LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 184

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

This week our hosts discuss some of the newest and latest trends, technology, and LPRC news! On this episode, our hosts discuss the continued college protests, the use of technology and it's role in operations, UK's Government response to retail crime, and the growing attention to Self-Checkouts. 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 is the latest in our weekly update series. I'm joined by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez and we're going to talk a little bit about crime and loss we're going to talk about retailing and what's going on around the U.S. around the globe and I'll start out with talking a little bit about some of the disruption being experienced of course on campuses across the United States and elsewhere in the world. Here at the University of Florida,

there's been a little bit of disruption, not much. The university administration, UFPD, and so on, moved fairly rapidly and were pre-planned for these kinds of incidents. And it's really interesting in that being so close and having the opportunity to work with UFPD and emergency operations and being so close to them, we see how professional they are, how well trained, how smart the command staff and the officers are, and how experienced. So it's's really the dynamics are pretty interesting there's typically six to seven home football games a year this is a southeastern conference where most of the games are there are huge crowds anywhere from 85 to 95 plus thousand

at the games you know you've got people that, that have been drinking for two hours or 20 hours. And so there's a lot of dynamics. There's a lot of heated rivalries or just robust rivalries. So you could imagine if it can, it will happen, it seems sometimes. But really, actually, when you look at the data and we have, incidents are down year on year. There's just better control, a little more self-control, maybe things going on. But the point is that the UFPD and their partners, the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, the Gainesville Police Department, and also other agencies will come in on game day. They're used to working together and they because they do this six to seven times a year as a minimum, they get to rehearse, they practice, they've got interactions and integrations that they work on. Their communications is amazing. I've been to the pre-game briefings and in the command center. So it gives them a world of knowledge and an opportunity every year,

year on year, and for over a course of months to work together and join operations. So when there are other problems or other issues like controversial speakers that will come on campus, when we've got the ongoing hurricanes that happen here in Florida, and there have been several very devastating hurricanes here and so on. These things, they have a robust, uber modern emergency operations center. And so the point is that they are absolute experts on getting ahead of handling and recovering from disasters, from these large events. And so when it comes to protests and things like that, there's a lot of history, but there's a lot of training and a lot of police science that goes into what they do and how they handle it. So in this case, basically assigning this is the area

that you can exercise your freedom of speech. But freedom of speech doesn't include any behavior or even things that are said that threaten, intimidate, intimidate, excuse me, or disrupt anyone else. You can't impede people walking to and from classrooms or the library to study or anything else that's going on. People are trying to do landscaping or go teach their class. And so forth. You just can't impede that, that activity. You can't intimidate or try and harm anybody through your speech or through your actions. It's illegal to camp overnight. So that was prohibited. So what they basically did is here's the area.

Here's what the rules things that you cannot do, just like with our kids having a code of conduct when they go to school or in a workplace having a code of conduct. We're here to do this and that's it. If you want to express your freedom of speech while you're here to do this, then you may, but you cannot do X, Y, and Z. In this case, it was articulated very plainly, very clearly on a page of paper that, you know, if you do violate these rules of the road, then you will be immediately ejected. You'll be trespassed. In other words, given a trespass warning, you may not enter campus for a minimum of three years or you will be arrested. If you are a student, you will be also removed and you will be expelled from school if you violate these rules. You cannot violate

other people's rights while you are exercising what you believe is your right so just very minimal i rode by yesterday yesterday on the way back from the labs to my home and i noted that the students now were no longer the protesters were no longer in the center of campus in the plaza americas but instead were on the corner of the intersection of University and 13th Avenue. And that there were UFPD vehicles on either side with officers just kind of, you know, hanging out and making sure that everything's okay. And you had maybe 40 or so people holding flags and placards and things like that. And so, but in other places, we've seen how disruptive it could be. And the reason I even bring all this up is that one, there's a lesson learned for all of

us as far as trying to, as we talk about, get left of the event, left of bang, pre-event, and how do we plan and deter and disrupt criminal offenders on their journeys to harm others? How do we handle those situations once they've initiated and they're going on? And then how do we recover from those and how do we maybe try and take action so that the offenders can't harm others in the future beyond what they've just done? So that's what we're seeing here is that these agencies, these departments are trying to get ahead. In other areas, they couldn't. There weren't enough people on the staff compared to maybe the crowd sizes to do what they like.

