LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 116 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

LPRC IMPACT Registration Open and Has Strong Attendance! Recession Fears Continue! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the increase in violent crime in UK similar to US, inflations effects on retailer spending, cloud computing continues and how it is being used, and a look into consumer spending habits. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 116 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. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series. I'm joined by co-host Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez. This week I'm on the road and so I'm going to go ahead and just let everybody know that we're excited to see you all in Gainesville, Florida on the campus of the University of Florida at 2022 LPRC Impact. You'll see probably anywhere from three to 500 top executives here in Gainesville

interacting, going through over 20 sessions of content, best content ever, coming from a plethora of research that we've been doing with retailers in the field, in the labs, around anti-theft, in the field, in the labs, around anti-theft, fraud, and violence. And so we're excited. That's October 3rd through 5th. Go online, go to lpresearch.org, register today, and we'll see you in Gainesville. With no further ado, let me turn it over to Tony. Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid, for those great updates. Let me start this week from retailsector.co.uk by speaking to the challenges the UK is facing with retail crime. On multiple levels, in fact, they are similar to what I shared last week from the United

States. Some 106 of UK's leading retail voices have reportedly written to the police and crime commissioners in England and Wales, calling on them to commit to making retail crime a priority in local policing strategies. The letters are said to express the retailers' increasing concerns about the rising levels of violence, abuse, and antisocial behavior across their operation, as well as the emotional impact it has on their victims and their colleagues. The rising in retail crime, the letter notes, is partly linked to tackling shopliftinglifting which pushes up the costs of operating and results in higher prices for everyone. In addition, the letter notes that retailers have set out steps they are taking to protect retail workers having spent 750 million British pounds on crime prevention in 2020 to 21 according to the latest crime survey by the British Retail Consortium. Retailers have reported hiring in-store

security teams, training teams on de-escalation as well as investing in CCTV and body-worn cameras for staff, but say local police support is still vital to protecting retail workers. The letter also outlines ways in which the police and crime commissioners could help the most, such as work with the local businesses to help give police accurate picture of the problem, push their local force to investigate all reports of violence

and abuse against retail workers, and monitor how the new Sentinelise Guideline lines are used and the impact on violence and abuse against retail workers. Doesn't this sound familiar to the exact update that I provided last week in the article that I published that's available on my website? It's retail crime out of control. And again, they're focused on the U.S. Let me now switch topics and go to retailcustomerexperience.com and provide an interesting update from this past week in one of their articles, which was titled, NRF Economy Strengths Keeping Recession at Bay. As they stated, the U.S. economy isn't in a recession,

and there likely will not be one this year, according to the National Retail Federation. The news comes as the economy has seen two consecutive quarters of decline, which technically is defined as a recession. Back-to-back contraction have heightened the fear of a recession, but while the economy has lost momentum heading into the second half of the year, economic data is not yet consistent with a typical recession, said the National Retail Federation Chief Economist Jeff Kleinhans. Our view, as he continued, is that while the economy is functioning at a slower pace, it is likely to avoid a recession this year. Despite ongoing

uncertainties, we believe the underlying strength of the economy is strong enough to deal with the inflation and keep the recession at bay, or short-lived, in other words, if a recession comes, even if we are wrong. One factor signaling the oncoming recession would be a huge downturn in employment. The June unemployment rate was 3.6%, which is just first quarter and $375,000 in the second quarter. Retail sales, which do not include auto sellers, gas stations, and restaurants, were up 7% in the first six months of the year, according to the NRF. So that's good news. We'll have to see when and if a recession comes,

but indications are from all sectors, from what I've seen, is that even if a recession does come, it will be shallow, will not be a deep recession. Switching topics again, going back to inflation, according to Statista, while Wall Street celebrated a slight cooling of inflation in July, the latest reading won't be enough to ease the financial pressure on millions of households in the United States in the face of the rising cost of living.

After all, prices were still 8.5% higher in July compared to the previous year, even if things didn't worse further compared to the previous month, which was higher. The cooling of inflation in July was mainly caused by a significant drop in energy prices, which was offset by further price increases in food and shelter. by further pricing fees in food and shelter. Regardless of the move in the right direction, prices remain elevated, with energy prices 33% above last year's level and food prices 11% higher than in July 2021. As millions of families face financial hardship in the face of inflation,

many are forced to cut back on more expenses to make ends meet. And what are the top five places that Americans plan to cut back to save money in times of high inflation? Number one is contracts and subscriptions. is contracts and subscriptions number two is closed number three is bars cafes and restaurants visits number four is traveling and number five is food and household goods and finally a market that I talked really closely is the cloud computing market and who exactly is leading that market and here again is the latest data from Statista in Q2 2022 global cloud infrastructure services spending climbed to 55 billion dollars bringing the industry total for the trailing 12 months to more than 200 billion dollars the top three providers of uh

cloud in q2 2022 and their market share are number one amazon they have a 34 percent market share number two is microsoft azure 21 and number three is Google Cloud, 10%. Again, cloud computing is one of my favorite technology. And even in loss prevention, I believe it is critical to accelerate the deployment of new technologies. Summarizing this week, UK is facing similar retail crime trends as the U.S. in terms of increased violence and challenges. NRF is not yet predicting a recession, but consumers are coming back because of inflation. Cloud computing will keep growing, and LPE needs to more aggressively embrace it and in closing a good place to test cloud solutions would be here at TLPRC. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. And thank you, Reed. And today it will be relatively short, but a couple of updates all over the news. Our Wall Street

