LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 136 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

2023 LPRC IGNITE & INTEGRATE planning is going strong for this first of its kind event! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss the role of social media in intelligence gathering, a quick look at the LPRC events coming up, an international coordination to stop a ransomware group, and a riveting interview with David Johnston, VP of Asset Protection and Retail Operations at the National Retail Federation! Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 136 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, joined by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, our producer, Diego Rodriguez, associate producer, Wilson Gavirino. And we're just going to talk a little bit about what's going on around the world. I think many of us have seen and some of you know we had been contacted by Lowe's Home Improvement.

Their innovation team working with asset protection had long been working on a way that they could better protect products and do it cost effectively. The solution set that they've worked on and designed and seems to be ready for some field testing, I believe they're working in 10 to 12 stores right now, on it as a benefit denial technology. Many of you know that's what here at the LPRC and in the situational crime prevention research literature in the criminology journals and so on is referred to as part of the situational crime prevention matrix and its benefit denial, denial of benefits or rewards for the would-be criminal offender to reduce their likelihood of victimizing or harming another person or place because it won't be worth it. They're not going to get what or as much of what they'd like to get. So in the case of Operation Unlock, it's a benefit denial technology that allows for point of sale activation of a device, in this case, an electronic device, and they're using it right now on cordless

electric drills or other tools. And so, now what they're doing is trying to understand all the mechanisms, mechanics needed just to operate in a handful of stores, and then at scale, there are manufacturing issues that they're sure they're working through, some testing and validation, legal structures, and things like that. Our understanding is that they're sure they're working through, some testing and validation, legal structures and things like that. Our understanding is that they would like to make this technology available without real charge to anyone and so on. So we'll all stay tuned and understand. I was fortunate to participate in a dinner, and we've mentioned this before, but a dinner in New York City on that Monday evening of the NRF big show. And it was very well attended, a lot of discussion.

We had speakers across the spectrum of legislation and legislators and lobbyists to technologists, leading technologists, again, from Lowe's and Walmart, and practitioners, APLP practitioners, government officials and law enforcement executives and beyond, trying to understand how we can all together better tackle some of the issues out there. So we applaud this effort and many other efforts out there to better reduce crime and loss attempts. And if somebody believes it's just too risky, that mode of action, I'm likely to get caught here. Think visible cameras, electronic tag systems, alarms, things like that, active, aware, alert, customer service, radios, things like that. They're all designed or examples of trying to increase the perceived risk of detection, detention or apprehension, of course, some kind of sanction, formal or informal sanctioning.

And there also, we all have talked about the other, another mode of action, a primary mode of action would be to make things like theft in this case more difficult. It's going to take too long, require special information, codes, passwords, keys. It's going to require something. It's going to take too long and things like that, or it might be dangerous to attempt. So that mode of action is pretty key. But going back to denial of benefits, whether it's point of sale activation or it's ink or dye tags, mechanical clamps, removing stereo fronts and vehicles and things like that, there are a lot of ways that we can make crime attempts less desirable and therefore make people and places a lot safer. So one thing I want to mention

too is that we're going to be hosting in Gainesville at the behest of the International Council of Shopping Centers, ICSC, a gathering, a special summit that we're going to be working on on March 8th in Gainesville with a reception on the evening of the 7th here that Tuesday. And we've got multiple associations at ICSC and others have invited to come in. The LPRC, our role is to host, to provide maybe some of our insights into an overarching anti-crime strategy. The session itself or the event, the summit is called the Organized and Violent Retail Crime Summit. Right now, in addition to ICSC, we have the National Retail Federation, NRF confirmed. The RILA, Retail Industry Leaders Association, confirmed. FMI, or the Food Marketing Institute, this is the supermarket and grocery group, trade or industry group, coming in.