Their administration or certain administrators might have told them they cannot exercise and implement their training and their strategy and their tactics to maintain order and discipline and to maintain freedom of movement for students and faculty and staff to move around and do what they're there for primarily so we want to look forward to the election here coming up which I think there's a lot of concern about particularly with this type of behavior going on here where it's widespread and doesn't seem to be very well informed by data, by historical facts and things like that, which is always a concern on all sides of the equation. So LPRC will be standing up FusionNet. Many of you are familiar with FusionNet. It's something that our team put together on the Discord platform at that time during 2020 as we prepared for

and to enable our retail corporate members to get on there, their teams get on, and through written channels and on voice channels, communicate with each other, share what they were doing, what they're learning, how they're adjusting, adapting. Remember, there were those stores that were allowed to remain open, those that were not, essential stores and things like that, or essential departments within stores, and how to mark floors, and how to wear masks, and how to do this or that. Do you apprehend people that are stealing your merchandise and then as we went into the vaccines were coming available how are we going to be distributing

those and administering those so they could share that information then we got into the blm time frame where there were looting events riots all across the country retailers were being heavily heavily affected stores put on fire started you know people driving forklifts through the through their stores and turning on the sprinkler fire systems and in mass just stealing from them so the retailers could try and get ahead of the problems deal with them and recover from them by sharing intelligence about what they what might be coming and how they were getting ready to prepare, what they were experiencing in the heat of the moment, how they were recovering, and so on. So we'll be doing the same thing. We did it during the prior elections and other heated events, court cases where there were maybe an officer- shooting and so on so anytime that a retailer

their people uh their places are possibly or probably going to be affected by some external dynamic um then fusion that is there for so we'll be putting out more information we've got some support from u.s u.s ROTC program for some of those students and others that want to go into the military, to intelligence, to law enforcement and those types of opportunities that we're collecting all the information we can that we're operating providing what our retailers need before during and after these situations so that's just a little bit about what we're preparing for now in the beginning as we go into summer uh getting ready for what may or may not occur during the fall uh coming up so trying to be left of bang here and trying to help everybody support what's going on. Other news, we had an amazing turnout, as we mentioned, at the LPRC Violent Crime Summit in Albuquerque, New Esco this year.

And over 100 executives participated, law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level, as well as dozens of retail corporations were represented by investigators and others working on organized retail crime, on violence, and also setting up Albuquerque as an ongoing research and innovation city, an initiative for us to add to, of course, what we talked about before, Atlanta, Gainesville, Eastside and Westside, and Port St. Lucie, Florida, where we're trialing some things down there. So, a lot happening there. Everybody is continuing to prepare for the

Impact Conference, and we've got a real concern here in a positive way that we had over 500 executives participate in 2023 impact on campus at the University of Florida last year. But the capacity is around 550 people. And with the LPRC kickoff, I've mentioned normally being 100 executives participating. This year, over 200 executives participated. We're concerned what might happen as far as a space available. and you are planning on participating in 2024 LPRC Impact, please, you can register on our website. Our Connect newsletter goes out weekly to several thousand retail and law enforcement and solution partner executives. If you're not getting that, go to LPResearch.org. But you want to get registered.

If you're a solution partner but you want to get registered if you're a solution partner you want to get registered you've got it and you're a member of the lprc you've got a seat you have an opportunity to sponsor and have a table in the solution experience center um but my understanding is that over half of those are already sold out then we've got over 150 people already registered for impact and that's growing daily. This year, last time, I think we had about 20 people. So, giving you some relevance there. We've also added, I think it's 18 retail corporations to membership and another 25 or so that are talking to us about potentially becoming LPRC community members. So, we're busy working the content.

There are dozens of retail, excuse me, dozens of research projects underway that are looking at anti-theft, anti-fraud and anti-violence. We love, absolutely love being at and working with other industry conferences, but this conference, the LPRC Impact, is the only one where every single session is based on research that we are doing in the real world with retailers and solution partners to come up with much better and enhanced protective efforts. So, stay tuned. We're making some big changes to our labs. The engagement lab now has about 500, over 500 solutions in it. This time last year, we had 200. That gives you an idea. So the computer servers, the amount of fiber things that run, you can't imagine, but it's exciting. It's just absolutely exciting to see all the changes.

