LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 181

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

The LPRC team goes to RILA next week! This week our hosts discuss some of the newest and latest trends, technology, and LPRC news! On this episode, our hosts discuss the changes with self-checkout, the LPRC's upcoming tour of the SaferPlaces Lab with the local police department, analysis of stolen goods from self-checkout, an international look at loss prevention, the solar eclipse's conspiracy theories, and a discussion of the Supply Chain Protection Summit. 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, the podcast, this latest in our weekly update series. I'm joined by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, both traveling the globe as we speak, and they'll fill you in on all kinds of great things. And mine's going to be very brief opening here, and we've got official visitors coming in the labs. We've been hosting, as per normal, a host of groups of experts. groups of experts. We had the ATF, I'll call it the Back of Firearms, ASAC for Florida out of Tampa, the head of statewide intelligence in talking to us, referred by the Gainesville

Police Department, all a part of what everyone's trying to do, and that is create strong, enduring action, intelligence-led teams, partnerships, initiatives, but that, again, are persistent. They're long-term, but are information-informed in action, resulting in the impact that everybody wants here. And so, in this case, looking at the source of firearms that are used in crimes against retailers on retailers properties where they coming from stolen from vehicles stolen from gun shops are just two major sources of these weapons these firearms that are used in gun crimes so what can be done about are there ways that we can strengthen, help, advise, do testing, research on better protection of the, let's say, gun shops in this case, the perimeters,

the interior spaces, the weapons themselves, the ammunition? What can we do to deter, disrupt, and document and do this in a much stronger way, but do it in a very cost-effective, very affordable way for small gun shops, small gun dealers around the country. So stay tuned to some of that opportunity there. That's just to call out one I mentioned before. We had the CDC in here, NIOSH team, again, brainstorming around some of the same issues, that violence in the workplace, in the parking lots, and in the stores, in the distribution centers and office environments, not just necessarily from firearms, but from all sources. So, we can see that there's a lot of coordination and interest in evidence-based practice and research. And we're just very, very excited to be involved and to be

asked to get into the fray here. So, coming up next week, there's the RELA Annual Asset Protection Conference. We've got four of us going, maybe five if I'm able to go. I'm slated to speak and do some things with the Southeastern Conference. Law enforcement agencies, all of them are coming into Gainesville to the University of Florida as the Sears host. You have police department and emergency management teams. So I've got a role there to help support that and go through some of the R&D capabilities. So I'm trying to see if I can do both. If not, I may not be able to make it to RELA. But we will have four great team members there. Our new director of operation, Greg

Navarro, will have Chad McIntosh, our COO and longtime asset protection loss prevention leader, Bloomingdale's vice president, Rite Aid vice president of loss prevention. So we'll have our director of research here, Dr. Corey Lowe, and we'll have Diego Rodriguez, our head of marketing operations here. So that all will be participating at RELA. So I hope that everybody comes by, engages with them. They'll be talking a lot about our research, our conferences and events to translate research into practice and other new initiatives, but also to get your take. What can we, how can we do better, get more of the right information and get that information in you and your team's hands in a more actionable way. That's always, always every day our goal

here at the LPRC. We've been doing, as per normally, more and more, not just planning, but execution of the projects in the field initiatives, specifically the Port St. Lucie Saver Places Lab Initiative. We've got, again, three Walmarts working together with Port St. Lucie Police Department, learning the lessons, how do we much more tightly coordinate, have common operating picture, and also be able to jointly operate surveillance sensors. That's a big part of that that we're learning the next part is of course our Gainesville east side initiative seven retailers have stores there that are working with us to get better at each place and together and together with the Gainesville Police Department and hopefully it looks like now soon with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office. They're highly fired up and we've had home and home visits.

