LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 151 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

On this episode of CrimeScience, we recap the NRF Protect event in Dallas and cover some thoughts about trends revealed there. Also this week, a reminder about cybersecurity and its role in retail as well as some new challenges to be aware of. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 151 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 Podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series, and I'm joined by our co-hosts, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, our producers, Diego Rodriguez and Wilson Gavarino. And we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in the world. Most of us, or several of us, just got back from Dallas, Texas area, a great vine to be specific for the National Retail Federation, or NRF's annual loss prevention conference termed PROTECT.

And by all accounts, the participation, the attendance numbers were roughly where they were back in 2018 pre-pandemic. And that's my understanding, hovering somewhere around 2,000 participants from the cybersecurity, 2,000 participants from the cyber security, as well as the majority from the asset protection or loss prevention field, including solution partners and some academics, but overwhelmingly practitioners at the different strata. So good times were had by all, a lot of good sessions, a lot of good interaction, and a pretty big exhibit hall. Our team had a booth there, manned by Diego Rodriguez, by Diego and Brian a lot of new faces, a lot's affecting people and communities and neighborhoods. But the retailers, their stores, their people and their businesses and these stores, as we all know, are part of the ecosystem of each and every community, every neighborhood around the states. But these places, just like other places, but

particularly retailers, are under siege from unprecedented levels of theft and fraud and violence. And so the fear of crime, the financial devastation, and then the deprivation that occurs from these crimes because products are not in stock or held because they're too frequently stolen. Or as we now know, dozens and dozens and maybe hundreds of locations are going to be closing, are closing because of the fear of crime, just the instability and the financial devastation that's wreaked by these criminal offenders. And so that was made for a lot of interesting conversations. I think that what it does, just like the pandemic, created a lot more dialogue around what are solution sets we need to adopt now? What are technologies that

we might have shunned or we're particularly interested in investing in or going through a test period with? I gathered a lot of retailers all the way up to the board level, and these have been escalated this topic to that board level discussion, the shareholders too, not just people that are out in the field making decisions or even in the corporate offices. We've got to do something. We've got to do something differently. So what I was going to do is, you know, we were involved in a couple of panels, one on RFID, and those of us who've been around for 20 years or so can recall a huge wave of potential adoption of radio frequency identification within maybe at the pallet level or maybe the carton or inner pack level of products or maybe in some cases down to the skew, the individual unit or item level

adoption. But what a lot of people found out is it required not only a whole lot of RFID tags, but a whole lot of RFID readers, the sensors that would pick up the signals from the RFID and read them and be linked into the point of sale and overall analytics to understand where the products are all the way down to whatever level they were tagged to in the supply chain, in the store, and if they've been sold or not, where they've been sold and so on, as well as if they've been lost, maybe even what exit they went out and are they coupling with cameras to better understand the dynamics, the buying dynamics and the stealing and other unintentional or other types of lost dynamics. But that would seem to all be lost to the world, other than quite a few

apparel manufacturers and some apparel retailers tended to use a technology and i know physics is a limiter as far as water or metal and distance and just other things that happen to signals of any type being read or read accurately or at least at distance uh in a practical, because to put a reader every two or three feet would be prohibitively expensive. So this is now there seems to be a resurgence in the use that the retailers have to be much more careful and much, much more clearly understand where each and every product is, particularly within the most popular mixes. And do they have the different SKUs or different

categories fully stocked that they need? And where are they? Because now these stores are not only having to be ready to go for the in-person shopper, but they may be supplying other stores and, of course, buy online, pick up in store or ship and things like that, fulfillment orders. So the retailer has to be much, much more accurate with where their stuff is, where their items are, to run their business and to get the satisfaction their customers want, need, and demand, particularly with good competition, but also in the loss area, asset protection area, there are those benefits as well

into trying to understand and plug leaks throughout the supply chain and understand the theft dynamics within a store space, between stores and so on. So that was discussed in a session I had the opportunity to work with Avery Dennison on, but also to work with a couple of absolute experts in the RFID field, including Joe Cole from Macy's. And he, along with others, worked with their operations and their merchants, people, their operators to adapt and leverage that RFID technology to cut down on theft and losses, to understand where they're occurring by item and day and hour and location, exit, who's doing it, people they thought were not stealing were and vice versa and so forth. So it was a great discussion. It was at 7.45 in the morning. It had been moved because the Walmart CEO had offered or been extended the offer to come in and talk about loss and the devastation to the retail industry and individual retailers and of course individual stores so um they moved our session to 745 despite

