LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 137 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

This week, we’re covering the last minutes before the INTEGRATE event, the new ATF gun crime report in the US, recent train derailments, and the unidentified flying objects press released from both the US and Canada. Stay tuned for more updates from the event as well as some live interviews from industry leaders on the next episode. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 137 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 from the LPRC today is our latest in the weekly update series and joined by Tom Ian, Tony D'Onofrio, our producer Diego Rodriguez, our associate producer Wilson Gavirino, and we're just going to spend a little bit of time with you all talking about some of the things that are happening or getting ready to happen. Right now, of course, we are just days away from the LPRC Ignite meeting, that is a summit or a gathering of our board of advisors and our LPRC Innovate Programs advisory panel.

We've also mentioned that we'll be having our first annual inaugural initial LPRC integrate. LPRC integrate. And that's, again, where we're going to be integrating dozens of technologies across the offender journey, in this case, a two-person crew that are going to be heading to our store environment engagement lab, creating havoc, and then heading out from there. So we've got now, we're right where we are. We want to freeze at 100 people just to keep things reasonable and allow us to learn together to create more of these interactive tabletop war game types of events for everybody and do them at a very high level. So we're full up, should be roughly 30 retail chains. And we'll have that. Therefore, we'll have 10 corporations represented in each of the red, white, and blue breakout teams. They'll work at left of bank pre-event.

They'll work at bank during the event, the kinetic part of the event, and then, of course, right of bank after they leave the premises and head out. So we've got research scientists assigned to each of the red, white, and blue teams. We've got technical support technicians as well. And then finally, we've got evaluators and facilitators that are made up of our retailer AP executives. We've got two very experienced retail LP AP executives that have not only a lot of field and corporate experience, but a lot of technical technology experience as well. So we think we're pretty well loaded for what we're trying to get done. And we're really, really excited about it. This team at the LPRC and these facilitators, the technical people have been helping us plan, go through

excruciating detail, making sure all these things work and work well, that we have a plan, that we've got scripts, that we've got all the right people coming in. And we've tried to orchestrate, make on-site visits, rehearse, time things and all that. So we'll still make errors. We'll still make mistakes. We'll still learn the easy way and the hard way. But we're pretty excited about how this is going to go. We'll have a podcast episode. Tony D'Onofrio on our team is going to leverage his incredible interviewing skills, and he's going to talk to some of our retail LPAP practitioners, some of our solution

partners that are helping us orchestrate this, our advisory panel members, some law enforcement that will be participating in this exercise and others to get their take on what we're trying to do, how we're trying to do it, how it might help them, how it might help our LPRC community and beyond, and what we want to do next from this type of learning session. So stay tuned for that special episode that'll be coming out. Again, we promise we did interview Dave Johnson from the National Retail Federation, the new NRF VP of loss, venture, and asset protection there. We are setting up more interviews as we speak. And so stay tuned for that. We just kind of, with a relatively small team, working on a couple, three dozen projects, as well as the Integrate event, the Ignite gathering, and everything else that we're doing right now.

Coming up, upcoming product protection summit, the Violent Crime Working Group Summit, and, of course, the Supply Chain Protection Summit. A lot happening, and we're just excited. We have, it seems, not only weekly visitors coming in from whether it be TJX or public supermarkets or Walmart coming up, CVS and on and on, distinguished VIP visitors coming through and planning with us, touring and doing their carving out time for them and their teams to do some private time and exploration and strategy and planning. We are also having a lot of technicians and technologists putting their solution sets in our labs, helping us integrate them. We have University of Florida engineering students working with us, Innovation Academy. We've got interns and we've been having different law enforcement

agencies coming through and doing tours and some interactions. So it's been a very busy place, and we anticipated that that busyness is going to continue. But with all this, there is an overarching strategy to better safeguard people and places, right? So that's what we're trying to do is make sure that we've got all the right partners in the loop, all the right technologies and innovations that we're going to need to produce new repurpose, improve, integrate and and so on. Create the synergies and the energy that's going to lead us where we need to go. And that seems to be happening. We've got academics coming through all the time. We're working on robotics right now. We're working on body-worn camera the places we're working in so that we can better learn and understand, measure the effects of what we're doing. So

