LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 15 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest Basia Pietrawska

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

In this episode of LPRC CrimeScience: The Weekly Review, we welcome featured guest, Basia Pietrawska, Vice President of Consulting and Analytics at CAP Index. She joins Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio to discuss LPRC initiatives, COVID-19 & rioting effects on crime rates in major U.S. cities (crimes against persons & property crimes),  mobile fraud, curbside pickup, online marketplaces, clipboard data privacy, online spending data, police spending survey results, password breaching, and activities and their risk levels in contracting COVID-19. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 15 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, Tom Meehan and Featured Guest Basia Pietrawska appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the 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 sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP-related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science. This is one of our weekly report series. And today I'm joined by colleagues, Tom Meehan, Tony D'Onofrio, our producer, Kevin Tran, and we're joined by a special guest,

Bosch Pietroska. We're going to talk with Bosch, Tony Will, specifically a little bit about crime during COVID. So with no further ado, we want to kind of launch in and talk a little bit about, we know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus or COVID-19 continues to plague and known infections seem to be on the rise globally in almost every single country. And even inexplicably on ships where they've seen one particular freighter at sea for 35 days, and almost the entire crew has all of a sudden come down with COVID-19. So a very mysterious virus in a lot of different ways. And again, we know that the science that we've got available so far, we've got a block, we've got a distance and we've got a clean. And so the masking, obviously we've talked about this over and over is a critical way to, if you are asymptomatic

or symptomatic, and you might have COVID-19, one of us, then what we're doing is essentially looking out for each other, the greater good. And just like you've got to wear shoes in a restaurant, it's probably not a bad idea to wear a mask when we're around other people. So moving on, we're looking at still there are close to 60 NIH-funded trials going on. Operation Warp Speed, the administration implemented a couple, three months ago, is moving. Their new factories are being built. Very large funding is going to several of the most promising vaccine teams so that if and when a vaccine is discovered that is at least 50% efficacious,

as well as, of course, safe, then that is eligible to go into production. And so there are also really three figures, over 100 plus therapeutic trials underway, looking at antivirals and other ways for treatment if someone has COVID-19. So we're looking at prevention and treatment therapeutics in that way. I guess in the co-VPN team, there are all sorts of coalitions that are established in the United States and around the world to coordinate any and all research around that. Part of the tracking continues with interviews, with mobile phone clustering and movement, trying to understand credit card use, of course, even sewage,

but ways to understand how people are coming together and what the lag times are between gathering infection and then possible illness and so forth. So trying to understand it looks like supportive care and therapeutics that we have available right now continue to increase in their effectiveness, be increased in their effectiveness. So those are some good news out there. I know that most colleges, universities, and other schools are looking at ways that they might educate children as safely as possible for them and, of course, for their teachers or when they go home. There are major concerns by educational, social, behavioral scientists around

the psychological impacts, of course, of being isolated in the entire world, being concerned about your job as well as concerned about infection, or seeing others that are suffering not being able to connect with other humans face-to-face and do the things that the species seems to be designed to do. And so colleges, though, may have to test as frequently as every 48 hours in order to maintain a somewhat safe atmosphere in higher rate infection areas. So stay tuned on some of that research. Moving over to some of the violence in the aftermath of what took place in Minneapolis, of what took place in Minneapolis, resulting in what were originally peaceful demonstrations that were hijacked across the country.

But we're seeing in New York City where they stood down there, violent crime or anti-crime squads that were very, very effective at taking firearms off the streets. They converted them to uniform to reduce tension and conflict. They converted them to uniform to reduce tension and conflict. Now you're seeing articles coming out last night and today that very prominent black leaders are calling for reestablishment of the anti-crime squads, understanding that they need teams like that out there to suppress firearms, identify people that have them, that are carrying them, that are likely to use use them so you're seeing almost a 300 increase in gun violence um this year over last year in new york city alone i know we had a shooting last night i got on my university of florida alerts um so we were seeing gun violence here and everywhere increasing so we'll have to stay tuned and see

what the what the downside here is of calls to defund or superficial calls to reform without good logic models and research evidence to support the moves that really which seems to, again, I've mentioned before, be proposed by Dr. Weisberg and other prominent criminologists that those are probably two distinct constructs that we've got to look at. We may be very, very good at suppressing a disease or crime, but if we have no bedside manner, we could have an issue. So that's sort of what we're looking at there. Some good reporting coming out on crime and how it's manifesting itself during COVID-19

and during the rioting time and that's from Stickland Felsen the University College of London has just come out with a new report they've got a webinar out today that'll be recorded we'll put that information out later so that's some of the things that are going on.

