LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 154 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

This week, our hosts discuss protests in France, how far retailers are going in preventative measures, and how Threads’ rapid growth. Also this week, a look at Canadian sentiment towards self-checkout 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 154 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. I'm joined today by co-hosts Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio, our producers, Diego Rodriguez and Wilson Gaborino. And we just want to talk a little bit with each other and you all and think about the world we live in, in the way that crime is affecting us and what we're trying to do about it individually and collaboratively here at the LPRC, at the University of Florida, and beyond. So, a little bit about LPRC. We're excited about

yet more VIP visitors we've got this week in our labs. Harbor Freight, we are very excited. We're going to be meeting with them this morning and throughout the day, looking at their issues, discussing those, brainstorming those, breaking them down with whiteboards or visits, but understanding options, you know, and what is out there. We'll be leveraging our, of course, our engagement lab where we've got over 230 different protective technologies arrayed in that simulated store environment, that space. Thinking about better ways to use things, things to be used in an integrated manner and maybe outside the box and so forth. And so very excited about that.

Tomorrow, Kroger Company. We've got the vice president, Mike, and we've got his team. I think there's at least six to eight coming in. To my best knowledge is we're moving pretty rapidly here at LPRC and at UF. Some of the same issues. We're going to be looking at some of their significant issues, some of the places that they, the markets that they're in, what's going on in those markets, what they've been doing strategically, operationally, tactically. operationally, tactically, what are others doing, what are some other options. We're going to bring everything to bear that we've got at the LPRC with the UF Safer Places Lab team as well, and working through options and opportunities and go forwards. So very excited about how that's going and just an ongoing. We've got some other very significant retailers coming in throughout

the year now. Schedules have been set or are upcoming, and this follows on probably about eight other significant retailers have been in here so far working with our team. So always busy and hectic. We've got one of our team, Dr. Justin Smith. He's up in Memphis working at the Auto Zones, holding a pretty unique tech event and collaborative event. Justin's going to be able to go through some of our concepts, the five zones, the bow but much more critically for real-world execution and creating much better outcomes, affecting offender decisions, but also detecting these decisions or behaviors. And, of course, trying to connect across retailers, across stores within a retailer, of course, and with law enforcement and other partners are so important. We've got another one of our team, another research scientist, James other governmental, I think feds and so on, mapping experts, what they're doing to leverage geospatial information. How do we, again, use maps to look for opportunities? What are the dynamics of what's around people in places, particularly those that are experiencing high losses

compared to those that are not. And when they're experiencing those this time of day and not that, this day of week and so forth. And then leveraging that to tell the story, to share, to coordinate with our partners that I mentioned before within chains, between chains and between chains and law enforcement. And then also leveraging the mapping, as I know that we've talked about before, to look at and

try and assess or even measure results. Do we see crime patterns change in areas that we treat or put interventions in? Or versions, because we always talk about it's not what we do, but how, see how that might change. So we've got people distributed all over the place. We've got another one in Carolinas. So we're getting out in the field. We're not just getting out in the field here in Gainesville with our Safer Places Lab east side or west side in our enclosed mall environments, but working in other cities and states, because as we know, crime is not just not taking a holiday. It's all over the place and highly dispersed and so forth. So the other thing we're taking a look at, particularly this week, is offenders. And one thing that's of interest is not

just looking at high crime places, times and types, by type and so forth, but looking at who are the offenders that are doing this. And the way I'm trying to look at this right now at this point is trying to understand offenders. We're, you know, we hear ORC and ORT, you know, it was our team that changed the name literally from ORT to ORC almost 20 years ago, just based on some research we did showing that these quasi to fully organized groups, that they were not just stealing, but they were also committing different types of fraud, sometimes human trafficking, passport fraud, all kinds of things. So we just kind of expanded from organized retail theft to crime. But organized, what's organized mean?