that um the room that we were in was packed standing room only and i know that dozens and dozens of people tried again and couldn't get in at all so um it seems to be another hot topic another uh cry and call to action that we need to leverage technologies to serve our customers and our communities. But now, how do we better safeguard as well? So there was another session I know I was involved in with AT&T business where they were talking about this tying together of cybersecurity online and physical security in these places, and that these crews, these booster crews and others that are tying together or independent actors with each other, they're leveraging both online and physical theft and fraud methods. They're working together. Sometimes they're the same crew. Sometimes there's a loose affiliation. Sometimes there are places they can go in the dark web and make the

right connections. And that's happening all day, every day, everywhere. So we had an incredible expert, Sean, from AT&T on the cyber realm. I don't know that I've talked to a whole lot of people, and I'm with some pretty sharp people here at the University of Florida and the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity that know more about the issue and some of the solutions that we need on the cyber side and to connect with the physical realm. It was a pretty good, interesting conversation, as well as leveraging our physical sensors we talk about through the five zones. sensors we talk about through the five zones. So a lot of good stuff. Two of our team were awarded this kind of hall of fame or industry or whatever it might be called, a career type of award. But Chad McIntosh, our COO here and one of the co-founders of the LPRC, way back in the

year 2000, and a longtime leader from the Home Depot and Polo Ralph Lauren and Macy's. And of course, finishing his practitioner career as the vice president of asset protection for Bloomingdale's. So it was a nice honor and a great way to help acknowledge that maybe we need a little more science-informed action out there. Instead of just winging it, we can do the winging part is important, but if we can leverage both, it's probably even better, particularly with what's at stake, life safety and brand reputation, of course, financial issues and incredible losses. So what I'm going to do is we are taking our LPRC Innovate program to the next level. We now have more solution partners that are, we call it, going on the wall.

They're providing good advice and good resource allocation. So our team is growing. I've mentioned before, we've had three stellar individuals to our research team. So we're now approaching, we now have 10. team. So we're now approaching, we now have 10, we'll get to a dozen people on the research team to try and get the things done that everybody needs in the theft, fraud, and violence area and across the country. We've been asked to go to Portland, to Albuquerque, and to an amazing dizzying array of other places by individual retailers and groups of retailers to work on some issues that may not be, I don't know, fixable in the near term. But we are optimistic in building a team,

our capability appropriately, the right people, the right skill sets, and so on. And part of that resourcing comes from the Innovate program that's so critical. And just a quick word about LPRC Innovate. It goes back now five years. We have conducted multiple projects. Take a very common, unfortunate use case, in this case, aggressive shoplifting slash robbery, and follow offenders from when they were way out in Zone 5 beyond our parking area zone four entered and of course go into zone three the interior space head over and start to steal different types of item items they're aggressive they're intimidating they push one of our team members down one of the store employees in this case as well as displaying a handgun to another and then moving out to the next victim right and so it was a great way to leverage all the technology we talked a lot about,

integrate, but that program, that project came out of the Innovate program where we leveraged technologies from the solution partner members of that advisory panel, and we had six out of the 30 retailers involved in the Innovate panel helped us plan this, even though all retailers weighed in. We had six that helped drive that. Well, we're going to 36 retailers. We envision getting to just about 20 or just over 20 solution partner members. That's going to allow us to add two more people to our team, research team, to get up to that dozen that's so critical. But that will be one of the two major projects will be these integrate tabletop exercises, increasingly more realistic, more relevant, and more use cases. So stay tuned for

that. The second part of this, and the bigger part in a way, is what we're calling the Safer Places Lab program, right right and that is uh our interior six labs are four square blocks outside to simulate co-located places or disparate places and how do we sense and deter and detect and so on um and infuse and so uh but we've also now as many of you know extended to the east side we'll have six to nine retailers, six already and officially that are co-located. Again, we're looking at individual and collaborative place protection. The retailers, again, a large, highly disseminated out there, distributed out there, and they're on their own. Each and every store manager, she's on her own trying to deal with the world, right?

And every store manager, she's on her own trying to deal with the world, right, not just serve her customers and have a good team and so on, but deal with all the crime, all the intimidation and the other issues that occur. Can those co-located work together and work together with law enforcement? So that's that east side. That's rolling. We're having extensions from that, though. Down in Port St. Lucie, we're standing up. We've got three Walmarts. One of those Walmarts has slightly more crime issues than the other two. All three are pretty affected through the parking and interior spaces. crime analysts, intelligence people, as well as Walmart at the different strata. We are measuring online chatter. We're going to be gathering information from survey data from place users, right?