With that, Crime Science Podcast continue. We've had some good episodes. Look for them to be recorded with Dr. Breonna Fox from the University of South Florida. Talked about the evolution and use of crime scene profiling, looking at how the FBI started profiling, but how it really goes back even to the 40s, looking at our adversaries. In other words, Adolf Hitler trying to bring together behavioral and social scientists to understand an individual, how they think and what they're likely to do to better prepare. And so look forward to Dr. Brianna Fox's. We'll have some others

with some other prominent criminologists coming up that I've just gotten lined up. So with no further ado, let me head on over to Tony D'Onofrio and Basia. Thank you very much, Reed. And it's really my great pleasure to introduce Basia Pedrasca, who is the Vice President of crime intelligent analysis at CapIndex. Her expertise is spatial analysis, combining mapping and data focused on reducing crime risk and loss. Basia has a BA in social and cognitive psychology from Jacobs University, Brennan, and a master of science in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. I'm really looking forward to hear your thoughts.

So, Basia, over to you. Thank you so much for having me. And as a lot of you know, CAP really likes to stay on top of recent crime trends because what we do really focuses on crime and risk assessment. And especially this year, because it has been such a unique, unique experience. Interesting year with a lot of factors contributing to the trends that we're seeing. So for this specific podcast, I want to focus on our most recent assessment, and assessment, which is looking at some of our biggest cities across the country, including Chicago, LA, New York City, and Seattle, looking at the last six months of the year, just trying to understand what we're seeing in terms of this year compared to last year, looking specifically

at crimes against persons and property for the four different cities. And we know that these four cities have been affected by COVID, with Seattle being sort of our first one, the earliest one, in terms of being a hotspot. And looking, I'm going to start with crimes against persons. Looking at the last six months, we started off the year actually with some upward trends for most of these cities, with the exception of Seattle. But then as COVID restrictions started taking place, we're seeing a lot of downward trends, which is something that everyone was talking about. And again, that is all crimes against persons for the four cities without focusing on specific industries. However, looking at May and June, we are starting to see some upward trends in crimes against persons.

Again, Seattle is really the only exception. It's looking pretty flat for the six months and very comparable to what we saw last year, which is always interesting to me looking at Seattle like that. The other cities are showing a lot more fluctuations with, again, crime overall being lower than last year, but sort of spiking up in the most recent months. Now, when you look at May and June last year, we're also seeing an increase. So could some of that be attributed just purely to seasonality with crime going up in the summer months? Perhaps. At the same time, we're probably seeing effects of what we just all talked about with COVID, with people resorting to crime to provide for their families, with offenders getting released from prisons. Some of that is attributed to that as well.

And when you look at these crimes against persons, a lot of what I'm seeing is attributed to an increase in shootings and homicides. We're not necessarily seeing so much of an increase in other crimes against persons, maybe a little bit in robbery. So that is interesting, and that sort of confirms a lot of what we see in the news. However, again, I feel like some of that is somewhat sensationalized because of that increase in shootings, but we have to keep in mind that overall, crimes against persons is still lower than what we saw last year for these four cities. The only exception that I'm seeing, though, is Chicago.

For the last two months, we're actually seeing that crime sort of went back up to the same level as what we saw last year for the two months. And we're all hearing about Chicago in various news outlets. They're dealing with a lot of violence, a lot of shootings. So that one is interesting, and I'll be curious to see what happens in July, because, again, the statistics is through June. And with the recent violence and the reports in July, I have a feeling we're going to see some continuous upward trends for this crime type. upward trends for this crime type. In our assessment, we also like to look at everything sort of by week, starting March 1st, because we want to understand how things are trending in terms of COVID, with most of COVID restrictions taking place around mid-March. And again, we're definitely seeing a lot of drop-off in terms of crimes against persons following that COVID restrictions introduction.

But looking at the most recent weeks, we're starting to see some upward trends as well, just sort of like in the monthly assessment. And one of those bigger upticks is around the time when a lot of the protests and riots took place. We're seeing a bit of an increase in crimes against persons specifically for Chicago and LA, not so much for the other two cities. So I thought that was interesting. I know the protests are mostly associated with property crime, but we have seen a bit of an increase in persons' crime as well. Now, looking at property crimes for the same four cities, again, in the first two months of the year, we saw some upward trends or pretty flat numbers when comparing the numbers to last year.