So that is progressing nicely. The dashboard to help with both the Port St. Lucie PD and the Gainesville Eastside and upcoming Westside initiatives continues to take shape. initiatives continues to take shape. We've been working with Gainesville PD and supporting them on a problem-oriented policing situation, POP, kind of an intelligence-led situation that's a few blocks east of our lab complex, and we'll fill in more on that, but we're excited to support Gainesville Police Department on that. Speaking of GPD, we're going to be taking a train ride. It looks like this Thursday, but if not, there's a possibility we'll postpone to the following week if I'm here, but that point is to get some of our

research team together and then ride with one or possibly it looks like two Gainesville PD officers that know the area very well on the east side where the test area is and just get out, do walk and talk, do drives and go around and understand from law enforcement officers that work the area's point of view. The drone missions, we're going to be doing a little bit more video imaging of the test area so planning on that going on um we are working away on the body worn camera portion of this we've got in one set of brand new cameras uh we'll be we're waiting now uh possibly one more week for the next set from another manufacturer to come in. We're working on the protocols there.

Our team's doing a pre-implementation assessment survey, getting an idea of what's going on in those locations, who's working there, what their experience levels are, what other tools they've got, doing a census of other protective devices and efforts there. So that's that pre-install we're working way also on the warn inform part of this of this mission and that's the two-way radios we've got 12 motorola tlk 100s or 110s with earpieces near mics and we've been working away on those tactics and how we're going to do that so we're getting ready to deploy in that way again a camera array that can help us better understand what vehicle and pedestrian movement by time of day and day of week in the test area just get an idea what's the baseline what's the normal activity by people where they walking to

and from what vectors approach vectors are they taking the same thing with vehicles um just to get a baseline of behavior before we implement visible deterrence to see hey does that change uh so a lot of interesting things there as well as online chatter changes um so much going on here the the supply chain protection summit evidently was a wildly successful um and again very appreciative of rei for hosting that at one of their brand new distribution facilities uh huge turnout great participation i understand i've been seeing a lot of linkedin posting I understand I've been seeing a lot of LinkedIn posting about it. And that group, the supply chain protection group, is just a fired up bunch.

And they're planning what they're going to do at the upcoming impact conference, LPRC impacts in October. The violent crime working group coming up in New Mexico, hosted by Brookfield Properties at one of their facilities there. That's where there's a lot of heavy planning. Everything's ready to go there. We got a very nice enrollment going on. That's going to be the April 21st, I think. So if you have interest in that, you're an LPRC member or in law enforcement, then please contact us at operations at lpresearch.org.

So a whole world of things going on, almost too much to cover in two hours. So what I'm going to do is turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio and then to Tom Ian and take it away. Thank you, Reid, for all those great updates. Let me focus this week on what's happening with self-checkout and all this stealing that retailers are reporting, and also what's happening in general in the broader trend of frictionless commerce, and is that going to slow down self-checkout? So this is actually part of an article that I published. And in the article, I pointed out that in the latest NRS security survey, retail shrink represented $112 billion in losses. And it was up 20% from the previous year. And a lot of the folks at the Loss Prevention Research Council will be familiar with the survey because they drove out the actual survey itself with the NRF.

Similar high shrink growth rates can be seen in other countries, such as UK, where in the latest British Retail Consortium research, customer staff doubled to just shy of 2 billion pounds or two and a half billion dollars. That's a lot of money. And as I predicted many years ago, the problem of retail shrink was in a collision course with frictional and commerce consumer trends. And this, in my view, this growing challenge actually brings new opportunities for both retail industry as an industry and for the loss prevention function. Countering all the challenges that we've been hearing about which shrink taking place is really what younger generation are looking for, which is less friction or frictionless commerce as they go shopping.