We've also got ASIS, American Society of Industrial Security, as is. Retail Committee represented, CLE represented clear the coalition of law enforcement and retail or retailing coming in for that. We've got the LP foundation coming in here for that. And, and department of Homeland security, HSI, Homeland security investigations that are coordinating across ORC groups and so forth, and many more coming in. So this will be an interesting summit focused on looking at what's an overarching collaborative or cooperative strategy, what legislative gaps and needs are. We know that RELA and others have successfully now gotten the INFORM Act into law federally.

There is some skepticism, I understand, from those involved as to how well and how long it will take to actually execute on that. But that's the way it is with any new effort or initiative is now how do we make this work in the real world? How do we get buy-in and commitment execution? How do we sustain that? How do we adapt and adjust what we're trying to do to the ever-changing criminal horde out there, if you will? So we'll talk about other gaps and opportunities legislatively. I know RELA is pushing an initiative that's well-founded as far as getting together the district attorneys, the prosecutors, because here in the state of Florida, they're called state attorneys or in some states, state's attorneys and so on. So to get the prosecutors at the state and federal levels to much better understand organized

retail crime and all the harm created by that, as well as high rate, high impact offenders that aren't necessarily organized or part of an organized group, but are high impact offenders. So we're going to look at that, discuss some of the good efforts that are underway. Are there ways that others can support? What are good lanes for people to move in? I know at the LPRC, our role is and always has been to be more of a think tank and, of course, a research center for the retail industry and for law enforcement and others trying to reduce theft, fraud, and violence.

And so that's the lane that we believe we should stay in. But we look at things like what is a grand strategy? What does that look like legislatively from an enforcement standpoint, but also from a preventative standpoint, which is what we talk about here every week and everything we do in our labs every day and in the field, and that is how do we convince people not to initiate or progress a harmful act like theft, fraud, or violence, some antisocial behavior. So what does that look like? But also those that are high-impact offenders, what do we do to better try and convince them to not re-offend, re-victimize a place, re-harm somebody or another place? Or how do we better neutralize that threat? Maybe they need

to be incarcerated, taken out of circulation so that they can. We're going to be looking at research opportunities that these retail industry groups would like to see. We'll have some retailer practitioners. We'll have some mall security practitioners in here as well, because again, we want to look at individual place protection, enhancing self-protection. We want to look at, though, also tying together retailers or in other partners together, as we've talked about before with our Eastside Safer Places Lab initiative, looking at at least eight retail company stores in this particular area. How do we connect them and connect them with the Gainesville Police Department to work more effectively at

prevention and better handling and management and recovery, and then better evidence or forensic activities so that we can put the high-impact offenders out of business so they can't keep harming and hurting others, as well as in the mall environment, whether an enclosed mall like we'll be doing on the west side, Safer Places Lab Initiative, working with Brookfield Properties and their retail tenants, both large and small, and then in open mall environments as well. minutes, both large and small, and then in open mall environments as well. So those strip centers, malls, co-located stores, how do we get better individual place and collaborative or collective place? These will all be things we're looking at because the LP Foundation's there. They lead

training and certification efforts in this space. Are there things that could be done or need to be done or don't to enhance organized retail crime training for practitioners in both loss of venture asset protection and law enforcement training packets that might be needed per the RELA prosecutor initiative, DA initiative, to help them better recognize and successfully prosecute some of the ORC or high-impact offenders and things like that. So looking at legislation tactics and strategies and tactics, looking at that prosecution, enforcement, and so forth, and then looking at training opportunities and development. So kind of having a comprehensive look. So we're excited about that upcoming March 7th and 8th summit. It's going to be a fairly

intimate group. It was starting out as about 20. Now it could be as many as 90. But we're trying to maintain quality so that some good outcomes happen, and that could be more coordinated strategy as far as lobbying the retailer and mall or center operators and their security tech and their tech people. There's more alignment, and then the same thing with law enforcement and prosecutors. So stay tuned on that. What we'll do is we know we've got an upcoming integrate summit coming up here. This is, again, designed to help us better learn how to put on these type of events where we've got tabletops and war game exercises, if you will, that are coming out of real world scenarios and leveraging multiple, sometimes dozens and dozens of technologies, integrating them together for effect. We're excited. It looks like right now it will be between 40 and 45. I think we're about 45 registered asset protection and LP executives representing well over 30 retail corporations.