But that is then followed by fairly significant decreases for the following months of the year, as expected with COVID. And again, the only exception is Seattle. It's looking pretty flat across the board across the six months. Now, of all these four cities that we're looking at here, New York is actually starting to see an uptick in property crime from May to June. But when I look at the same timeframe last year, we're also seeing an increase around this time. So again, perhaps seasonality could play a role here, at least to some extent, but of course we're dealing with a lot of other factors. And while we're seeing that increase from May to June, crime overall is still lower than what we saw last year in terms of total property crimes.

Now, when looking at the same category of crimes, and when I say property crimes in this case, we focus on part one offenses. And that would be burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson, as defined by the FBI. We are definitely seeing a very significant uptick in the total category for, again, the week around which a lot of the protests took place. It's a very, very significant increase for most of these cities, especially for Chicago and New York City. Seattle, again, continues to be somewhat unique. It's looking relatively flat. And I am a little bit surprised about L.A. because we're not seeing that much of an increase in property crime around the Black Lives Matter protests. I wonder how much of that could be perhaps attributed to reporting issues.

Now, when I look at these property crimes to really understand which ones are driving that uptick around that time, obviously, as we know, a lot of it is attributed to burglary and arson. And we do not track vandalism in this case. Obviously, as we know, a lot of it is attributed to burglary and arson. And we do not track vandalism in this case. But as we can all imagine, that must have gone up as well. And that's something we're trying to get from the police department. So everything I'm talking about here is based upon data that was actually reported to the respective police departments. So that's something to definitely keep in mind. It would definitely be interesting to take a look at this information

directly from retailers and see what they collected on their end. I'm sure a lot of it would correlate, but for something like LA, where we're seeing a decrease around the first week of June, that's so much surprising. I wonder if an increase would show in data recorded by retailers. So for two of the cities, for Chicago and LA, I was actually able to pull data specifically for retail locations because they actually break it down by premises type when they record incident information. And that was quite interesting too. With this one, we're not seeing as much of a decrease in crime following COVID-19 restrictions.

And that's something we found in the past as well, because what we continue to find is that retail locations that continue to operate like grocery stores, like drugstores and so on, actually saw a lot of increases in crime, specifically in shoplifting, assaults and robberies. So looking at overall city numbers, obviously could be somewhat misleading because some industries, some retail segments specifically, are getting more affected than others. So that's always interesting for us to look at when available. And again, part of me always questions reporting to police departments. We know not all retail incidents get reported, but it's at least something. It's a good start. And it's starting to tell part of the story. And specifically what was interesting for Chicago, when you look at the

weeks when a lot of the riots and protests took place, looking at crimes against persons, they went from being in the range of between 20, 28 in the weeks preceding that to 45 and 48 in those specific weeks when a lot of those incidents took place. So that's quite interesting. So it really wasn't just property crime. A lot of it was actually attributed to person's crime. And that is especially evident again for Chicago, not so much for L.A., which I find quite interesting that there are these discrepancies. Now, when you look at the retail sort of trending across the different weeks, starting in the first week of March, crimes against persons are looking pretty flat for retail. But you definitely see a pretty big spike again around the week of the protests. So looking specifically at Chicago, we're going from

count around somewhere between 100 and 200 property crimes for Chicago retail locations, all the way up to 594 in that first week of June. So that is a pretty significant change, especially when you look at the graph, which I know we're not showing that right now, but it really, really stands out for Chicago. And again, LA, there is a bit of an increase, but not as significant. So that one is interesting. I would love to explore LA a little bit more just to understand how much of it actually gets reported. And working with retailers in the area would obviously be interesting, which I know the LPRC team conducts excellent research working directly with the members. So I'm curious to see what could come out of that. And then after the protests, looking at the property crimes for retail for the two cities,

we're sort of back to the flat level that is comparable to pretty much all the weeks leading up to that. So I thought that was pretty interesting. So these are the four cities we've looked at most recently. We have about eight more that are coming up later this week, and we're going to publish all of that information. So I'm happy to share with everyone here if anyone is interested. And usually when I publish this information,

I like to post total crimes against persons and property statistics, but I have a lot more that's behind it. So for anyone interested, if there are any questions, happy to provide more detailed crime type information. So that will be all from me. Thank you again for having me. And I guess I'm going to switch over to Tom now. Thank you. Great information. It's great to have you on. I'm just going to cover a couple of things today. I don't have as much, but I want to talk just about mobile fraud. There's some numbers starting to come in, and I know we've talked about credit card fraud increasing, but specifically fraud driven from a mobile application or a mobile phone. They just reported first quarter reportings and that there was a significant increase in use of mobile phone for web browsing and shopping, but also a much greater increase in fraud. That's for Q1. So those are still really, in theory, pre-COVID. Q2 numbers are early, but the early numbers are off the charts.