The licit ones anyway, the customers and the associates, right? The employees inside getting a baseline of behavior and fear and concerns about the personal and professional crime victimization, all that, being victims themselves. We're going to deploy some technologies there in the parking area, and then we'll be measuring what happens at that place after that deployment compared to the other places that did not get that treatment. You'll see also on the west side of Gainesville, again, individual and co-located places in an open space retail center environment, the lifestyle environment,

if you will, in the first case co-located. In the case of the Walmarts Downs, they'll be isolated. In that case, here we're talking about they're co-located in a very large open mall environment. And then it looks like we'll be heading for our mall and closed mall rather than using the Gainesville Mall very much. We're going to use one in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The retailers, the mall owner operators are talking about the Albuquerque Police Department being down 300 to 400 officers. Incredible crime victimization levels. The sheriff's trying to help but doesn't have the resources to help them very much. That's going to be a lab area for Zones 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And then the possibility it looks like now for our metro area where we're going to be looking at some stores in a larger but clustered area that are experiencing a lot of serial crime. This will be our serial crime place to do studies, and that's going to be mostly ORC or theft serial offenders, but also some of the violent serial offenders, and deploying some technologies there and integrating. So it's going to be a very active year. The LPRC Innovate program is allowing us to do it, bringing together 30 and then soon to be 36 retail chains that meet monthly on Teams calls as well as at the beginning and end of the year during our Ignite and Impact programs.

And then, of course, getting up to 20 solution partners that are providing the critical resources we need financially to grow the team and then provide a lot of insight and provide the technologies we need. So a little bit about Innovate, a little bit about the NRF program. Stay tuned for Impact coming up that first week in October. Go to lpresearch.org. All right, let me turn it over now, if I could, to Tom Meehan. Tom's on. I know he and Tony were both out there at the Interref at the Protect show, and they've got a lot to talk about. Yeah, thank you, Reid. And I don't want to be too repetitive, but I think one of the topics I want to talk about just briefly is the RFID and also cyber. I think RFID is coming of age. There was a lot of talk, a lot of folks that I spoke to,

and then I saw a couple different sessions all the way packed. While there are certainly some physics challenges, I think the use cases are being proven out. So really exciting to see that, as well as someone that spends some time in cyber risk. Kind of the conversations around the crossover between physical and cyber and how in our space there is not a lot of cases today that don't have some cyber element to them. And then how does that impact how we pursue these cases legally? So very, very exciting. Good to see both of you. Congratulations to you and Chad on the Ring of Excellence. I thought that announcement was awesome, especially being that we've worked together for so long. So it's exciting to see that. But overall, really good show. A lot of intense conversations. Certainly a lot of conversations around violence and organized retail crime. But I thought it was interesting in the news for the past week or so, there have been little tidbits about shrink and how it impacts. Bloomberg actually put a report out that said 200 retailers, which was double

what it's ever seen, mentioned shrink during their earnings calls. And as we know, that's a huge win for us because it means that the folks that are making the financial decisions are truly involved. And I think they were before, but I think it goes without saying today, there's a heightened lens on everything that we're talking about here, good, better, and different. Sometimes that could be a challenge for us, but the reality is that there's definitely a tension on it. So excited to see that. I thought overall the show was phenomenal. I know we, meaning Tony and you, we didn't have a lot of time to connect. I got to connect with Diego.

But I think with shows like that, there's just so many people. So really, really enjoyed it. Switching gears a little bit, because I think there's, you know, we talk about this often. And one of the things the LPRC does is something called the Fusion Network, where we're looking at events that are occurring. And we are in, you know, a very interesting time with the indictment, another indictment from the former president. There is a lot of talk about protests today, tomorrow, and throughout the weekend in pockets. They don't seem to be large

in nature, at least from what I'm seeing, but there are quite a bit of protests and civil disturbance, certainly around New York City, certainly in Florida. And then pockets where I don't think we would normally see these types of protests related to this particular instance. I saw quite a bit in the Denver area, in addition to some of the occurrence that happened in Denver yesterday with the Nuggets winning the NBA finals. And there was a shooting in some cases where there seems to be some sort of event and a pretty regular occurrence that causes some level of civil disruption. This is a little bit more activity on the Internet, both on open and back channels around this indictment. both on open and back channels around this indictment. I don't, it doesn't call for any violence. It calls actually for protests and the semblance,