We've only got a handful of solution partners, and those are helping us actually operate some of the tech and serve as sort of advisors in some of the more sophisticated or complex components of the exercise itself. And then, of course, our sponsors from the Innovate Advisory Panel that work weekend and week out, month in and month out, year round with 30 major retailers. They're innovation people in our team. with 30 major retailers. They're innovation people in our team, and they also provide critical resources, as we've talked about before, to grow our research capability, both data and criminological scientists, the venues that we work in, the technologies we use, and the ability to move around, travel, and conduct real-world research in very rigorous evaluations as well. So, we're excited about it. The Ignite portion of this is the winter planning meeting, as we've said before. Now you're looking at the committees that we've got coming in, and they'll be doing breakouts and

understandings, ways to help us get better operationally from a recruiting and what we call team-building exercises and things like that, a smart growth initiative. We don't want to grow too large. We don't want too many corporations. We're now over 200 members of the LPRC community. Our members don't want to grow a whole lot larger now. Nobody wants a mob scene. They want to get things done, make things happen, maintain quality and rigor and things like that. So a lot of those strategic discussions and next steps will be lined out there. And we're excited about that, as well as some of the research focus, what we're doing for individual issues, as well as looking broader with our working groups, our events, our labs and the initiatives we're doing out in the wild or out in the field. So enough on what LPRC is up to, other than, again, we've got our LPRC Supply Chain Protection Summit coming up, as well as our LPRC Violent Crime Summit coming up.

go to lpresearch.org, if you will, to find out more information on our events, how to get involved in the LPRC community, or more involved if you're a member, how to engage here at our labs, how to go out and participate in our summits and on our calls and on FusionNet during critical incidents and things like that. So, with no further ado, let me turn this over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid. Let me start this week with some interesting news from Amazon as published in Supermarket News. Amazon just announced that it is pausing the rollout of Amazon Fresh retail stores while it revaluates the concept's economics. SSS that is portfolio of Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores and has decided to exit some of those stores due to low growth potential. Amazon currently has 44 Amazon Fresh locations and 28 Amazon Go stores in the United States. Both the Fresh stores, which are more like traditional supermarkets, and the gold stores, which are careless convenience stores, have been widely considered a potential opportunity for the e-commerce giant to disrupt the traditional retail grocery space.

The company, interestingly enough, also took a $720 million impairment charge in the fourth quarter related to property, equipment, and operating leases at its physical stores. While it's rethinking the Amazon Go and Fresh and Amazon Go concept, Amazon's Whole Food banner market actually continues to do well and has made progress toward profitability in the past year. For the fiscal year that ended on December 31, Amazon reported that sales at its physical stores increased about 11% over a year ago to about $19 billion. That figure does not include orders placed online for pickup and delivery.

Everyone needs to remember that grocery is a lower margin business and it's great to have all this technology and remember all the hype with Amazon Go stores when they open. But like everything else, in the end, you have to make money and the economies need to work. So it's interesting that Amazon is reassessing what to do with all those high-tech stores going forward. And this follows actually closing some of the other formats that they were doing in physical stores. So you'll be able to see where Amazon goes next. And let me conclude this week with a very important new report. And this report is very important here at the Loss Prevention Research Council.

It's from the United States Secret Service and it analyzes mass attacks in the United States. This is really a first of its kind and it looked at trends of 173 mass attacks that took place in the years between 2016 and 2020. Among the findings as summarized by National Public Radio, first let's look at the location of these attacks. Again, very dear to the Laws Prevention Research Council. Most of the attacks took place in a variety of public and semi-public spaces across 37 states and Washington, D.C. The most common locations for the attacks were businesses including restaurants and retail. What about weapons?