Journal, New York Times, pretty much every major media publication throughout the world has kind of talked about the current state of retail. And a lot of retailers are announcing earnings this week. By the time you're listening to this, a lot of this information will already be out and about and some of it will be happening in real time. But overall, the Wall Street Journal reported that retail sales are flat. And that is not necessarily a negative thing. What that means is there are signs that inflationary concerns are not increasing and are kind of plateauing. I think it's certainly premature to celebrate and assume that we are out of the woods, if you will.

I think it's certainly a good sign that we're seeing some relief. Certainly a good sign also when we have some sales there. We do still see some retailers reporting large on-hand quantities and overstocks in some positions. So I think that's important to know. But I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. I just thought it was a relevant topic to talk about. One thing I do want to talk about is active intelligence, open source intelligence gathering and kind of preparing for the midterm elections and the elections in general and what we're seeing. We're seeing just a tremendous

amount of chatter. And I want to really classify that at this point, it is just chatter. And I want to really classify that at this point it is just chatter. And certainly we can talk about predictions of what that chatter means. This chatter is centered around civil unrest around the elections. I think we're in this very, very heightened state as we have been now for what feels like years for some, but it really been about uh more than 24 months um some of it's politically motivated some of it's um event specific where there is a lot of talk about if this x occurs there'll be civil unrest so we know that the political climate and the geopolitical climate and both the what's occurring here domestically in the United States and the geopolitics has far reaching effect. I can tell you that at this point, I've been involved in active intelligence gathering and open source intelligence, specifically to social media since 2011, and I've never seen the level of activity and chatter.

I'd also say that it's important to note that with emotions being high and a lot of the tensions being high, it could just very well just be chatter at this point. While I'm not one to predict things, I think I've heard some experts as well as I think we all on this call on this podcast probably believe that there is a higher propensity to civil unrest today than there was have in the past all of the indicators point to that we will see civil and arrest continued to see civil unrest and actually specific stories around elections and some of the political things that are occurring so here at the lpr, we'll continue to activate the Fusion Center as appropriate and FusionNet. And what that is is really is a collaboration platform where we can share active intelligence.

So stay tuned for sure for that. When appropriate, we will absolutely flip that on. who's listening today to, if you don't already have an active intelligence, open source intelligence or social media monitoring program, platform or design, now is definitely a time to do it. There's a tremendous amount of information available. Certainly reach out to the folks at the LPRC, myself, if you have questions about, be sure that you have a program in place.

And if you're listening to this podcast and you're a member, the LPRC does have an avenue to join that, that FusionNet to get that information. Um, why I keep talking about this is because we continue to talk about the what if, and what the what if is, is there are numerous folks over hundreds of thousands of posts, um, that are at this point, not validated because they haven't occurred yet, where there's talk about if this occurs, this will happen. So I think we'll continue to monitor this, but it's definitely something to look at. Switching gears a little bit to the cybersecurity front,

we continue to see zero-day vulnerabilities popping up. Chrome just released another zero-day vulnerability. And for those of you that are new listeners, zero-day vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities related to software that were not known before. Basically, what that means is that there is no evidence or anything about this vulnerability. A vulnerability became known in the wild

and in some cases is actually not ever really taken advantage of, but in a lot of cases it is. Very, very simple piece of advice here is make sure your software is updated. Why do I say this so often? Because it is so important. Make sure that that software is patched and updated. It's free, it's easy,

and it pays dividends down the road. I can't express the importance of that. And then the last thing, which I know we talked about before, and again, this is the kind of the constant awareness around social engineering events that are occurring specific to retail. So just talking about social engineering, when we talk about social engineering, social engineering is if you have been in the business for a long time, you may not call it that, but it's someone taking advantage of the human psyche and manipulating it. This could be in form of making phone calls and trying to convince someone to process a transaction, gift card, refund, something along those lines. transaction, gift card, refund, something along those lines. This could be a position where someone is trying to influence someone to make a decision that they shouldn't make.

And we're seeing a huge, a substantial list of reports from retailers, but also chatter again on the internet of people taking advantage of the situation. And there's actually some really interesting posts while they're not super specific to retailers about how easy it is to call a retailer and represent yourself as an asset protection professional to get someone to ring up a gift card as a test transaction, if you will. So I know that this is a repetitive reminder, but having a strong education on wearing it on this platform is paramount. And then last but certainly not least, as I sign off,

if you're listening to this podcast and you haven't already registered for Impact, do it. It is coming up soon. It is in October. If you go to lpcresearch.org to find out more, but if you're not already registered, make sure you do. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reed. All right.

Thanks so much, Tony and Tom. And thank you, Diego. Most of all, thank you all that are listening. And we're always, always looking forward to hearing from you at operations at lpresearch.org. Let us know what you think, what you need, what we can do better. Take care. 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 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.