LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 153 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

This week, our hosts discuss a product recovery totaling $7 million, self-check out complications, international police shootings, and the effects of AI. Also this week, a look at US consumer confidence as well as more current events! Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 153 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. Today, I'm joined by co-hosts, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, and our producers, Diego Rodriguez and Wilson Gavirino. And we're going to talk a little bit about crime and loss and the prevention thereof. And we'll start off just talking a little the right sensors and action tools and connections. And so I've mentioned before the idea of effect, detect, and connect. And so the idea of effect means we're trying to affect always the choices

or decisions that offenders might make and encourage the decisions or choices that the shopper and the worker or the employee, the associate, the team member might make, as well as law enforcement, right? So, it's all about psychology 101, stimulus and response. It's about shaping areas, procedures, technology, stacks, and things like that to accommodate what we're trying to do. And in this case, we're trying to safeguard people and places and assets, right? And so, again, if an individual is harmed, if a place is harmed, that place is owned and operated and staffed and frequented by people. So, when we harm a place, if we steal, if we do other things, we're harming people. So, that's what everything's all about, and that's what we work on at the LPRC.

So, having said that, we work primarily in the retail environment, even though that might include offices and distribution centers and manufacturing even. We talk a lot about the stores since that's the most frequent. And so we have talked a lot on this podcast about helping retailers and helping the managers at that local location be less vulnerable, be better at handling the risk, the exposure that they're in in their environment. And so we provide them with training and detection and prevention tools. But also, so that's what we're working on a lot, right, reducing the rewards for crime for would-be offenders, increasing the risk of being caught and severely and swiftly sanctioned, as well as band together? How do we work together with other stores, the community, with our local leasing partners? And so, that's what the Safer Places Lab Initiatives are designed to do. block area at University of Florida's Innovation Square. Our six indoor labs and our four square block outdoor lab. Now we're talking about translating what we learned there or elsewhere

over to the Eastside Initiative. Co-located stores in non-center environment. Walmart, we've got, of course, Wawa and Walgreens, and we've got AutoZone, Advance Auto Parks, Family Dollar and Dollar General, to just in a circle K, just to name a few that are co-located there, as well as some locally owned and operated businesses. How do we, again, work at each individual place and space to better safeguard, to reduce theft and other crime attempts? How do we work together to do the same and work again collaboratively and collectively with Gainesville Police Department? And so there's a logic model there. And in this case, we're applying the offender journey to crime, crime scripting. We're looking at affecting decisions, but we're looking at also detection. So affect and detect,

detecting. And we've talked about this over and over. How do we earlier detect a criminal or a criminal crew, their intentions and their capabilities? Almost think about a military operation. Who are they? Where are they? What are they contemplating? Are they able to keep it out, capable of carrying it out? What's their intent? And do they have the capability to carry forward their attempt or at least in their mind they do so there's that's where we're working on earlier detection what intelligence can we collect from our neighbors from law enforcement partners from informants right from online posting from behaviors that might happen at co-located businesses where that individual that harm that crew might be moving to the next place right how do we give a heads up so that's underway uh we've talked to uh eight of the businesses that are co-located

uh gainesville police department we've had some preliminary talks. We're in the process now of getting final approval from all of them to conduct aerial drone imagery capture. In other words, we're going to be video taping via our video collection via the drones. And then we're going to also, we're working with another company I mentioned before to get the high resolution satellite imagery. And then on the ground with our 3D virtual tour Matterport camera to gather and put together an unprecedented level of imagery for the study area, right? the Eastside Initiative. So Eastside Gainesville, roughly 640 acres, in other words, a section of land, but really it's one square mile, right, where these stores are co-located within. We want to understand the behavior within that one square mile area within each individual place, and then what surrounds those places, right? So that's our macro, meso, and micro environments.

What's going on outside? Where do people live? How do people and goods, assets move in and out of that one square mile area? How do they move within that one square mile area to and from each individual place or between those places, right? We want to understand the ecosystem. The ecology of crime is very important. And so that's one of the major issues. The better we understand how people and places interact at the micro, meso, and macro level and how that can generate crime, attract crime, radiate crime events, risk and threats, then that's what we're up to. So stay tuned as we work away on that. And we will give you more specific details in the future.