126 of the attacks or 73 percent involved the use of one or more firearms and nearly a quarter of the attacks involving firearms, at least one of the firearms, was acquired illegally by the attackers. Who are these people? What are the demographics? Well, very interesting and maybe not surprising, 96% of the attackers are male. In this finding, consistent with previous analysis of mass attacks, 57% were white and 34% were black. What about criminal history? 64% had a prior criminal history, not including minor traffic violation. 41% of the attacks were

found to have a history of domestic violence, but only 16% of those individuals faced domestic violence charges. Did they have an online presence? Interesting that a majority of the attackers had an identified presence online and nearly a quarter were found to have conveyed concerning communications such as threats and posts about suicidal ideations, previous mass shooting, violent content, and hatred towards a specific ethnic group. Were they stressed? What was stressing them? Nearly all of the attackers experienced at least one significant life stressor within the five years of the attacks, most of which, interesting, were issues with family

and romantic relationships. 20% of the attackers experienced some kind of childhood trauma, including physical or sexual abuse, entering foster care, living in a refugee camp, or death of a parent. And what about financial and housing? How did that impact them? With 60-72% of the attackers experienced financial stressors sometime before the attack and over half experienced within five years. The report also describes some financial stressors such as bankruptcy, eviction, foreclosures, and loss of income. 39% of the attacks was also experienced unstable housing within 20 years of the attacks including homelessness and impending evictions.

Interesting that this report does provide some operational implications that should be considered when developing community violence prevention programs, and I'm going to list them because these are important. Communities must encourage and facilitate bystander reporting and be prepared to respond when reports or concerns are received. Communities should not wait for a direct or specific threat before taking an action. Individual displaying an unusual interest in violent topics, especially past attackers, should elicit concerns. Businesses should consider establishing workplace violence prevention programs to identify,

assess, and intervene with current employees, former employees, and customers who may pose a risk of violence. Public safety, school, workplaces, and community service professionals should consider strategies for resolving interpersonal grievances. Individuals tasked with community violence prevention must understand the impact of violent and hateful rhetoric while protecting the constitutional rights to free speech. Misogyny and domestic violence deserves increased attention from those tasked with mass violence prevention. Online platforms may be utilized by individuals to make violent communication and to share violent rhetoric and ideas.

Individuals sharing final communication or engaging in other final acts may warrant immediate intervention. Community violence prevention efforts require identifying and promoting appropriate resources for individuals who are managing stressful life circumstances, experiencing mental health issues, or facing a personal crisis. And finally, mass shootings have been perpetrated by those who were legally prohibited from possessing firearms. And so the report concludes that the background and

behaviors of the attackers demonstrate a continued need for public safety resources to be directed towards addressing threatening behavior, stalking, harassment, domestic violence, violent extremism, and violence in general. The findings further emphasize the increased need for community resources to address mental health needs, social isolation, substance abuse, and individuals in crisis.

Really interesting report. I urge everybody to read it. It's actually available also on my website if you want to see it. But research it. It's an important topic here at the Loss Prevention Research Council. I know we have a violence group, but this is an issue throughout society society and we all need to work together to actually get better in terms of addressing this major major concern that is plaguing the united states so with that let me turn it over to tom well thank you tony and thank you reid uh wanted to start off with the chinese surveillance balloon i'm sure everybody by now has heard or read the news about the Chinese surveillance balloon that entered U.S. airspace over Alaska, traveled all over the country and was shot down eventually in the Carolinas. Kind of the interesting part here, and this is a

developing story, as I'm sure everybody's aware, we're learning about it day by day through the media. But if you read some of the intelligence briefs, the first kind of interesting point of view is that this is the fourth balloon, potentially the fifth. So there's two different kind of reports out there, and I think some of this is the way the reports are written. is the way the reports are written. Three of these surveillance balloons were in U.S. airspace, one several years ago, and then an additional one this year. And so what does that mean? Well, that's kind of the challenge.