We're going to take on some additional space. Our team, again, has grown from six to 20 in 18 months, and we'll probably, by the time impact rolls around the first week, full week in October this year in 2024. We'll probably have 23 team members, so we need more space for our team to be collaborative but not sit at the same exact desk, right? So, we need some space for them in addition to the lab space that we have because the labs are used daily rather than weekly now and on top of having vip visits from our solution partner and retailer and law enforcement members and partners almost every single week now in fact some weeks there are multiple visits so a lot going on it's all exciting um and we're here to support

with everything that we can uh each and every one of you all and your organizations in the fight against self-broadened violence. So with no further ado, let me turn this over to Tony, and then we'll go to Tom. Thank you, Reed, for all those great updates. Let me start this week by going to the other side of the pond and talk about retail crime from the UK point of view. And to give you an idea idea how hot it's getting and how high it's getting in politics I'm gonna go to the independent UK newspaper where Sir Keir Starmer the UK leader of the Labour Party which is the opposition party of the government that's in place now has promised retail workers he will crack down on crime and reverse what he called the Tory

shoplifters charter in a speech. Sir Keir said, today I'm putting shoplifters on notice. You might get away with it under this weak Tory government. We'll put 13,000 extra neighborhood police on the beat, tackling crime on your streets. We'll scrap the shot through charter, the 200 pounds rule that stops the police investigating theft in your workplace. And we will legislate to make sure assaulting and abusing shop workers is a standalone criminal offense because you deserve to feel safe at work. Figures released last week showed that the number of shelf-lifting offenses recorded by police in England and Wales have risen to the highest levels in 20 years. Of the 408,690 police reported shoplifting offenses in England and Wales in 2023 that were assigned an outcome, 16% were charged or summoned, while 58% of the investigation were closed with no suspect identified, according to the PA News Agency analysis of home office data. This compares with 15% and 55% respectively in 2022.

Sir Keir said, nobody in Britain should be in any doubt about the scale of the crime we're on our high streets at the moment, the epidemic levels of shoplifting, and the persistent plague of antisocial behavior. So that gives you an idea of how hot the politics are getting in terms of retail crime in the UK. Switching topics, I'm going to come back to the United States and go to an opinion piece that was published in the Wall Street Journal. Americans think crime is on the rise, but the media keeps telling them they're wrong. A Gallup survey last year found that 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats thought crime was increasing. A February Rasmussen report

survey found that 61% of likely voters say violent crime in the U.S. is getting worse, while only 13% think it's getting better. Journalists purport to refute this by citing official crime statistics showing a downward trend. In 2022, 31% of police departments nationwide, including Los Angeles and New York, didn't report crime data to the FBI. In addition, in cities from Baltimore to Nashville, the FBI is undercounting crime in those jurisdictions reported. Another reason crimes reported to the police are falling is that the arrest rates are plummeting. If victims don't believe criminals will be caught in punishment, they won't bother reporting them. According to the FBI, if you take five years preceding the COVID-19

from 2015 to 2019 and compare them with 2022, the percentage of violent crime in all cities resulting in an arrest fell from 44% to 35%. Among cities where more than 1 million people where violent crime disappropriately occurs, arrest rates over the same period plunged from 44% to 20%. Arrests for poverty crimes died even more sharply. FBI data said that in 2022, 12% of reported poverty crimes in all cities resulted in an arrest. In cities of more than 1 million people, only 4.5% of reported poverty crimes in 2022 resulted in an arrest. While the rate of reported violent crime fell 2.1% between 2021 and 2022, the National Crime Victimization Service shows that total violent crime reported and non-reported rose from 16.5% to 23.5% per 1,000 people. Non-reported violent crime in 2022 exceeded the average, the 2015 to 2020 average by more than 17%.

So data reflect the scant consequences criminals face, according to this opinion piece. During 2022, in cities with more than a million people, only 8.4% of all violent crimes reported and unreported, and 1.4% of all property crimes resulted in an arrest. Not all those arrests resulted in charges. So that's one of the big debates that's going on on this side of the pond. And I'm sharing this opinion piece, not to take sides, but to share some of the data that's out there in terms of from both sides. So this is one side in terms of one view. And I'm going to end this week with, again, another One view. And I'm going to end this week with, again, another story from the Wall Street Journal, which reported on store operators modifying how they use self-checkout stations in a boost to improve their profitability and improve shopping experiences for customers. Some retailers are pulling kiosks out of stores as a way to keep

a lid on theft. Others, including Target, Dollar General, and the regional retail chain, Schnucks, have limited how many items customers can bring to the self-checkout area to avoid bottlenecks and alleviate headaches for staff. In March, Five Below Chief Executive Officer Joel Anderson said the retail chain limited the number of open self-checkout registers and positioned employees at more checkout lanes to assist customers. checkout lanes to assist customers walmart pulled self-checkout lanes from a handful of stores in recent months based on feedback from associates and customers a spokesman said about a fifth of people use self-checkout stated they accidentally took an item without paying for it according to a survey of 2000 shopper last yearTree, some 15% of self-checkout users admitted to stealing an item on purpose. On social media, some users have posted videos of shoppers scamming a lower-priced item instead of a higher-priced item that should have been scammed.