but it's definitely something that we want to keep an eye on. As we were at NRF too, it was a pretty active cybersecurity week. Not that it, again, it doesn't feel like it's ever not active at this point, but there was a lot of activity that occurred that I think warrants some conversation. The broken record here of update your phones, if you haven't already,

there was a fairly significant vulnerability on iOS that was out that the patch was sent. For those of you that haven't heard or missed the episode where we talked about the new security update feature on iOS does not require that very long process. They're able to update just security vulnerabilities in a faster way, so it's less disruptive to what you're doing. And then both, actually not both, all three of the largest web browsers used, Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge, had pretty significant vulnerabilities that occurred June 6th and 7th. So I say it all the time, update, update, update. But what's going on today is the bad actors are utilizing the same

channels that we do to find these and share these exploits in real time to see if folks can take advantage of it. Quickest, easiest way to solve this is to update. The challenge becomes that it feels like you're doing updates every week, probably because you are, and you definitely want to do that. I think it's something that's very, very important to do. And then there's been an uptick, which again, I think we've talked about quite a bit in phone scams. So there's been an uptick, which, again, I think we've talked about quite a bit in phone scams. So there's been a pretty significant uptick in different types of phone scams, not to get into the specifics, but we live in a day and age where information is readily available. uses LinkedIn or one of the social media piece out there, one of the social media types, whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, which undoubtedly gives some information whether you're in business or not. And so there's a very, very important mix of that these bad actors are

taking advantage of information that's readily available so when they're doing a phone scam or a call that it seems and feels more realistic so keep in mind that you know and tony and i probably are the most guilty and read too on the call here when we go to a trade show we tell everybody right we tell everybody we tell everybody who we met with we post pictures sometimes in real time. So imagine a phone scammer calling you and having that information in real time saying, hey, I just spoke to Tony at NRF and he told me to give you a call, Tom, about X. I'm going to send you a file and take a look at it and get your feedback. That would not actually be that unusual. And that is a

very easy way for someone to perpetrate it. Also, as probably everybody's aware, if you're in business, your phone number is pretty readily available. You put it on your email signature, you share it sometimes in social media, and in business, you want to be in contact with people. So be very cognizant of when you're getting an unexpected phone call that's asking you for any information, asking you to look at documents, asking you for your email, that you're very aware of the challenges that could arise from that. That doesn't mean you don't answer your phone. I often say, you know, I do answer the phone when it's an unknown caller because a lot of people have my phone number. But I'm also very, very cognizant and conscientious of if I'm not expecting someone to send me something, I'm not going, the curiosity

is not going to kill me. I'm going to move on. Or, in fact, and this has happened to me not too long ago, someone says, I spoke to so-and-so. And I said, great, let me call you back. And I text so-and-so. And it was like, nope, that wasn't the conversation. Don't know that person. So just be mindful and aware of it.

And then additionally, the FBI released a warning last week on job scams. This is, you know, there are a lot of, unemployment is in a good place in comparison to where it has been years past. But post-COVID, there were still a million people that never went back to work. And there are a lot of job scams that are being poached where people are, it's really changed quite a bit, where people are applying for fake jobs. They're actually, they're high paying jobs, they look legitimate, they're getting in there. And then they're being scammed out of money for these type of job advertisements.

This is not a new scam. This scam has been around for a really long time, apply for the job, do an interview, give them your information, they steal your personal information. There's an ask to pay for something to get into a group or into a conversation, which is still not a new scam, but taking advantage of cryptocurrency to do that. With that, those are some things that we're aware of. Stay vigilant, pay attention to these type of things. If you're getting a call or you see something that's too good to be true, it probably is. I often say if the deal doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. Take the extra 30 to 60 seconds to check. If you get an email and you're not expecting it from

someone that you don't expect that says you have to check this out, this is what it is, just take the second due diligence to look and say, okay, does everything look okay? You're never going to be 100% safe, but if you can do all of those things, then you'll be safer than you were before. And we will continue to monitor some of the civil disturbance and things that are going on and share appropriately. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tony. Thank you very much, Tom. Good updates. Same thing with you, Reid.