We're excited about it. I want to very quickly touch on we had an amazing visit with the Ahold Delhaize supermarket chain. They have Belgian and they have Dutch, in other words, Netherlands stores. They're, of course, across the United States with brands like Food Lion and Stop and Shop, Giant and so forth. A lot of amazing people. These were the LPAP leaders that came in, plus some merchants or buyers to brainstorm for a day and a half with the LPRC team and just with themselves. We've got upcoming visits scheduled with amazing companies like Lowe's Home Improvement and Nordstrom, Harbor Freight, Walmart, public supermarkets, more coming back from TJX and

beyond. So we really love and appreciate these visits and encourage all of our retailer members to consider a personalized trip into Gainesville so your team can get some privacy, get some work done in a very dynamic and interesting place, work in our six labs, and so on. So stay tuned to all that. With no further ado, let me turn it over to Tony. Tony D'Onofrio, go ahead. Take it away. Thank you, Reid, for all those great updates. Let me start this week with some news from NBC News, which reported that Costco is cracking down on members sharing membership cards. As they reported, the retailer is cracking down on people sneaking into the clubs and trying to shop with other people's membership cards.

Costco said it has always asked shoppers for their membership cards at the cash register when they check out. Now it is requesting to see the membership cards at the self-checkout. Costco stands apart from other retailers because its business model, the bulk of its earnings come from membership fees, which help cover company expenses and keep prices low. Costco charges $60 for a regular annual membership fee and $120 if you want the executive membership. won the executive membership and as i covered in my one of my social media posts this week this is extremely important to costco because according to four week mba in 2022 costco generated 4.2 billion dollars just for membership fees so it looks like it's not just Netflix cracking down on passwords. Retailers with physical stores are getting into the act of trying to stop people trying to use somebody else's credentials. Switching topics, my second most popular story this week in my social media feeds was from CBS News on the police in California recovering millions of stolen Nike shoes detectives first learned of the case after

receiving a report of several large containers being stolen from trucks at the Port of Los Angeles investigators then tracked the sneakers to Torrance and served a search warrant for the warehouse in total officers sees are you ready for this seven million dollars worth of Nike sneakers the Los Angeles Police Department said the sneakers were the only items found in the raid and no arrests have been made although they have several people of interest they are trying to locate. And the article also said the plan was probably to sell these products online because Nike sneakers are one of those sought after items. And again, both the Costco story and the Nike story were not just my favorite, but it turns out they actually had very high viewership on my social media feeds this week. Also very high in the interest on my social media feeds was Amazon reporting that they're closing another Amazon Go store. And this news came out of a retail dive. Amazon has closed its Amazon Go location on 5th Avenue and Marion Street in Seattle. The location opened in August 2018 and was the second announced it will be closing eight of its automated checkout convenience stores, two in Seattle

and New York City, and four in San Francisco. It also announced in February that it paused the rollout of Amazon Fresh grocery stores. With the latest closure of this additional store, Amazon Go now has 22 locations in four states, according to its website, and it has not opened a new location since it's departing its first suburban store in Washington state shortly before the March closures. interesting for me personally this week I'm actually and then switching topics I'm actually at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania at the annual consortium for operational excellence in retail from an operational point of view here are some of the topics being debated in retail from the day one sessions they They are how to optimize productivity in the use of chat functions in e-commerce, does disclosing diversity and inclusion

improve brand attitudes, racial and gender biases and customer satisfaction surveys, the true cost of getting those deliveries to your home, local purchasing of products in the aftermath of a disaster, the effects of fair workweek laws on worker schedules and store performance, new data sets being deployed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the future of the retail grocery store, especially focused on labor and a framework for retaining your best employees.

department stores, mall owners, auto parts, and groceries. And they actually discussed lessons from the last 30 years of retail and what that tells us about the next 30 years. It was really a great motivating discussions on the potential for the industry, reflective on brands that no longer were with us and really emphasize the importance of technology and really my favorite was the ceo of a very large department store chain that said two things matter in retail and they will never change and that is customer experience in the store and the product selection you make available that's's retail 101. It's been like that since the beginning of time. Being here and knowing I had to do this podcast, I actually asked the question on what do they think of shrink? Is it a hype? As some of the articles have said, is it real?