Does it mean the offender? Like when we look at serial killers are organized in the way that they select targets, the way they attack, their post-attack or right of bang behavior versus those that are somewhat disorganized in all those elements or those domains or in those time periods. So, or are we talking about organized because they're coordinating with others, either sometimes, all the time, in different ways, in their theft or fraud attempts, in their post, again, right of bang with how they're trying to convert what they've stolen or defrauded somebody else into cash or other valuables. So these are important topics. But what we are looking at mostly is repeat or serial offenders, whether they're organized or not or whether they're coordinated or linked to or working with others full-time or occasionally or somewhere in between. And so we look at their ongoing repeat or serial offenders. Who are these people? How,

why are they doing it? But then you can further subcategorize them into what's the frequency of their offenses? Just, you know, again, think in parallel, say the serial killer or serial shopper, how often, what's the frequency that they attack, that they victimize somebody or harm somebody or someplace, right? So what's that frequency look like? So we look at, is this a low rate, medium or high rate offender? They're a serial. Now what's the rate of their attacks, you know, the frequency? So another component would be the impact. Is this a low, medium or high impact offender? How much violence, how much fear of crime are they

generating because of their attacks? And of course, how much loss are they generating for their victims? In this case, let's say stores per event, how much they steal dollar-wise or the criticality of the merchandise. You may steal a lot of stuff, but it's not stuff that somebody is interested in buying. That's not as big of an issue obviously so we want to look at that um the so when we talk about offenders think maybe about serial offenders repeat offenders um not just um organized or whatever disorganized that's important are they organized in how they work are they coordinating with others and how often they coordinate? And again, what's their rate or frequency of attack? And then how much damage are they creating when they do? So that's kind of it from our front. We're busy here at LPRC also coordinating and planning and getting ready for 2023 LPRC Impact, our big annual conference, the first week in October. If you're interested, go to lpresearch.org. We're excited. We'll have between probably close to 400 to maybe close to 500, just depending on a lot of factors that are not our own. But trust me, we've got a whole lot of theft, fraud, and violence

research to share with a lot of top retailers and solution partners and law enforcement partners. A lot of things to go over about what we're working on with the Safer Places Lab, the East Side Initiative, the Atlanta Initiative, the West Side Initiative, the Enclosed Mall Initiative, and beyond. Our Command Center, our Security Operations Center, our EOC initiatives show off more and more new capability in our labs. We're working in some new venues. I think it's going to be a pretty neat 24-7 almost experience for those that come in and participate. Impact's just not like anything else. It's just not.

The venue being on the top five public university campus, working with all types of scientists, including graduate students and faculty, working with all kinds of engineers. And then with 105 probably growing now, solution partners with all their tech and other solutions, Manning and so forth. And of course, 83 retail corporations and our growing team. We're now 16 people on the team with more to come. We're doing actively interviewing right now. So we'd be excited to

work with you at any time, but please, we'd love to work with you at the Impact Conference this year, lpresearch.org. So with no further ado, let me turn this over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you could, take it away. Thank you, Reid, for those great updates. Let me start this week with a new article from Warren Schulberg published in the Robin Report entitled, When Does Crime Prevention Turn Into Sales Prevention? As Warren writes, theft and stealing in retail stores have become a legitimate problem across the country.

Both symbol and singular acts and larger scale coordinated robberies that result in significant hits to store merchandise levels. The National Retail Federation says total shrink all in hit 94.5 billion in 21, up from 90.8 the year before. In response, retailers around the country are taking various steps to try to combat the crime wave, but some seem to be taking the effort to bring maximum security prisons. It almost seemed like a joke when the news first broke about the extreme case of a big national retail trying to deal with theft

in the vault-sized store that Walgreen recently opened in a downtown Chicago neighborhood. The big national drug chain took an existing store that to East Roosevelt Road and reconfigured to just two aisles containing many of the basics no one would expect to find in today's modern drugstore, over the counter medication, baths and body items, batteries and snacks. So far so good, but everything else in the store, most health and beauty products, including hair treatment as well as beer and wine and hard alcohol, plus gift cards are all locked behind barriers and must be ordered via an electronic kiosk device. Prescription drugs work the same way. once on store employee fulfills the