Let me start this week, actually. And my update this week is strictly going to be about NRF and NRF Protect and what happened there and some of my thoughts on it. And I really want to congratulate and kudos to David Johnston, Vice President of Estra Protection and Retail Operation for NRF. I think this was a well-orchestrated NRF Protect. It looked like it was coming back as an industry event. And the fact that, as you said, Reid, nearly 2,000 people attended is a testament to that. I also think it was a major coup to actually have Matt Shea, who leads NRF overall, and John Furner, CEO of Walmart, on stage as the opening keynote

on Tuesday, and that really elevates the importance of the event. And they talk about shrink, which goes to exactly what you said, Reid. This is something that is being elevated within companies and exactly what Tom, I think he said, 200 retailers mentioned Shrink as part of their earnings call. And of course, the Walmart CEO brought up Shrink, but he also brought up something that to me was very interesting, which is the need for increased collaboration, especially in the sharing of data.

And this is something for Walmart and other retailers that I know struggle to do some of this, but this is something that even LPRC has been advocating. How do we share data across retailers who actually attack this much more aggressively? Interesting, they had a live vote during the John Furner and Matt Shea event where they asked the audience, is organized retail crime more or less of a risk for your business than it was three years ago? And not surprisingly or unsurprisingly, 86% said it was more of a risk. So we are in very interesting times right now. And again, the topic came up across a lot of the leaders throughout the sessions, and it's coming up again all over the press.

For me, it was an amazing event to see so many industry friends and leaders and just to meet some new ones. It was really a motivating event. Lots of actions in the industry groups, really like in terms of the leadership you had and some of the actual sessions from the Lost Prevention Research Council. The foundation was very active, Lost Prevention Foundation. The magazine was very active.

There was some confusion that I finally did clear up. I thought the Loss Prevention Foundation sold the magazine. That is not the case. There are two different companies within the media group of Loss Prevention, and the magazine is actually staying with the Loss Prevention Foundation, in case you were confused, as I was. The hot topics in terms of technology that came up were artificial intelligence, of course, that was all over the sessions in terms of being talked about. RFID

was extremely much more prominent than I expected it was brought up. A friend of mine said he would rate it like 20% of the sessions brought it up in terms of as a technology. Also interesting to me this year is that official recognition, official features was brought up openly by retailers and sessions, which, again, that's something we typically in the past were not brought up. But it tells you that the industry is moving on and is speaking to multiple major retailers. I know that is an area that is aggressively being looked at in terms of facial and what it can do in terms of targeting and finding the really red actors. And from an organized retail crime point of view, as part of the sessions, CoreSight Research actually published some new research in terms of they did pre-conference and their research found that 75% of consumers are extremely to very concerned if retailers raise prices to cover the cost of theft. 36% have stopped shopping at certain stores

due to safety concerns. And 26% will shop elsewhere if their local store puts items under lockup. And those are trends that actually are increasing, so it's interesting. The top three technologies that were brought up by Coresight in their sessions were, again, RFID, computer vision with AI, artificial intelligence, and prescriptive analytics. And I'm actually running a survey on some of this online right now, and I'll talk about those results next week in terms of those three, which ones are the hottest technology.

I'm running it on LinkedIn. those three, which ones are the hottest technology. I'm running it on LinkedIn. Interesting how social media is also exposing some of the ways that loss prevention actually works in the industry. In one of the sessions, Victoria's Secret played a TikTok video from a former employee where that former employee detailed exactly how loss prevention works inside of their stores, how they actually decide what to arrest, not arrest, how to approach you, how to deal with the discussions that are going on in terms of the levels of crime before shoplifting becomes a crime. And that video from a former employee already had, when they presented it, 3.8 million views. So interesting how social media can be used

to actually uncover some of the, what we used to think of secrets in terms of how loss prevention operates. One of my favorite sessions was the early Tuesday morning session with you, Reid, Pam Sweeney, and Joe Cole, which covered combating theft. It was standing, very packed room. I looked around, I couldn't believe it, how packed it was.

Interesting stat that Joe Cole shared that he had a 47% increase in case value when they deployed smart exits. In my view, smart exits and in general, how RFID is used for loss prevention is just getting started. It's got a lot of upside. I'm actually engaged with a major retailer right now

that I spend a lot of time with at Protect, and they're testing RFID on some of the highest organized retail crime items in a non-apparel environment, and they're getting some very, very promising results. Lots of serious discussions, as Tom said, in terms of throughout the floor with retailers and also in the sessions in terms of how we leverage technology to attack shrink and violent, which I think is very good news for the Loss Prevention Research Council, what we do here. The parties were amazing. I attended so many that I forgot and lost count. I ran out of time and I actually could not attend them all. So the after hours events were well orchestrated, well attended, really amazing.