you can tell I'm pretty excited. We're buckled down here and we're going for a ride. Anybody that might be listening that's not a part of the LPRC or that is and wants to learn more, how they can get engaged and involved and help us all work together, you know, please reach out to research at lpresearch.org or operations at lpresearch.org and let us know what you're interested in knowing about as far as joining or getting more involved or getting more of your people involved or getting involved in more things. So that's what we're here for. We're bursting at the seams in a good way, but we've got more space. We're adding more people capability and all the things that are needed to be done as we continue to gain more resources and member involvement. So

an exciting place and time, but again, always remaining focused, humble, that what we're trying to do is really help better safeguard the vulnerable. So with no further ado, let me go ahead and turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony? Thank you, Reid, for all those great updates. First, I want to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day. And let me start this week with some fun facts about the holiday of Valentine's Day. There are two theories in terms of how it started. Both, of course, go back to the Romans.

First theory is the holiday is derived by Lupercalia, which was a raucous Roman festival inspired to increase fertility. The second theory, it is the day St. Valentine was executed by Roman Emperor Claudius II for conducting secret marriages. The first known official celebration of St. Valentine's Day took place in Paris on February 14th in the year 1400, when King Charles VI established the High Court of Love. The oldest record of a Valentine was a poem from the Duke of Orleans to his wife, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1415. It's good to hear that today all those Valentine messages, the number one audience that gets them is actually teachers.

In 1537, England's King Harry VIII officially declared February 14th as the holiday of St. Valentine's Day by royal charter. And remember, he's the one that had six wives, including two that he had beheaded. And finally, a fun fact, it is a big holiday for retail. St. Valentine's Day in the U.S. in 2022, we spent nearly $24 billion on Valentine's. And that's the second highest on record, by the way. The record was in 2020, where consumers spent just over $27 billion on Valentine's Day. So happy Valentine's Day. Switching topics, let me go to Visual Capitalist and hear us on the latest projections for where inflation in key markets will end in 2023. While the International

Monetary Funds predicts that the global inflation peaked in late 2022, rates in 2023 are expected to remain higher than usual in many parts of the world. Following the 8.8% global inflation rate in 2022. The IMF forecasts a 6.6% global rate for 2023 and a 4.3% rate in 2024. Remember, the target for most markets, including the U.S. Fed, is about 2%. So, looks like even by then, we won't get there. But here, that's the global rates for key countries. The projected rate for the end of the years are as follows. For the United States, 3.5%. So the number just came out this week. We're at 6.4 right now. Canada, the target is, the IMF believes is 4.2.

Mexico, 6.3. Brazil, 4.7. UK was the one that was a big surprise. The inflation rate predicted for 2023 is a high, 9%. France, 4.6. Spain, 4.9. Italy, 5.2. Germany, a big European market, the largest market actually in Europe. It's going to still have very high inflation at 7.2. in Europe, it's going to still have very high inflation at 7.2. The surprises are in Asia. China is expected to have inflation of only 2.2, and Japan, one of the lowest, only 1.4.

So tough news for some countries like the UK and Germany, but better news, especially in Asia in terms of those low rates. Switching topics again, some good news from a new survey published in Chains to Rage. Americans are not letting inflation and a potential of a recession crimp their spending. 67% of Americans said they plan to spend either the same or more in 2023 as they did last year on retail purchases, according to a survey from the on-demand pay solution, Daily Pay and Dollar Tree. And 44% are more likely to prioritize shopping for bargains in-store this year compared to last.

Singly, a continued increase in in-person shopping in stores. Three out of four Americans plan on shopping the same or more in store in 2023 versus last year. That's really good news. And the survey also revealed the preferences of what we like to buy in stores. So 81% prefer to buy furniture in stores, 69% home goods, 65% apparel, 65% sporting goods.