There's a 700 percent increase in reported fraud driven from a mobile device during COVID. And you got to take that number with a grain of salt because with sales down in stores, the fraud impact is more significant. And additionally, you have some stores that arguably or retailers flip the switch to a mobile app or an online environment where they weren't really necessarily prepared or running through. It just reminds everybody to really go back and look at your safeguards and controls that you have in place. It's time to work with your payment gateway or your internal fraud departments to look at your rules to make sure that you're protecting yourselves appropriately. Another report came out through yesterday about curbside pickup and proxy pickup. And obviously, as we all know, with a lot of retail merchants, the only way to get things was curbside

pickup or, you know, online sales. In a non-traditional environment, some retailers created a curbside environment overnight and allowed proxy pickup, which allowed other individuals to pick things up. And there's been a significant spike in fraud there. I know Best Buy specifically put some safeguards in place. And I think when you think about being able to buy something online, pick it up an hour later with someone else, that was always an option before, but it just adds a layer of complexity to the fraud. With that, switching gears a little bit, and I don't want to make any false assumptions of why this is happening. I mean, I think we can all take kind of a step back and think about, could this be related to protesting or credit card fraud? But there's been

a surgence of high value goods on online marketplaces like Craigslist, like eBay, and specifically Facebook marketplace really has had a huge explosion in private groups of things for sale. Actually, one Facebook marketplace in the Philadelphia market actually advertised the looting sale where they went through and talked about items that were looted from a home improvement store, as well as some electronic stores and well-known fashion retailers. And basically said, just read the quote, you can't, you can't pick it up on the corner. We'll deliver it. So this is a South Philly area thing, but they're actually advertising that this is looting. It's hard to tell based on the history and looking at that particular account, if it's actually looting related or they're taking advantage of trying to draw

attention because they have quite a bit of history of selling things. But if you have an ORC team, I know now is an interesting time, dust off that manual and go back and look at some of your e-com channels to see and see where people are fencing. I thought it was very, very interesting to see the increase of high value goods. Again, one can assume that it's related to looting, but it also could just simply be people are trying to sell things that they have. And then my last thing, which is a little bit off the beaten path, is there was some news around Apple and LinkedIn and TikTok and all these apps stealing information from your clipboard. For those of the listeners that don't understand,

the clipboard principle on a cell phone is the same as on a computer. When you copy something, it's held in this virtual clipboard until you paste it. And there were actually several very well-known apps, abcnews.com, CBS, Fox News, New York Times. I mean, if the list is, there's about 50 different apps, 32 very well-known apps that would behind the scenes save whatever you had copied. So just to envision that you copied a phone number, envision that you copied someone's name, and you were going to paste in an email. These apps in behind the scenes kept that information. I just wanted to really talk about it because there was a lot of news around TikTok and a Chinese app. And really, it's not just TikTok. There are several apps. LinkedIn is actually being sued. There's a class action lawsuit against this.

The actual purpose of this, the UPS app is probably the easiest one to understand. The idea here is that when the app opens up, it's looking for a known entity that you're looking for. So, for instance, if I copied Basha's name in my clipboard and went into LinkedIn, LinkedIn is looking to try to create an algorithm to say Tom is looking for this. Obviously, it's behind the scenes and without asking. But I got a couple of calls over the weekend and text messages of what my thoughts were. And what I think normally starts out to be an app developer really trying to get information molds into the potential to gather data. So just another reminder of that when you're on your cell phone, your smartphone, even if it's your own personal phone, when you're doing things

on it, to be cognizant of what you're copying and pasting. And the reason I would say that is if you think about some of these apps, there probably isn't a real good logical reason why ABC News or New York Times or some of these news apps or some of these games have that clipboard functionality. The LinkedIn functionality actually makes sense logically, that if you copied someone named LinkedIn once, they got it quicker. UPS, if you copied a tracking number when you're opening the app, UPS is pushing that tracking number and identifies it as a tracking number. But it's just a stark reminder that if you have a cell phone, even though it's yours, to just be very, very cognizant of that any electronic device is susceptible to some sort of risk.