And I did so many posts. I did. I was one of those individuals that what Tom was talking about. I was posting lives and I was posting live on social media. And I can report now that the top post that received the most mention was the one where I talked about this podcast crossing over 150 episodes. So the Loss Prevention Research Council podcast that we do every week, this is actually our 151st episode. So the Loss Prevention Research Council podcast that we do every week, this is actually our 151st episode. And that post that I did at NRF is already at nearly 5,000 impressions and still growing. So an amazing, amazing experience. But I really want to close by

recognizing a couple of things. One, I want to recognize the individuals that were in the ring of excellence, including you, Reid, by actually talking a little bit about each. So Reid Hayes is a research scientist and co-director of the Loss Prevention Research Team and the University of Florida and founder of the Loss Prevention Research Council. With more than three decades of experience, he plays a pivotal role in supporting the retail community with research. Joan Mason is a leader in the loss prevention space for over 40 years. Mason first joined a container store in 1997 and created a retailer's first loss prevention program. Now retired, she's also credited with establishing what is now known as the Women in Loss Prevention Network.

Chad McIntosh is the former top loss prevention executive at Bloomingdale. McIntosh had a career spending 40 years with brands like Home Depot and Ralph Lauren. He's also a founding member of the Loss Prevention Research Council and currently serves as the CEO. Chuck Miller retired from the Food Marketing Institute in 2002. He received a posthumously award to directly given to his son. Many of Miller's published

works produced influential educational and training materials for retailers, law enforcement, and academia. And the final one was Keith White, who currently serves as chief of global safety and security for Salesforce. He spent almost two decades with the GAP, leading its loss prevention, company administration, and emergency preparedness function. company administration and emergency preparation function. Throughout his career, White has been a champion leader in people development diversity and talent-driven initiatives across the industry.

I want to recognize that partly because I am biased. I'm really proud that two of the individuals are from the Loss Prevention Research Council, so congratulations to you and Reid. But I also want to recognize the other leaders because we are better when we

have strong leaders as a community to drive. And finally, a couple of recommendations. I do think the the sessions overall and the agenda was great, but my view was too packed when I printed the agenda to get ready for this event it was 10 pages long. I do think some of the sessions could have been better, especially some of the openings and

closings in terms of delivering the key messages that needed to be delivered, and I'll provide that feedback directly to NRF. And I also think that one of the challenges with this event is that there's not enough floor times for the vendors that spend a lot of money. And that's a formula they need to keep working on. But overall, really, really an amazing time. Really enjoyed being live again after the pandemic and everything else. And really seeing the work that's being done at the Loss Prevention Research Council being recognized. So congratulations on 150 episodes, and let's go get 150 more done.

So with that, let me turn it over to Reed. All right. Wow. Thanks so much, Tony, for all the insights and updates. And the same to you, Tom. It's just never, it never stops in retailing. And the behaviors that are outside are happening inside and vice versa. And a whole, whole lot of things to be done. And I totally agree with you talking about, Tony, about leadership. We've got to have, and we do, I think, from the retailer side, from the solution partner side and others, we're getting good people that are standing up and that are thinking about things, that are trying things, that are making things happen. And one of the probably the most rapidly changing times in history, and this change continues, it's been going on now for several years, but particularly our concentration, it seems like, during and coming out of the pandemic.

And so it takes a lot of leadership, but I think it takes a lot of understanding. And hopefully all of us can play that role with conducting good research at the different scales, the National Retail Security Survey, the ARCS Survey, the Voice of the Vict victim survey that's going on. These three things are happening as we speak. And if you're a retailer and you're listening, please, you or somebody on your team, please pour your data into ARCS, get a hold of Corey, C-O-R-Y at lpresearch.org. And the same for the National Retail Security Survey that the LPRC is working on with the National Retail Federation. Reach out to Corey. We need your insights, your input at the corporate level.

We need to understand the behavior, the incidents, the responses as well at that market and local level. And that's what the ARCS program does. We've got to have a much, much clearer picture about what's going on, who, what, when, why, where, and how to have any chance of making some real gains here and not just pushing stuff around or absorbing it or just having to continue to close vital, very vital retail locations. Those are great employee, employer opportunities and so on. So, all right. So, let me move on. I want to thank everybody out there for listening. Please send to operations at lpresearch.org your questions, your comments, your suggestions. Hit that website again, lpresearch.org. Take a look at all the things

that are going on, the responses, the opportunities to get involved, to put information in, to participate in research, to help us guide and digest and disseminate and put into action what we're all learning. So everybody stay safe, 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.