order is brought to a separate checkout where the shopper paid for it and picks up the purchases Walgreens told CNN the store addresses the needs of the digital shopper and was not specifically designed to address in-store crime the store it said was designed to enhance the experience of our customers and team members. Walgreens is far from the only retailer to try to figure out how to deal with the crime wave. Dollar Tree, after specifically citing shrink as a hit to its earnings of 14 cents a share, is also locking up more than merchandise as part of what are called defensive merchandising said CEO Jeff Davis at a recent analyst calls Lowe's is testing a program called project unlock which we've talked about here at the LPRC that requires RFID chips embedded in its high price items like power tools cannot that

can only be unlocked at once they are purchased and the consumer receives certain coding. Some supermarkets like Kroger and Safeway have shoppers who provide their mobile phone numbers to receive a code to unlock certain merchandise on their store shelves. And numerous chains are putting premium goods behind plexiglass barriers far more than in the old days when the security shabby was only used for razor blades condoms and other small items easy to slip into a handbag or pocket today's in-store merchandise maneuvers the compact that seemed to bear more of a passing resemblance to the convoluted shopping process of catalog showrooms.

Consumers who clip coupons under their hands are sore. They will get up to five hours in the morning on Black Friday, and they will tremble their follow shoppers for a deal, but they won't wait around forever to make a purchase. It's the reason why Big Blue created a self--service supermarket why gas stations allow for pay at the pump service and oh by the way this thing called the Internet comes along to make shopping faster and easier in a way you can't blame the retailers for trying to solve all this ramp of stealing it's a real problem hitting bottom lines and

margins with inventions and there are only so many security guards hidden cameras and stern style as store exits that retailers can employ before stores look like federal penitentiaries crime like the weather has always been a go-to excuse for retailers looking to explain away poor results and it's not like it's not true this wave of theft is real and it's not going away but so far retail solutions leave much to be desired as one shopper told the Associated Press in a recent story and all this if they're going to make it this hard to buy something I'll find somewhere else to buy it so I'm sharing that in detail because this is an important problem that we deal with and I'm gonna continue that by going now to Canada and talk about an article

published by Sophia Harris on the self checkout and this was published in CBC News as Sophia reported for Brian Simpson, a recent routine of shopping at a Canadian tire store in Toronto turned into an unsettling experience. He says after paying for the items at self-checkout, a security guard blocked him from accessing and demanded to see his receipt. feels like a suspect, like I had done something wrong, and I don't like that they're painting us all in the same brush, that they're assuming that everyone who uses self-checkout is going to steal. The Retail Council of Canada told CBC News that shoplifting is on the rise and that it's working with retailers on solutions. Some major retailers have adopted random receipt checks in selected stores, but the practice has sparked backlash from shoppers who say they shouldn't have to pay the price for self-checkout theft.

the expansion of self-checkouts that John McCracken who encountered a receipt check warning signed last month at a Loblaw-owned superstore just outside Halifax. In a study published in 2022 criminal owners Tedrin Beck surveyed 93 retailers spread across 25 countries and that have incorporated self-checkout technology and according to the study retailers estimated that as much as 23 percent of their store losses were due to a combination of theft and customer error with self-checkout two-thirds of the retailers said self-checkout related losses were a growing problem. Beck suggests retailers will keep offering self-checkout as long as the money they have from the reduced labor cost is higher than what they lose to the theft and scanning mistakes. In my view, we need to do a lot more to combat

this problem. Locking everything up is not the answer. I do think we got to step it up, especially here working at TLPRC and finding some new innovative solution. And then finally switching to a totally different topic, because I think this was a big surprise for me. And this is from Statista. Most of us have heard of the new platform called Tread that Meta released to compete with Titor. Can you guess how long it took

Treads to reach 1 million U-Core? It's a shocking number. I was surprised and maybe not surprised based on how fast technology is accelerating, but the answer is they reach 1 million users in just one hour. By comparison, not too long ago, it took JetGPT five days to reach 1 million people. And by comparison, again, to other online services, Netflix took three and a half years, Airbnb took two and a half years, and Twitter took two years to reach one million euros. So technology is dramatically accelerating, and here at TLPRC is a good place to test all this stuff together. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. This will be brief because I'm at an airport and I'm going to have to catch a flight.