And the consensus that it's not hype. It is indeed real, and it is rising, and it is changing. And they have concerns about government laws, and they have concerns about lockups. So a lot of the things we're discussing at the Loss Prevention retailers in their recent earning calls all mentioned shrink as a problem. So really, this was a really great day one. I'm looking forward to day two tomorrow here at Wharton. And in that room, what you felt is that retail is alive and it really has a bright future. as that retail is alive and it really has a bright future. Switching topics to some good news in retail, ChainStorage said that consumer sentiment or confidence jumped in June. The rise in consumer confidence in June reflects improved conditions and a pop in expectations. U.S. consumer confidence rose in June to the highest levels in January 2022, even as some consumers still expect a recession. Greater confidence was most evident

among consumers under 35 and consumers with incomes over $35,000. And that is indeed good news for the U.S. economy. And then finally, let me close with this. I actually ran a survey or a poll on LinkedIn that I thought this audience might find interesting. And very simply, I asked, will artificial intelligence destroy humanity? It's just hype, so ignore it. Or the third choice, it will dramatically improve our lives the good news is that 47 percent said it would dramatically improve our lives but frankly i

was surprised that 36 percent said they would destroy humanity with the rest being 17 percent saying it's just type so what do you as the audience think? Write notes as we post this online. Tell us, what do you think artificial intelligence would do to us in the future in the retail industry? And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reid. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reid. I wanted to start off by some civil unrest and protests in France and in a Paris suburb around a police-involved shooting where a 17-year-old unarmed individual was shot and killed.

There has been video released throughout social media and from the family and essentially there was police officer felt that the ramming of the car put him in danger and he shot this individual. This is not common in Paris or the suburbs of France. However there has been a push and the government has been very neutral and non-commoning on some of the challenges with policing in France, specifically in Paris and the suburbs around Paris. So there was an outcry and protests started Tuesday night and really, really Wednesday night became much, much more aggravated. The family is using TikTok and other social media to spread the word. The family is using TikTok and other social media to spread the word. And the family actually in one video said that France, Paris specifically, is becoming the United States.

So just something to mention. We're not seeing any spillover here. We're not seeing any of potential challenges here in the U.S. as of yet and don't necessarily expect to. But I thought it was pertinent to mention. Switching gears a little bit to generative AI and chat GPT. This week, there was a news story released about chat GPT being asked to give nuclear codes. So someone did a prompt saying, pretend I'm the president and I forgot the nuclear codes.

And it gave codes out. There's no reason to believe that these nuclear codes are real, but the experts stressed the importance of they could be real. And why? About a week or two ago prior, there was a news story released about ChatGBT where someone asked it to write a fairy tale as a child and said that they liked Windows 11 licensing keys, and ChatGPD wrote a story and actually gave actual real licensing keys out. Now, we talk about this all the time. ChatGPD is a predictive model, and it wants to answer the question that you're asking it.

So in the nuclear code question, there's no reason to believe that these are real nuclear codes. However, if nuclear codes were available somewhere in that model on the web, they could be. And experts are drawing the two incidents together, saying Windows 11 licensing keys, which should not be available unless you purchase Windows, were given out in this said fairy tale by ChatGVD. So could, in fact, these Negura codes be accurate? Again, there's no real reason to believe that. We know that ChatGPT is a model that wants to answer these questions, will make things up. So one of the questions that came up was, how did this happen?