device is susceptible to some sort of risk. So if you have really highly sensitive information, it's just another indicator of where you store it and how you store it is important to be mindful of it. It's also important to gather facts and information. A lot of the comments were really around LinkedIn and TikTok that I received of, are my children's information being taken on TikTok? And my answer is absolutely it is. That's how the platform makes money. They make money by gathering your information, much like most other social media platforms out there. And I would be more worried about some of the other information that they capture than what's on the clipboard. And I'm going to turn it over to Tony now. Thank you very much, Tom, and great information again today. I'm going to wrap up with some industry data in terms of what's happening in some key areas. I'll start with

online spending since the data is in for June. So this is from Adobe. The first six months of 2020 have driven about $369 billion of online spending. The surge continued in June with another $73 billion, which was up 76% over last year. Online grocery and apparel daily sales actually started to decline, and that's part of the spike coming down for grocery. So grocery declined 18%, and apparel declined 15% online as more stores reopened. Prices actually went up in grocery for 4.2%. And there are some signs that the stockpiling is slowing down, although I've seen still a lot of empty shelves. Buy online, pick up in store, some of the things that Tom was just talking about in terms of curbside. That continues to maintain record growth being up 130%, but it is also showing some signs

of slowing down. So that's online. Top of mind is also what's going to happen to schools. And there are some initial surveys that have come out in terms of what spending is going to look like for retail in schools. Deloitte forecasted what spending is going to look like for retail in schools. Deloitte forecasted that spending is going to be flat for the year, reaching $28 billion or about $529 per student for grades K through 12. Back-to-college shoppers are going to spend $25 billion or about $1,335 per person. More is going online even for back to school. So it'll be 37% online versus 29% last year. Spending in tech is going

to increase by 28% and spending in all the other main categories such as clothing accessories and traditional school supplies is going to drop 17 percent. And despite all the uncertainty in terms of what's going to happen to schools, 40 percent of the people that responded to the Deloitte survey are planning to start shopping for back to schools four to six weeks before school begins. So that's imminent late this month, next month. So back-to-school is a key part of retail and important. So I thought I'd share the latest. Supporting actually what Reid was talking about in terms of police funding and all that, there was a Pew Research Survey that was done mid-June, and the results were

just published. And in that survey, Americans were asked, do they support changes in police spending? So 42% want police spending to stay the same. 20% wanted to increase a little. 14% wanted to decrease a little. 14% wanted to decrease a little, 12% wanted to decrease a lot, 11% wanted to increase a lot, and 1% really provided no answer. And it is an age-driven issue. If you were 18 to 29, you wanted a 45% to decrease the funding. 30 to 49, 28%. If you were age 50 to 64, it's 17%.

If you're 65 and over, your decrease was 13% that you wanted for police. So some data that came out of support and some of the things that Reid was talking about. Also in support of some of the great input that Tom has given us on these podcasts, saw some interesting stats in terms of what's happening to passwords. So the average user, I was shocked, has 191 passwords. And 81% of confirmed data breaches that Tom has pointed out are due to reused, weak, or stolen password. The first password was actually used in 1960 at MIT, and the breach of that password

happened, or passwords, happened two years later. So that's how fast we actually were attacking those passwords. So the most common used password, this was interesting because it was used a lot in different movies. So the most common used password is one, two, three, four, five, six. That's the most common used passwords. 91% know that you're not supposed to use the same password, but 66% of us still do it. And I'm going to close with actually some new data that came out of the Texas Medical Association on the riskiest and least riskiest activities for COVID-19. So the top five lowest risk activities for contracting COVID-19 are opening your mail, getting restaurant takeout, pumping gasoline, playing tennis, and going camping. Those are the lowest.

The highest risk, and these were all the highest risk, and there were eight. Number one was going to a bar. Number two was attending a service with 50-plus people, going to a sports stadium, attending a large music concert, going to a movie theater, going to an amusement park, working out in a gym, and eating at a buffet. So just a reminder is exactly what was talked about in this. This is time to stay safe because COVID-19 is still out there. And with that, I'm going to turn over to Reed. Thank you very much, Tony. Thank you, Tom.

Thank you, Basha, for all your great insights, good information, usable information. And I know we're all appreciative of that. It is a very challenging time. Everybody gets that. But any and all information to understand at the macro level, what some of the dynamics are, what help might be on the way, what that looks like, are all greatly needed. We're going to have another call coming up with our members around debriefing, you know, lessons learned, if you will, coming off of some of the civil disobedience and disorder, the destruction that we saw during this COVID-19 crisis that came up to see what can we do to share and get stronger and get better. Look for more of that coming up.

But everybody on behalf of myself and Kevin Tran, we wish you a safe and productive rest of the week. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws 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 LF Prevention Research Council.