been successful. We're not doing anything wrong. We're trying to manage the ecosystem. So space to watch because it could affect us if they did go ahead and open NFC. That would mean anybody could use tap and pay on Apple, which we know could potentially create liability for us. So definitely a space that we will watch from a risk standpoint. And with that, I will turn it back

over to Reid. Thanks so much again, Tom. Thanks, Tony, for all the insights. Amazing stuff. And I encourage you all, please reach out to us at operations at lprese.org or Diego at LPResearch.org with any of your questions, your comments, your suggestions. I want to thank Diego for his production work and for each and every one of you out there. Thank you. Stay safe. Stay connected. 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.