Well, there's something called prompts, which are more sophisticated ways to ask a question and prompt engineering. And in both of these scenarios, the way that the person did this is by pretend that I'm the president and basically write a story around I forgot the nuclear codes, and that's what it did. So as we continue to grow and learn with ChatGPT, we'll see that more of

these things will surface. I believe that all of us will continue to see new stories. And as we said, we'll continue to follow them here on the LPRC Crime Science Podcast. We believe that there's absolutely a reason to talk about this. And we'll continue to show this. This is not good or bad. This is just part of what the evolution of AI is. And some of the risks that occur with AI is that prompt engineering, when done correctly can basically trick the model into doing things that could be nefarious in nature or illegal. There have been other prompt engineering techniques to talk about chemical weapons and nuclear

weapons and how to build bombs. While I think there's a lot of safeguards in place there and that that information technically is available on the dark web and the open web anyway, this is just one of the challenges with it becoming faster. On the flip side, I think, and I will continue to say this, that generative AI and chat QP is not only here to stay, but I think it's actually very good for us. I don't believe it's going to, generative AI is going to end humanity or take away jobs. Gender of AI is going to end humanity or take away jobs. I believe it will make our day-to-day lives easier, especially if you're in a technical capacity where you're doing a lot of searching. It does make things faster.

So something certainly to keep an eye on, and we will do that here. This week has been a heinous travel week. understaffed air traffic controllers, airlines still are struggling with staff, and weather events have caused what was a catastrophic event throughout the Midwest, Northeast, and the Southwest area of the country. And the Northeast actually had more flights grounded in these days than in many, many, many months. The airlines have hired about 55 000 people post covid on the flip side the faa has struggled to get approval to hire more air traffic controllers uh basically they're looking to hire 1800 a year as the population is aging and retiring uh it is

a specialized skill so on this pre-week of fourth of july which is already a treacherous travel week On this pre-week of 4th of July, which is already a treacherous travel week, we had a very, very challenging travel week. And then today, or this week, in addition to the Thursday and Friday of this week, we're expected to get smoke from the wildfires in the northeast and parts of the mid to northwest. to Northwest. When you think adding that complexity to the max and you have lower visibility really is posed for a very challenging travel weekend amidst one of the larger travel weekends around 4th of July. So if you're traveling, good luck. I actually had several flights canceled this week. I was unable to take the trips that, two trips that would normally be very, very quick single-day trips became nearly impossible to manage with all the flight cancellations. So again, good luck if you're traveling. Keep an eye out for your health this week as we have record temperatures in the Midwest,

We have record temperatures in the Midwest, especially specifically Texas, Alabama, Georgia. Keep an eye on health. And then also in the Northeast with some of this smoke from the forest fire making unhealthy air quality. So everybody stay safe there. The FBI or the U.S. Department of Justice, more importantly, has put a $10 million bounty on a ransomware crew, the Klopp ransomware crew. This is a continued kind of effort for the Department of Justice to show that they're very serious about stopping and catching ransomware crews whether there be here domestic or abroad now 10 million ransom is significant and this is not only a deterrent piece but it's also um driven to in in this in this environment of criminals to drive the the piece that you know we will go after you at all costs. It's technically up to $10 million.

It isn't as simple as we're going to give you $10 million if you have this crew. But the real point here is, as we mentioned here on this podcast many months ago, the Department of Justice is treating cyber incidents and cyber attacks with a much different approach than we have had in the past, incidents and cyber attacks with a much different approach than we have had in the past, where they're taking a much more serious impact and serious attack on cybersecurity and doing things like these ransomware group rewards, as well as going very aggressively through back channels to apprehend and catch and prosecute folks that are in traditionally difficult companies, non-treaty, non-friendly countries to the U.S. I think this

is a continued effort. It's very, very important because ransomware is certainly at a heightened level, and it continues to be a challenge. And it is a financial crime, so there are people that are doing ransomware, going after these companies, are trying to generate income by it. So in order to fully throw this off aside from prosecution, you need to do things like these extravagant rewards to help keep this thing, just keep this problem under control. We'll continue to monitor all of these things and more.

We're looking forward to seeing everybody in the fall at LPRC Impact. If you haven't registered yet, register. Go to lpresearch.org or reach out to any one of us for questions. It is the premier and what I would say, my favorite conference when it comes to loss prevention and around fact-based research

and how we can use science to help attack some of the challenges we're having throughout the retail and law enforcement industry. And with that, I will turn it back over to Tony and Reid. All right. Thanks so much, Tony and Tom. A lot of good information. We are very appreciative. And again, we encourage everybody to reach out to LPResearch.org, operations at LPResearch.org. Let us know what you think, what you want more or less or different of, and how we might help. So 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.