The Chinese government has acknowledged that it is their balloon, but basically the narrative has changed a little bit. It started out like this was a civilian manned research balloon that fell off course, and then it was a weather balloon, and there was a whole bunch of different things here. The balloon itself is a very sophisticated device. It can travel above 65,000 feet, has rudders and propellers, so it is able to move. And for lack of better words, it can accomplish the same as a satellite can, just with a little bit different of a range. It's also important to note that you may not have heard about this, but on the global newswire, the high-alt altitude Chinese surveillance balloons have

also been spotted in Japan, India, and the Philippines. I think this is kind of one of those things that continues to develop. But the next step is what will happen now that we've shot this balloon down? What does that mean for the China and US relations, which were somewhat tense in the past, and I think this has been kind of a common theme for several years, what occurs with these types of incidences. It's also important to note that it isn't uncommon to have other types of surveillance, planes, drones, come into U.S. territory, generally in the waters. It's not uncommon on the Pacific coast as well as in the northern part of Alaska to

have surveillance, the planes or drones from other countries come around. This is something that's been going on for a very long time. The U.S. government is looking and trying to collect pieces of this balloon. They've basically cordoned off a pretty large area over the water and are working at getting the debris. They've already collected some of it. And we're in this kind of wait-and-see phase of what the government will, if anything, do from the Chinese government standpoint. They've said in plain English that there will be consequences for shooting the balloon down. And they're using very neutral language in the sense of, you know, things like this is,

you know, not appropriate based on international law. So they're not making direct threats, but they are definitely insinuating that something will apply. So it's something to definitely keep an eye on. Also kind of in global geopolitical news, there's been a lot of chatter about Russia making a very strong offensive play in the Ukraine. There is a lot of intelligence data, the support that Russia will take another strong approach, really in symbolic approach versus a strategic or military initiative that is, this is more symbolic in the sense that they want to capture land or areas that they didn't, they lost in the sense that they want to capture land or areas that they lost in

the past. And there is a lot of geopolitical chatter through the cooperation with Iran and Iran providing Russia with drones that are high-speed drones. So the geopolitical climate today is very, very stressed, if you will, and there's certainly a lot of information out there, and there's also a lot of misinformation. So why am I talking to this today on the podcast is because there is a tremendous amount of misinformation. There's a tremendous amount of fear-mongering of what this could mean for the United States.

fear-mongering of what that means, what this could mean for the United States. And while I'm just delivering the news, if you will, we don't really know. One of the things that we do know is COVID has taught us a lot of things about supply chain and fragility in the supply chain. So something as retailers to look for is look for what, if any, impact could occur in the supply chain world based on some of these things that occur. I'm not 100% sure that you will see direct impacts, but we do see indirect impacts. We know that specifically with China, there's still a large percentage of chips that are manufactured in China, There's still a large percentage of chips that are manufactured in China, which means a lot of folks here who are listening that use electronic components definitely have an impact. Additionally, we know that the region is still a common place for textiles and some apparel manufacturing. So just something to keep an eye on. We'll certainly keep everybody apprised of the situation

and we'll go kind of through there from that standpoint. Another thing, just wanted to talk kind of into the cybersecurity space. There has been a lot of news around different types of ransomware attacks that are coming. And I think the good thing here is we continue to see when we see these attacks and some of these events that occur, we also see reactions from developed governments. So that continues to be a great kind of move forward for all of us listening that the bad guys are seeing that the good guys will see these through these very intense and sometimes extremely complicated type of investigations. And we are, as a government, reacting to them. I had the opportunity, and I am actually at a

conference today and yesterday for aerospace. um you know one of the divisions at control tech does rfid for aerospace that's why i'm there and uh there is a tremendous amount of talk and this is a very similar to nrf protect or nrf big show i apologize that's why i wanted to bring it up just a tremendous amount of talk about artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation. And while I would say that you have polarizing differences between aerospace and retail, some of the challenges were really about innovation and managing customer experience and sustainability. So very, very interesting from a technology perspective to see the parallels. Also, organizations similar to the LPRC in that space.