Over 50% of consumers will switch to a merchant with less friction in the shopping experience, and 41% of all consumers will pay for more simple and fast and convenient shopping experiences. Specifically, to self-check out, the 2024 Digital Commerce Index found that 43% of consumers favor self-checkout when shopping in a grocery store. By age, it's interesting all the various differences. Again, younger generation, for example, 55% of the 18 to 29-year-old favor it, 30 to 44 again very high rate 51 percent 45 to 60 at 40 percent and as you will predict over 60 years old only 26 percent favor self-checkout so in my view especially for younger generation frictionless commerce is out of the bottle, the genie bottle, and is actually now appearing in all sectors, not just grocery. But as I wrote previously in other articles, it's also prevalent even in apparel stores, which also are adopting more and more frictionless commerce. stores which also are adopting more and more frictionless commerce. In my research I also focused a lot more in terms of what's going on in self-checkout and what happens when you increase

friction. There's a chart that I share where I point to some research that says and this is from CoreSight if you put items under lock and key 26% of consumers are going to shop elsewhere and another 26% are going to shop online. So locking things up, you lose a good chunk of consumer in the process. And if you read all the journals and all the things that retailers are doing, self-checkout has introduced more shrink challenges. One study of retailers in the United States, UK, and other European countries found that companies with self-checkout lanes and apps had a loss rate of about 4% more, more, which is more than double the industry average. So 4% shrink rate as self-checkout, more than double the industry average. Also very interesting from a landing tree survey,

almost all Americans, 96% to be precise, have used self-checkout at one point or another. Most Americans said they enjoy it. But 69% believe that the machines contribute to shoplifting. 79% of such account users digitally insure each item was scanned. 21% admit to accidentally taking an item and guilt didn't get any better of the 61% who kept it anyway. 15% of self-checkout users to confess to purposely stealing a self-checkout, while 60% of those who have stolen felt remorseful and 33% once they've been caught,

44% they are likely they would do it again. Interesting, again, it's a generational thing. 31% of Gen Zers and 21% of millennials have purposely taken an item and self-checked out without scanning it. The self-reported value of the stolen goods is $60 on average. Among those who steal in the future, 46% said all targeted items more expensive than anything else in their cart, while 37% will help themselves to essentials like food, water, and health care goods.

While 23% of self-checkout users think that they have witnessed someone else steal from a machine, 45% have said they didn't do nothing about it. Some consumers have been hit with false accusation, as 10% of self-checkout users said they've been wrongfully accused of taking something. That figure rises again, 17% for Gen Zers and 14%, again, millennials, again, those younger generation. The teams are actually getting much more organized. And if you search and if you go to your LinkedIn, to my article or to TonyDenafri.com, you can get a link to a blog that will teach you how to steal and self-checkout and it'll teach you things like the old switcheroo, the pass around and the cut and run.

And above challenges really that I've just described in self-checkout have led to many retailers rethinking what they're doing. Dollar General, which had moved to exclusive self-checkout, is the latest to reverse the course on the technology. Walmart earlier this year pulled back in New Mexico stores as did ShopRite in Delaware. Five Below is not getting rid of self-checkout but it is increasing staff cashiers. Target has started limiting self-checkout to 10 items and Costco is adding more employees to monitor self-checkout. So even with all these challenges my view Frictionless Commerce is here to stay primarily because younger generations want it. There are labor savings, and there's also labor shortages, and really that's driving the deployment. The number one really fastest shrinking job that's forecast from 2021 to 2031 is cashiers.

So that's, again, that tells you again that self-checkout is where we're going. The smartphone is really the everything device. Younger generation are demanding much more innovation. They're asking for things like crypto, virtual fitting rooms, and this is the ability to pay for crypto live streaming QR codes so shopping on mobile apps and they're also willing to give up more

privacy for shopping perks so as a result these frictionless commerce trends and self checkout will continue to. And there's lots of examples in terms of how it's going to evolve. Some of them will be smart cards. Some will be using AI to verify, to make sure that you're actually paid for goods. So again, the genie's out of the bottle. I actually called it the self-checkout horse, which is written by Frictionless Commerce, is out of the gate and it's going to win the consumer race. However, South checkout still needs fine tuning as a strategy for greater consumer independence, both as stationary and mobile additions.