I wanted to give you a quick recap. I'll start off with the civil disturbance in France. France is seeing protests and civil disturbance that are in the likes of nothing they've seen in the past, all related to an unarmed African-American teenager being shot by a police officer. to an unarmed African-American teenager being shot by a police officer. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Ferguson riots in the United States where they're being set on fire, they're looting. The French police have really, in the last two to three days, taken a much more aggressive approach to try to limit the damage. But we don't necessarily see an end in sight.

So we'll continue to monitor that situation in the current way it hasn't spilled over into the United States. Additionally, we have seen chatter related to some of the events in France, here in the U.S., but we have not, again, seen any specific activities related to it. we have not again seen any specific activities related to it. Let's talk about a ruling that came through by a federal judge this week. There's a lot of noise or news around this that is not necessarily misleading or it's more of somewhat confusing.

The, a lot of the headlines read things like federal government rules that the Biden administration can't have interaction with social media and trying to censor data. So what basically this comes from is there was some information that was found that during COVID there was specific folks or posts that were suppressed and that was done by the task of the federal government. So this judge, and it's going to be very interesting, that there was a judge in Louisiana that found basically that it would be in some cases a violation of folks' First Amendment rights, but more importantly that the government should not interact with social media companies and try to condition to what they say. Now this is interesting because there's two sides to this story. Most of the articles are based on what the government

says here. The social media side of this is social media companies have basically says that social media loses the ability, in some cases, to limit this. That's an interpretation. It's not actually what was said, but I think it's important to note that they will try to appeal as strongly because there are some cases where this makes perfect sense and that we would want the government to be able to have an influence on what is put out there. For instance, if it was known misinformation, allowing the government to address that is a no-brainer. So we'll certainly follow the situation. There's definitely more to come. Continuation of some social media news is

Facebook's Meta, formerly known as Facebook, released over the week, a week last week, an app called Threads, which is a direct competitor to Twitter. There's been a lot of news around this. There's been a hundred million There's been a lot of news around this. There's been 100 million active users on it, which is a substantial number in a week. But one thing that's important to note is that it doesn't require a new sign-up. So when you think of a new app that requires you to fill out things, sign in, give information, that number would be almost unimaginable. In this circumstance, you have a meta-owned platform which allows you to simply, if you

have an Instagram account, just click a button and basically create a threads account. So the verdict is still out of what this means for Twitter. CloudFlare and some other companies have actually released traffic data to show that there was a 5% decline in Twitter's traffic in that same time. It's a little too early to tell if the two are related, but certainly for all of us that use social media for active intelligence or open source intelligence gathering, there is a trend that is occurring that's important for all of us to monitor and see what is going to happen. And then last but certainly not least, I think this becomes a reoccurring theme and I hate to sound like a broken record I think it's so important to mention it is that there was several critical

updates to Apple iOS. If you have an iPhone, update your phone. It's very, very important if you don't have automatic updates on your cell phones, your smartphones, or your computers that you turn them on or you work directly with your IT department, if it's a company laptop, to make sure that you have the settings set correctly. If it's a personal device, I still to this day meet lots of people that don't do updates because they're worried about battery drain or other things. The reality is they're worried about how long it takes. I can tell you that these vulnerabilities are significant.

Your people are taking advantage of them every day. So be sure to go ahead and use them and protect yourself. And with that, I will turn it back over to Tony and Reed. All right. Thanks so much, Tom. And thanks, Tony, for all your great information, ideas, thoughts to get us thinking and moving and trying to protect. So I want to wish everybody out there a safe week ahead. We look forward to meeting you and moving forward together. There is no shortage of issues, no shortage of venues to work in. And so we're here for you. 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.