LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 178

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

LPRC INTEGRATE was a HUGE SUCCESS! This week our hosts discuss some of the amazing things that came from INTEGRATE! On this episode, our hosts discuss the continued battle with AI biases, aerial/weather surveillance balloons vs national security, the world's most valuable retail and apparel brands, AT&T's national service issue, and Apple's brand success. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more!

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 Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer Diego Rodriguez and we'll talk a little bit about what the LPRC has been up to and what we're up to next and in this case we had an amazing week last week. The LPRC hosted about 180 plus visitors, guests, executives from multiple, multiple law enforcement agencies, 47 retail corporations. And we had, I believe, 16 solution partners there who were part of the innovate program, as well as sponsors of the events.

Obviously, day one was our Ignite session. This has been our annual winter planning meeting for the Board of Advisors, expanded to include LPRC Innovate advisory panel members. So, those two breakouts, even though the BOA does join the Innovate advisory panel, though the BOA does join the Innovate Advisory Panel. I think it was unanimous in the vice chairs meeting. We have chair and vice chairs of the board of advisors, the BOA, meet first and talk about strategic issues and talk about the BOA itself. Very lively identified four key targets, goals to look at as far as long-term planning and development for the LPRC, the mission, but also the personnel, the team members, including myself, our Director of Research,

Dr. Corey Lowe, our Director of Operations, Greg Nafores, and the rest of the group. We're now, again, we've talked about this before, we've gone in 18 months from six full-time team members to 20 overall team members. And so that's pretty short order. So part of that goes down to growth in the mission, the resources made available by a lot of membership growth and a lot of LPRC Innovate Advisory Panel growth. The resources that come from that panel from the SP side are phenomenal and allowed us now to add five research team members, five incremental members we did not have without that program. So in this case, we've got our four initiatives, succession planning

throughout the structure of the LPRC team. We talked about increasing and enhancing the output and the experience of our six working groups, ways to take each and every working group to the next level. And so we've got a pretty good outline there. In fact, some of the actions already been put into motion now following this meeting. We're also looking at the structure and the actions of the Board of Advisors, the BOA itself. There'll be several meetings along that to get where the BOA would like to get themselves, in this case, to provide even better advice and wise counsel. So very excited about that. Those are some of the strategic initiatives that they talked about. Another one being mentoring and professional development for the LPRC team, particularly in leadership areas.

We don't have, we're a tiny organization. We don't have trainers and seminars and things like that. So some of these major retailers in particular are going to take that on board and make our team part of their teams for professional development in the leadership management training area. So very, very exciting that first day. We also had an excellent panel looking at intelligence and how, in this case, the state of Florida, working with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the FDLE's fusion centers, but starting with the North Florida Fusion Center, how do we work more closely together and leverage LPRC's research and

development team to work with multiple retailers, starting out with just a few to continue to better fuse together ORC investigators, but also look at things like terrorism, active shooters as well. FTLE now can, through the Fusion Center, put out alerts on people's phones in a very, very precise area around select cell towers. But so we're going to be looking at software, looking at the LPRC's mapping dashboards we put together and other tools. And this is part of a follow-up to planning calls with FTLE and with key retailers, particularly Bill over at Target. So we're going to continue that. We also, I might have mentioned before, met with FTLE while I was over in Tallahassee for Gator Day. My voice, as many can tell, is still recovering from that two-day lobbying attempt over there.

So we're excited about what came out of Ignite on that first day. It was a pretty amazing day. a pretty amazing day. We went through left of bang, at bang, and right of bang, pre-active shooter event, during the event, how to better handle, and then, of course, the all-critical right of the event or post-event recovery in the immediate aftermath and beyond. We did have an expert from FDLE on evidence collection. We had two FBI special agents out of the Jacksonville office that are evidence collection people. We debriefed them. One in particular had a lot of expertise, tragically, from dealing with and helping in the Pulse nightclub active shooter in Orlando that was linked to terrorism.

Also, the Dollar General active shooting event that's been fairly recently in Jacksonville, Florida. So we had a lot there. We had panel members that were on the scene at a horrific active shooter at an Albertson Safeway store in the Pacific Northwest. He was there within minutes, Scott Samuelson, to relate that experience. Tom Arrigge, who had responded to Kroger and Walmart active shootings as part of both of those teams. We had other law enforcement that have done the same, including Detective Sergeant Rich Rossman of the Broward County Sheriff's Office, shooting there, relating all the things they learned, how they've tried to improve. We also had Wright in the aftermath of Distribution Center active shooting in Pennsylvania. Dan Davies was there. So it was an amazing post or right of bang panel. We had had an active shooter during the event at bang panel with Alachua County Sheriff's Office, SWAT, Gainesville Police Department, SWAT.