And I was surprised 59% of consumers prefer to shop for electronics in-store. So good news for in-store shopping in 2023. And finally, some somber news and on a more serious note, let me end this week from Idea, Stream Public Media, and National Public Radio. Here are the six major takeaways from the ATF first report in 20 years on U.S. gun crime. Number one, legally purchased firearms are being used in crimes sooner than ever. The ATF found that 54% of trace crime guns were recovered by law enforcement more than three years after their purchase. Those guns were legally purchased but were later used in crimes. Number two, and

this was a shocker, more than 1 million guns were stolen from private owners from 2017 to 2021 and also roughly 4.6 million children living at home were loaded and unlocked firearms, the studies have shown. Number three, ghost guns remain difficult to track and are increasingly used in crimes. The number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement agencies and sent to the ATF for tracing and tracking increased by 1,083 percent from 2017 to 2021. Number four, in five years, the number of illegal machine gun conversion devices recovered by law enforcement agencies jumped 570%. Number five, pistols represented nearly 70% of crime guns traced between 2017 and 2021. And number six, there is a lot of data, but it's still limited. In 2021,

only 47%, just over 47% of law enforcement agencies were participating in the ATFC trades program, which tracks firearms using crimes. And as of 2021, there were only 259 cities with national integrated ballistic information network sites which analyzed ballistic information. So more to be studied, but really some sad news in terms of what's happening. And this correlates to some of the information that I discussed last week. So with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. And thank you, Reid. And it has been a wild week in the open source intelligence and active intelligence space with all of the things going around globally. And we'll start off with just kind of an update on the surveillance balloon situation

that we started to talk about in last week's podcast. Since that event occurred, the shooting down of a Chinese surveillance balloon over the Carolinas, we've had four other unidentified objects shot down. And as of this morning, more information becoming available. Both the United States government and the Canadian government have issued different statements, but essentially in as many days there were several other objects that were identified flying over either U.S. or Canadian airspace.

One over Lake Huron in the Michigan area, one in the Yukon Valley, and then an additional one that didn't make as much news, but in the central part of the United States. So I think a couple of things to talk about here because I think it's very interesting news. The military has confirmed that one of the items from, pardon me, the first incident was in fact a surveillance balloon. They further, and this is more recent information,

confirmed that they were actually tracking that balloon from its takeoff. One of the things about radar is radar is designed to, air traffic control radar is designed to take large planes, missiles, things of that nature. And smaller objects by design were ignored. There's roughly, at any given time, 40,000 weather balloons throughout the world.

In the past, the radar was really focused on larger objects. They made some adjustments to the speed of the radar which in turn has in fact shown more anomalies over the weekend during the Super Bowl Sunday there were numerous anomalies in the sky and quite a bit actually of air restrictions and planes going into the air, fighter planes and surveillance planes going up. While this was all going on, the information becomes kind of skewed or confusing through the media channels.

One thing that's really interesting about all of this, if you're an active intelligence gatherer or an open source intelligence professional, you would know that most, if not all FAA traffic and radar is publicly accessible. So, you know, if you're familiar with any of the apps out there like flight aware or flight for any of the ones that track planes, if it's a registered plane, you can actually see it live. So while this is occurring,

the general public and the open source intelligence community can actually see activity occurring as well as radar. Radar, while some of the military grade radar is not available, but traditional radar, especially in the weather sphere, shows anomalies on the radar. During Super Bowl Sunday, you can actually see on the radar something, and then you can actually watch these planes go up and try to intercept and look at it. So very, very interesting.

I think the information is still becoming available. One of the things I would say is that there's a lot of data to support that these objects that are flying are not new to us. It's just that we've essentially tuned the radar to work faster, and now we're seeing more of it. And I think we'll continue to see more of it. I think there were some things that occurred that drew attention to this that some folks are questioning why. For instance, there was a press conference that was done during the Super Bowl. The question was, why would you do a press conference during the Super Bowl was a major, major question throughout the internet. And I think that obviously we can't

answer for the Pentagon here on this podcast. But when you have an event like this that coincides with the Super Bowl, which is several hours in the day, it's a little challenging to say, we're going to hold this press release until after the Super Bowl at 9.30 p.m. And I think some of those same folks would be commenting about, hey, why did they do this press release late in the evening? So when there's events like this occurring, there's a lot of noise and misinformation. We'll continue to monitor it. I think it's a very interesting situation.