item that should have been scanned. Shoplifting used to be mostly invisible, said David Johnston, Vice President of Asset Protection and Retail Operations at the National Retail Federation. What we are seeing now today are methods that are open and brazen, David concluded. So just some thoughts in terms of where we're at in the state of self-checkout. It is changing in terms of how it's adopting and how it's being adopted by retailers in terms of improving customer service, but also reducing tasks. So that's the news this week. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Good morning, and thank you, Tony gonna turn it over to Tom. Good morning and thank you Tony and thank you Reid. We're gonna do a brief recording today. I am traveling so

excuse the background noise and I think we've been talking about the protests at college campuses all around the United States and really the world in the last couple weeks and just wanted to kind of remind everyone about the the fusion net at the Los Brancos Research Council and the ability to utilize that to share information in and during an active event right now these protests have stayed around college campuses but there's always the concern or the risk that they could spill over into civil disturbance that could impact some of retail dwellings and other businesses. I wanted to just go through a couple really interesting things that were reported in the news the last few weeks. This did make national news. I'm going to specifically talk

about some New York news around it, but NBC, Fox, the New York Post, the New York Times all reported on what would be a privately held local cosmetic store just in Manhattan in Herald Square had been shut down for illegally selling over a million dollars of stolen goods. One of the sources of the news story said that they recovered around $200,000 worth of merchandise from Macy's and some merchandise that was unidentified for Walgreens. Interesting here, this is making really large news. Both the district attorney, Alvin Braggs, for New York City and the New York City Mayor Adams spoke about this. This is a good sign.

This is something we talk about all the time. Getting the media attention that there is a challenge here helps us all. Additionally, there was a bill in California that came through, which is an interesting one. And this also made national news, although I don't think it had as much exposure as the organized retail crime bust in that cosmetic store. But in California, there is a proposed bill to eliminate self-checkout in certain grocery and other retailers. Interesting, the Fox News article that I'm referring to referred to that self-checkout causes up to 10 billion dollars in loss in California I think there was a lot of anecdotal information and basically the bill would in certain retailers establishes force a human cashier and not allow for the use of self-checkouts

something definitely to watch I think there's a lot of bills on the docket that are interesting. I'm not sure what the data is behind it to support it, but definitely something that makes for interesting news and something for all each and every one of us to look at. And the news articles really cited some things in the bill and a few politicians talking about it, but didn't have a lot of specifics. There was also some talk of because it's earnings season CNBC said it had a pretty interesting article about retail earnings highlighting that consumers are cautious yet still spending

the landscape with inflation that has definitely impacted spending, but they're seeing revenue growths in some companies, but they are seeing brands and retailers being forced to offer discounts. So I think we continue to talk about that. We're in what I would say is a volatile time, but something to definitely keep an eye on as the reports are not necessarily all doom and gloom. They're just some things that are out there that we need to be aware of. And then, you know, in technology news, something that we talk about often is the use of bitcoins

in retailers or retail. Merchant magazine had a really interesting story about Square, the payment platform that was introducing a new feature to allow merchants to convert their payments into Bitcoin. I'm always interested in the Bitcoin piece because we see the ebbs and flows and where people are accepting it. So definitely a space to continue to watch. And then I'll round out with just a couple risk things. And then I'll round out with just a couple risk things. The FBI issued a warning just this week about email users activating two-factor authentication on their accounts to protect against a rise in hacking instances. This is something we've talked about multiple times here.

This is a simple security measure that in most cases is free and very easy to do. And what it will do is help alleviate or protect you in some circumstances it's not an end-all tell-all but we continue to see a business email compromise so it's definitely something to keep an eye on and with that i will turn it back over to tony and reed tom so thanks hugely for that information fantastic i appreciate it uh Tony, as always, good stuff. You know how much we appreciate you. We appreciate you, Tom. And we know how busy you all are traveling the globe and working on helping control all the theft, fraud, and violence as well through powerful solution sets. And we want to thank each and every one of you all. We want to thank Diego Rodriguez, producer, and please 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.