We also had University of Florida Police Department and leadership. University of Florida Police Department and leadership. And then again, a couple of retailers, but also Mike Currier from Verizon Wireless, who his organization has done extensive training on active shooter events. Very realistic scenarios like the one that we used that grew, reviewed and leveraged the active shooter event that we had recorded and extensively we're working on ways our team so that this can go beyond the 180 plus participants in the event the the video itself is masterful in the way that the production company that we team with and our team put it together it's's unbelievable. So we'll get back

and share that. And then went through that extensively. And it's pretty bone chilling what happens during our video. And then, of course, I'm kind of working backwards here, but going left to back, an amazing panel looking at threat detection threat assessment and threat management planning we had uh special agent dan corsellius from the fbi uh representing bau behavioral analysis unit one uh we had uh the threat assessment expert steve Magrusep, in this case from Verizon Wireless. We also had consulted with the Kroger Company threat team. They were not in attendance due to a scheduling conflict. Others from Kroger Company were at the event.

We also had Santa Fe College, a 25,000 student college here in Gainesville. They have a very, very well- well trained and led threat team there. We also had the University of Florida's threat assessment team led by a PhD as well. personas that were put out and went through very methodically how they assess these and how they how to compare and contrast their approaches their ideas and the training that they've got the instruments or questionnaires that they use and all these kind of characteristics and criteria was amazing amazing session we I can't tell you how many people came out there saying you know what, today's going to save somebody's life. So we'll go through this in a lot more detail and a lot more upcoming. We've actually literally started planning the LPRC 2025 integrate, which will be a very, very intense active shooter scenario. We've got the panels put together already, believe it or not, and started planning. But throughout 2024, as mentioned before, we're going to do some deep

dive deconstructs on some active shooters and mass attack events to do look at, left at, and right of bang lessons learned. So I've got to get off to a meeting. We've got another major retailer in our labs, in this case, IKEA. We're excited to engage with them, do some whiteboarding with them. So with no further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, take it away. Thank you, Reid, for all those great updates. I really wish I could have been in Florida with all of you, but unfortunately, I'm on the other side of the world. The Ignite and Innovate would have been one of my favorite events, but on this last couple of weeks, I've been to India and a couple of countries in Europe.

I'm currently in Germany, headed back and then leaving again for Brazil. it back and then leaving again for brazil so it's been a crazy travel life but let me update you in terms of what's going on in terms of some of the things that i've been thinking about and this week i want to focus on one of my latest article which is about the world's most valuable and powerful brands for 2024. earlier this year brent Finance published its latest ranking of the world's most valuable brands. Displacing last year's number one, Amazon, Apple has now roared back to the top with an astonishing 74% brand value, which equal to the total value of Starbucks, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Porsche's brands combined. Apple has grown its run value through strategic diversification and premierization, moving away from heavier lines and iPhones towards ventures in the wearables and services such as Apple TV subscriptions, according to Brand Finance. And according to Brand Finance, more than 50% of respondents recognize Apple as expensive, but worth the price, reinforcing the brand's ability to demand a price premium.

What I'm going to discuss today is really a little bit of a deeper look at Apple and why it is one of the most valuable brands. And I'm also going to talk about who are the top 10 most valuable global brands in the world. And finally, I'm going to look at retail and who are the most valuable overall retail and apparel brands for 2024 in the world. So let's first look at Apple. In June 2023, Apple introduced the world's first mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro. As CEO Tom Koch said, in the same way that Mac introduced us to personal computing and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing the Apple vision pro will introduce us to spatial computing but it carries a price tag of nearly $3,500 and the world really is skeptical that this is really going to be one of those next Apple's big thing I did my own unscientific research on LinkedIn several weeks ago and 45% voted the product as overpriced and will fail, where 32% deemed it indeed to be a new winning Apple product.

Trying to figure out what is the next big thing and they have been successful With the iPhone, of course being the major driver if you look at the revenue flow, it's been an amazing run since 2001 when they launched the iPod launch iPod and that was followed by the iPhone the iPad the Apple watch Apple Watch and AirPods. And now, of course, the the Apple Vision Pro and an amazing run. Interesting. And the rumors were that Apple was working on a car. And indeed, those those rumors were indeed true. According to Bloomberg, they were working on a competitive electronic wheel to go to Tesla. And actually, according to Bloomberg, they spent $10 billion on it. And just this week, Apple announced internally that they are abandoning this project and shifting the resources to generative AI.