How does it affect us? Well, in the retail space, I don't know that there's a direct correlation or effect yet. But in the event that there was an occurrence, airspace being closed diverts travel, diverts potentially supply chain that we as humans have short memories. So a lot of things that occur basically at times can go out of our minds very quickly. So I think we'll watch this and see what occurs and continue to monitor the situation. Switching gears just a tiny bit around the Super Bowl, there was some civil disturbance or civil unrest around the Super Bowl, but it was minimal. And what I say by minimal is that it was somewhat contained to specific pockets of cities. So I won't spend a lot of time on that today. I did want to talk a little bit about cybersecurity and risk and things that are occurring in that space.

We continue to see the increased attack when it comes to ransomware. We also continue to see, while this isn't cybersecurity related, outages with major, major corporations. While I'm taping this right now, we're seeing Lusansa's error, IT infrastructure fail, which caused thousands of flights to be canceled globally. And it's a company-wide IT outage. So when you think of a company-wide, very large commercial airline, this is not the first one. We'll probably continue to see these type of outages. And the next question is, is this because of outdated systems? What's driving this?

And we'll continue to monitor that and give an update. And then last but certainly not least is we've had three train derailments and you know one very unfortunate train derailment in in Ohio that had caused some leaking chemicals and the controlled burned and with vinyl chloride and polychloric vinyl chloride. And now this leads to what's the environmental impact. There was a mass evacuation of the city, and then they brought people back in. But three trained-around months in a week, as I said, this is a busy week,

drives a lot of what safety protocols need to be in place, and then what, if anything, can be done with chemical transports. During as many days, there was also what I would say is a relatively common occurrence. There was a truck overturned in Tucson, Arizona, which was carrying chemicals that did escape from the vehicle. This was all over the news. And basically, it had nitric acid in it. It caused closures and, again, short-term evacuations. So as we transfer these chemicals, these are things that –

it's important to note – sorry, these are things to know. It's important that these all happen relatively regularly. But when we think of the level of what's occurring, it is definitely more or feels like more, I should say, than it has had in the past. So I think that's one of the things that I continue to monitor here for us, the listeners, is the information to try to get it out to folks. You have three trained Royal Mints, two rather caustic chemical releases, all in a very short period of time. And that was where I was or what I was trying to allude to when we started. It just was a very busy week in kind of the open source world of trying to figure out what the risk is and what isn't. In the Ohio train derailment situation, there were actually two reporters arrested for asking questions.

So it exasperates kind of the news cycle of what what's occurring and i don't have an opinion either way i did see one of the videos of the reporter and did appear at least from the outside in that he was just asking questions and they wanted him to leave um which again strikes that that you know what is the right answer and then last but certainly not least is when we talked about so that is the really terrible situation in Turkey and Syria as of yesterday the death toll in Syria was confirmed to be over 35,000 with over a hundred and over a hundred thousand injuries. In Syria, the death toll is confirmed to be about 6,000. And so the total death toll right now that is confirmed is about 42,000 folks.

And it's expected to only rise. It's a very unfortunate event. It was one of the strongest earthquake in many, many years there and a very, very unfortunate situation for the folks that are there. And I think that we'll continue to monitor that. Those folks are in our thoughts. Next week, I think we will certainly have an update on some of the balloons and unidentified flying objects. And then some of, we'll also hope to have an update on some of the military activity that we're seeing globally.

Um, and in the event that there is civil unrest, we'll obviously cover that as well. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. All right. Well, thanks so much, Tony and Tom, for all that great insight. Thank you to Wilson, and thank you to Diego for your hard work, and thank you for all of you all that are listening. Please spread the word. As you hear on other podcasts, like us, repost us, put out there on social media, let people know about Crime Science, the podcast. More to come, more creative. Diego and Wilson are hatching some new ways to add even more energy, more ideas, more involvement in

this Crime Science podcast from the LPRC. So signing off from Gainesville, everybody stay safe and stay in touch. 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.