Frictionless Commerce is the next generation consumer shopping of choice, again, especially for younger generation. But the new technology will have to address in the short and medium term. So some new technology will have to address all this stealing that is happening as a checkout. So that's my update this week. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reed. I'm taping this in Europe this week, and I've been all over Europe,

and sediment in Europe is very similar to the U.S. There's a lot of lows, but the people in general were very happy. I think when we think about retail theft, I saw some really interesting things here that I would argue that maybe in Europe they could be a little ahead from a technology investment standpoint or some policy and procedures. So very interesting time here. Last week was the Los Peron Research Council Supply Chain Summit. So first and

foremost thank you to the Supply Chain Working Group, REI for hosting at the distribution center outside of Nashville, and the Los Peron Research Council team for putting together what is of of course, another phenomenal event. And an event that I would argue is, much like other Los Aventos Research Council events, different than what a traditional trade show slash meeting would be, where you had a group of practitioners and solution providers together, coming together to collaborate to solve challenges and discuss new ideas. So really great use of time.

If you didn't attend and you're in the supply chain community, I would strongly suggest you reach out. If you're a member of the Lost Mansion Research Council listening to this, we did do a taping there on the podcast. So that was really exciting and fun. It's always fun to be with people live and doing something in person versus virtually. So that we had a great time there. Also this week was the solar eclipse. So the next solar eclipse is in 2045. So hopefully you had an opportunity

to view that. If you didn't, the next one will be in 2045. There was a lot of internet doomsday and conspiracy theorists about the eclipse. And the reality was it was an eclipse. And aside from kind of typical traffic backup that's related with any major event, there was no real up that's related with any major event. There was no real occurrence or any problems associated with it. So as I often say this, and I mean this wholeheartedly, be very mindful of what you're reading online and mindful of the doom and gloom that goes with a lot of the things we work on, because there are a whole host of conspiracy theorists and misinformation out there and the solar eclipse is probably the best example of some of the challenges with social media is that if you read some of these posts, you could deduct that there's actual factual information

with the amount of information that was being shared if you um if you were in a position you could potentially have some confirmation bias where you read something that well you know there's an event that's occurring at the same time there's an eclipse how much do you have to do with each other where um there's no evidence to support that also last week the eclipse was this week there was an earthquake in the New Jersey area, you know, and with, I think at this seat, almost 50 aftershocks. So not a small earthquake, not a huge earthquake by California standards, but a 4.8, which was a pretty significant earthquake for the New Jersey, New York area. So lots and lots of stuff going on and all very interesting. I wanted to just kind of spend a few minutes on just two things and then we'll turn it back over to Reid.

But one is that there was a U.S. intelligence giving a warning out around targeted attacks around gatherings against race and religion. So we actually saw an active shooter this week in a mosque. This was an intelligence briefing that went out last week and then was reaffirmed at the beginning of this week. And while it was a little bit broad, it basically stated that there's a heightened risk for threats of violence in large group gatherings. So the bottom line here is to stay vigilant, stay in tune to what's

going on, and for lack of better words, if you see something, say something. And then last on the tech side is Google has announced its kind of competition to the Find My feature on Apple. And so if you have an AirTag, you're familiar with the AirTag, but also Find My device feature. One of the things that I think is really interesting is Google and Apple, which is unusual. We're working together on a standard and anti-stalking standard that has been agreed upon and released, where you will see shortly on both Google and Android devices the ability to see if an Apple tag or if there's a tracking device in your device for an extended period of time. So as we continue to develop technology, we need to be mindful of some of the bad actors taking advantage.

For those of you that are using AirTags for investigative purposes, this would be a time to really look at that because that's going to be flushed out with that. You're going to get notifications and it'll be easily identified. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reed. Thank you. Thanks so much, Tony and Tom. Good stuff as always.

Very appreciative of your time and your sharing your expertise, your experience, and your knowledge. And I want to thank Diego Rodriguez, our producer. I want to thank you all for listening and tuning in. Please, please let us know what in the world can we do to get better and better and 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