So I thought that that would warrant a little bit of conversation because I thought it was so eerily similar that it made sense to talk about it. We also are seeing an uptick through some of the social media and active intelligence gathering channels around unrest. I think we're at this really interesting kind of challenging state of when we're looking for events occurring that you have folks that use social media as an outlet just to talk about things,

and sometimes the conversations become heated and there are comments about potentially violent exchanges that are sometimes again just an outlet to express how someone feels emotionally about what occurs so i think um we'll continue to monitor that, activate the fusion net as we see needed. I do know that during LPRC Ignite at the end of the month in February, we're doing a tabletop exercise, and it will be an active tabletop exercise where we talk about left to bang and right to bang and during an event and how to react. And I think some of this will come up in

that play is how do you validate, how do you sift through active intelligence data? And I think this is a great exercise, so stay tuned on that. But at a very, very high level, one of the things to really talk about is it has a lot to do with the planning and how you will act when something occurs. And then last but certainly not least, I think we've talked about it a few times, ChatGPT has been all over the news. And what it is, it's the 3.5 version or version pseudo four of OpenAI's artificial intelligence platform. I think I wanted to spend just a couple minutes on this because it's come up quite a bit in different meetings with folks that I've met with at the big show about this being new. And first, probably by you heard me kind of allude to 3.5 or pseudo four. It's not new. It's actually just that it was newly made available to the masses.

It's been in the works for several years. It is not the only modern developed large language model, and that's what I'm going to talk a little bit about and kind of some of the news around it. But it certainly was the first that people had free access to to see. A couple of caveats with the chat GPT that you've probably come to know because you can go test it is. One, it is a large language model. So what it does is it basically has a lot of different words, several billion words and phrases. It pulls information through some of the common search engines. And then it is more of a predictive model than anything else, where when you ask

it a question, it uses that large language model to anticipate what you're looking for it to say. It's fairly accurate. I think it's important to note that the data is only updated to 2021. So if you're using it, keep that in mind. One of the great things about this is it's really opened the eyes to, I think, what I would say is the consumer or average person of the availability that large language models offer. You also hear a term called generative AI, and I'm going to simplify this. Generative AI is exactly what it says. It's when artificial intelligence is used to generate an answer. You also will see that with images.

Today I'm not going to really talk about image in general. I want to really focus on chat GBT because there were some announcements last week. And much like probably we all expected, Google, and I think we definitely talked about this at the podcast very early on, so I feel like we were ahead of the curve as we are a lot of times, released BARD, which is Google's version. And this is something where I think Google has said in not so direct terms, but something we reported here on the podcast was chat GPT is, from a functional perspective, a big risk to Google because it shows the capacity of a large

language model and how it could be used in a search engine. So Google made an announcement earlier this week saying that their version of a large language model is out and about. So we'll see a lot of this. This is great for everybody here listening. This really helps us understand what's going on. And when I say Google announced, it didn't actually release it to the wild yet. But what this really does is it helps all of us, everybody listening here, understand what is capable, but also I think brings us to the next era of artificial intelligence. I wrote an article about the NRF Big Show, and I talked about this kind of for years, and we've talked about this at the Laws of Prevention Research Council, you know, what the DAI versus ML implication is. So artificial intelligence is really a machine or a computer replicating a human behavior

where machine learning takes that to the next level. And when we talk about large language models like chat, GPT, really what it's doing is just a massive amount, just a massive amount of language, words, and being able to predict what it is. So I think we'll continue to announce and talk through what this means for the listener base. But as soon as BARD was announced on Monday of this week, Microsoft went and talked about some of the things they're doing. And Microsoft really has invested a fair amount into open AI and the chat GPT piece.