It's an interesting transition, but if you think in terms of what makes Apple successful is unique consumer based products that are physical in nature so it'll be interesting how general AI will make money going forward and also interesting to me that the iPhone has been around a long time and they really do need to figure out what is that that next big thing it's my pleasure to unveil to you what are the world's 2024 most valuable top 10 brands and for 2024 here they are they are Apple number one to Microsoft number two

Google number three Amazon number four Samsung number five amazon number four samsung number five walmart number six tick tock number seven uh facebook number eight t-mobile number nine and the ice c bc bank number 10. uh it's interesting that um six out of the top ten are from the us two are from from China, and one is from Korea and Germany respectively. Interesting also that really artificial intelligence has played a big role in brand value increases, including from Microsoft, and it actually helped them jump two spots. And NVIDIA also jumped, they actually were the highest, they didn't make the top 10, but they had the highest growth in brand value, jumping 163% in the latest brand finance survey. brands and that's really determined by the regular strength based on a balanced scorecard of metrics evaluating marketing investment stakeholder equity and business performance for 2024 the strongest brands include WeChat YouTube

Google the marine bay sands which is a spectacular hotel in in Singapore W Deloitte coca-cola Netflix Rolex and Ferrari again five of the strongest brands are from the US to up from China and one is respected from Singapore Switzerland and Italy and then finally let me unveil the most valuable retail brands overall and they listen other the highest not were the number eight some list of the number eight number one was Amazon number two was Walmart number three were Home Depot Costco CVS Target Lowe's and then number eightobao so interesting seven out of the eight are from the united states and taobao is from china looking at the apparel brands the most popular top five

are louis vuitton which is from france nike which is in the us chanel which is in france hermes which is in france and zara which is in in Spain so interesting again the brand value for brand value in general 2024 is shipping to be an apple on a year artificial intelligence is really here to stay interesting how Dutch telecom with T-Mobile when so fast to number 10 Tesla by the way dropped out at the number 10, falling to number 18. WeChat is the strongest brand, as I said. U.S. dominates with over 200 brands in the ranking and a half for the total value. And finally, if you look at the retail

brands and their value, you can see that retailer actually did not have one of the best years ever in 2023 with challenges and cutbacks for people shopping on the high street so that's a little bit in terms of what's going on with the world's best brands i'm looking forward to catching up to what happened at ignite and innovate from the team when i get, looking forward to speaking with many of you. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Oh, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reid. Pretty crazy week last week with a couple amazing things that occurred and then just a whole bunch of different things that occurred. Starting off with, we had the first or the second, I should say, moon landing, it was an unmanned ship.

The United States used a private company to land on the moon. That device, or that unit, is actually at this point just about to go dark, so the solar batteries are just about out. It did land, kind of got its foot stuck, if you will, but there were some great images and really it's amazing to think that we've went from what would be normally or in the past the NASA initiative to a private entity to help us get to the moon. So very exciting technology advance for sure. A couple interesting things occurred. There was a widespread outage of AT&T phone internet service last week. I actually found myself at about, gosh, 4.30 in the morning on the way to the airport recognizing that there was, in fact, no service whatsoever. It was actually, I have an iPhone, and they saw the SOS message, so there was no bars.

And it was out for several hours. And a couple things to note. One was that AT&T was remarkably quiet about this. So I found myself in the airport, many people confused on what to do. I went and I had my boarding pass already saved on my phone and kind of got on the plane about my business. And what a lot of tech folks do when something goes out is you go to Twitter or now Zax. And I noticed at about, I don't know, call it 5 a.m., there was probably a couple hundred people on Twitter asking, were other people experiencing this? And interestingly enough, AT&T made no statements on their social media.

And this was a several-hour outage that led people to speculate on cyber attacks and events. on cyber attacks and events. And AT&T made a public statement saying that there was a process error that caused this. That speculation is that there was a software update. But it really serves as a strong reminder of the importance to have a backup plan. When I landed in Chicago, there was no AT&T service. And there were several people that I spoke to that were just walking around, and I hate to use the word aimlessly, but they weren't able to get their boarding passes. They weren't able to get an Uber. Some of them said, you know, I don't carry cash and I can't, you know,

can't get onto the Metro because everything is on my phone. So it serves as a really important reminder of the importance of having a backup plan. Interestingly enough, on last week's podcast, I talked about how important it was to have physical phone numbers and not be so reliant on Teams and Slack and all of these technologies to communicate. Less than a week later, we had an event that really echoed that message of the importance of having some cash with you, having offline maps if you're dependent on the phone, taking your boarding pass and saving it into your wallet, whether you use Google or Android or Apple's iOS service. iOS service. At the same time, or the same day, I should say, there were two large cyber events. One, UnitedHealthcare acknowledged, but specifically targeted a pharmacy system. So that further exasperated the AT&T challenge, saying this could have been a cyber event. With anything like this, I think it's very difficult to establish what exactly occurred. It's also easy to draw conclusions. One of the

things I would say is that when you're doing research or investigative research, you have to be very aware of confirmation bias, where a lot of things look like they're related and they aren't necessarily related, and we draw conclusions based on our biases. So be very, very aware of, and in the time of all of these cyber events, there are a lot of things that could occur that look like a cyber event or could later on be a cyber event. But as of right now, all things are leading to a process error. Time will tell if that changes. But certainly, certainly for everybody that listens here, especially if you're involved in asset protection, security or intelligence or law enforcement, have a backup plan. One thing that