So I think we're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months a rapid acceleration of large language models, which allows better research at our fingertips, allows people to get more data. And when we talk about misinformation and misleading, the risk is that these models, information misleading, the risk is that these models, while they're extremely cool and intelligent, still lack the ability to have human logic. So with that predictive model, if you play with chat GPT, you can get a completely different narrative. And so I did a little bit of experimenting early on with chat GPT and asked it about shoplifting and bail reform. And I asked the question three different ways, and I got three very different answers, all from different fact sets. And the interesting part is this isn't necessarily right or wrong.

It's just it's predicting based on what's out there. So definitely something to stay tuned to. I think it's probably been the most interesting questions and topic ability to talk about recent events in the response, which is a massive difference. If you think about COVID and all the things that occurred, ChatGPT is limited to 2021, where BARD will not be, according to what I read. Again, I haven't seen it yet. will not be according to what I read. Again, I haven't seen it yet. It's also important to note that chat GPT, obviously, an open AI is obviously going to improve.

So when we, you know, some of the information isn't still ready available. That's why I say chat GPT is version 3.5. I think it's really version 4, pseudo version 4. So the next version theoretically would be with updated data. And with these models, if you've used chat GPT, your feedback influences how the model works. And this is, again, one of the risks with machine learning is that to do, because humans create these models and humans interact with these models, it could create some, you know, our subconscious or group biases could change the way the model works.

I think there's a tremendous amount of work out there to stop that from happening. But I think this is the topic that I'll continue to monitor is the more you try to change a model to not have biases in the past, the more the model actually has biases. So very, very interesting time for all of us. I spent a lot of time on it because if you haven't looked, go ahead and search chat GPT or OpenAI.

You can actually go on for free and use it. Very fun tool. Very, very interesting. And I think it will impact all of us in the next few years on the way we do everything, both personally and professionally. And I think that at this stage of the game, there's not a big risk of human jobs being lost because of it, because of what it actually does. I think that's the number one question. Do I think people's jobs will get lost? I do think there will come a time when large language models, if you are a news reporter that writes, you will have this,

be able to do a lot of that for you. But I think in our space, the reality is it's only going to enhance the way we do things. I can see a time when researchers will use it to pull data much quicker and see reference points. I also can see it where it's really good is for law and case law trying to find things. It's phenomenal for those type of researches. So I encourage everybody to go check it out. If you have any questions, shoot any of us a question. We'd love to get them here on the podcast. Last but certainly not least, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it because it's not something that is something we normally talk about or what we that is something that I would say that I was an expert in.

But definitely a weather junkie, someone that follows it. And there was, you know, very, very unfortunate and really massive earthquakes in Turkey, you know, 7.9, and then extremely strong aftershocks. And we, you know, there are some major fault lines in that area. So this is not, earthquakes are not uncommon, but this level of magnitude earthquake, I think, has been several hundred years, and the estimates are more than 20,000 dead. So let's keep everybody in our thoughts and continue to monitor it. But we do continue to see these very extreme weather events. And again, not to go off topic here, but just one of the things is that be rest assured that here at the LPRC, if an event like that would occur

in our area, we would use all of our resources to help kind of monitor that situation. And that was actually when we designed the fusion net for the people that were involved early. We started with weather events and civil unrest, and really we used weather as kind of the precursor. I actually recall being in the lab, in the old lab space, taking the last flight out before a hurricane. I think it was probably, gosh, probably four or five years ago now, and us actually activating the lab and helping push out information. And that's what the LPRC is all about. How do we get research to folks in our space to help them make better decisions based on

facts? And with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. All right. Thanks so much, Tom, for all your insights. Tony, the same great information week in and week out. Look forward, everybody out there, if you will, to upcoming special guests. We're excited about that. We've got criminologists. We've got practitioners. We've got tech people that are out there leading the charge and helping us make things happen and upping the quality, the execution, and the outcomes of what we're all trying to do out there to safeguard the vulnerable. So yourselves, please stay in touch,

stay safe. 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 Thank you.