I spoke to a few folks on is that a lot of the first responders nets were down as well. So this was a catastrophic outage and something to be mindful of. Not that I'm a paranoid guy, but I did go out and the next day got a phone on a different carrier. So now I have both an AT&T and a Verizon phone. I'm in a position with my day-to-day job that I can't be not connected. So I felt like that was the best course of action that I could take. I know a lot of folks that I work with are in similar situations. So definitely, definitely an interesting, if you can say that, an interesting week. Lots of news in AI around Google's and Google's Gemini. Google made a couple announcements of the integration of its AI chatbot Gemini into Android and some really fantastic advancements.

If you're using Google, Android is messaging the ability to summarize long messages and text messages, the ability to give descriptions on pictures that are text, a lot of very useful things. On an unfortunate note, Google's Gemini also had a release last week that was pulled back because the model was biased and was actually displaying images that didn't depict the history in an appropriate matter. So this is one of the challenges with AI models is when you're trying to counteract bias in a model, sometimes you can have a negative effect. And in this instance, this was all over the news. It made international news and it was kind of a black eye, if you will, for Google because there were folks of a historical nature that were displayed incorrectly.

And as a matter of fact, what was going on is there were some racial biases put into place. So, for instance, you would ask a historical, historical, and the race would be mismatched. There was one example that was on CNN where George Washington was an African-American male. And this is one of the challenges you have with AI and model bias. And one of the things that I would say, and I actually spoke about this a couple weeks ago, is the models aren't biased, the people that write them are. And the more you try to trick a model, the more biased the model actually becomes. This is a major, major challenge with AI and always has been. And us as humans, a lot of times with very, very good intentions, I think Google's intentions here were right, but the way it was executed was

wrong, is you go in and you try to tell a model to change something to make it look less biased, and then unfortunately it becomes more biased in that case. So this is a struggle that we will have with AI for some time, and I continuously say this. I speak about AI pretty regularly. I spoke at a conference a couple weeks ago, is that we as the humans are biased, not the models. And the more that we try to influence these models, the more information that we put in it to try to counteract it, the more likely that we'll get a false result.

So something that we definitely, definitely need to be very, very mindful of as we move forward. A lot, a lot of news around AI in general. We're going to probably skip some of that this week. But there was just a tremendous amount of announcements. And I continue to believe that we'll see these type of announcements coming across the wire for some time. And I don't see an end in sight. Last but certainly not least, there were another two balloons in the air.

So if you remember, it feels like a very, very short time ago, but a year ago, there were what was deemed as Chinese spy balloons in the air. One that was shot down over the East Coast had a payload the size of two buses. I just want you to think of that size. That was last year. This year, there was a balloon that was spotted that had a payload of two foot by two foot, a much smaller payload. And then there was another much smaller payload. Both, at least what the reports are saying today, both seem to be hobbyist or weather balloons. This is not uncommon. At any given time, you could have up to 2,000 weather balloons

in the atmosphere. So with heightened tensions and geopolitical challenges, this becomes a kind of race to see what is it, who's behind it and how do we react to it and with these reactions uh you don't want to make any false statements on balloons because you don't really want to get into that that scenario of accusing someone of something but certainly right now it points to these are hobbyist balloons and there's no threat to anyone. But we'll continue to see that. And last but certainly not least, circling just back, I said the balloon was the last one, but we are continuing to see a heightened attack vector from a cybersecurity standpoint. And the news and the intelligence report to foreign nation state backed attacks on utilities. So

again, everybody stay safe. Always have a backup plan. Over to you, Reid. All right. Thanks so much, Tom. Great stuff as always. Great to see you and work with you in Gainesville during Ignite and Integrate. And thanks so much, Tony, for all your input. We didn't get to work with you. I understand right this minute you're in Brazil, but before that you were in Europe, in Germany, and so on during the event. So safe travels out there. And I want to thank Diego Rodriguez, our producer, and I want to thank you all for listening and tuning in. We just wish you stay safe. Stay in touch. Thank you.