LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 185

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

This week our hosts discuss some of the newest and latest trends, technology, and LPRC news! On this episode, our hosts discuss the newest iteration of ChatGPT release, a new Retailer visit to the LPRC Labs, an ORC case in California valued at several million dollars, and a look at the online marketplaces selling products online. 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, a weekly podcast series from the LPRC, and I'm joined today by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Ian, our co-host, and our producer, Diego Rodriguez. And we're going to talk a little bit about crime, loss, opportunities in the U.S. and abroad. And I'll take a quick look here at what the LPRC is up to. We had a fantastic planning or whiteboarding meeting with the Macy's corporate APLP team.

And we had the people, the leaders from the field and from the corporate office in the labs, a couple of them in New York due to illness, but still on Teams calls and connected. and fantastic planning and looking at where they are and where they want to go, going through some of the concepts that we've been working on here, how they might incorporate those into their planning and their action plan. So we'd love these visits. If you're a retailer and you want to have a meeting here at the LPRC, I'd recommend the way that we've been doing these. I think the retailers, the feedback we're getting is they love it. It's an independent place. It's a unique place here at Gainesville on campus in these labs. We set aside one or more rooms that a team that comes and visits can have their own meeting area that they can meet and brainstorm. There's connection TVs and

whiteboards and things for them and there if they want to connect with people remotely so they spend time with our team they spend time with their team they spend time in the labs there's cool places around town to go to and it's just different it's different than the corporate or regional offices it's different than the hotel and conference center grind that we've all gone through in our careers. So I want to extend that invitation. We've got Kim on the team and others that stand by and help plan and making sure that we nail the objectives. What do you really want to get done? What do you want to walk away with? What's your end state? Who all's coming? How much do you want to engage with the LPRC team, who on the team,

what are some specific issues in addition to objectives that you'd like to get done, where do you like to eat, what do you like to eat, all kind of things, those types of details, what do you want to see, what do you want to do, do you want to go to field initiatives, what we're doing out there. So, contact us at kim at lpresearch.org. Your team is interested in getting into Gainesville, getting into the labs, the UF Innovate Hub, and so on. Another part today and tomorrow, we've got the LPRC, excuse me, we just had so many. Today and tomorrow, we've got the LPRC, excuse me, we just had so many. Today and tomorrow, we've got the LPRC's Product Protection Working Group Summit. The summit's been going on for quite a few years now.

Corey Lowe, Dr. Lowe, our director of research, changed it a little bit, like everybody did with conferences and summits during the pandemic. We created a remote version, so it became virtual, if you will, and set up in our labs to broadcast live from here. Part of what he also did was he came up with some categories. What types of product protection are you proposing if you're a solution solution partner or as we call them an SP? What zone is it? Five beyond the parking lot? Is it four in the parking lot in that transition area from public to private property? Is it the zone three, that interior space and that transition from outside to inside and vice versa? transition from outside to inside and vice versa? Is it zone two, that area around the asset you're trying to protect, which would be zone one, is the asset, that person, that money, that merchandise,

that other asset property? And what category do you fit into as far as are you trying to increase effort to the offender? Are you trying to increase their perceived risk of detection and consequences? Or are you trying to reduce the benefit if they try and steal something compared to buy it? Or some combination of all the above, the zones and the mechanisms of action, the modes of action. So we're excited to have that and that summit going on this week. We also, the way Corey designed it and the way Dr. Justin Smith runs it now the last two years, three years, is that we've got voting panels of retailers that will vote on each of the categories, what they're most likely to try or they think has the most promise um doesn't mean it's always the best or not the best but it's based on their assessment

their evaluation their expertise and experience um but the main thing is to get submissions we've got well over 100 technology submissions into the program um it's another way just for RSPs to engage with the retailers and vice versa. It's a way to engage with our science team here, our researchers, and understand zones and understand the modes and mechanisms of action, how a solution works to deter a would-be offender or crew, how it works to disrupt them and their process, how it might document them and their process to generate more serious consequences for the offender, create more downside for them, reduce the upside of their effort, and so forth. So, we think all around it's designed, like everything that we do here very purposely to understand operational frameworks and how to use those.

How do we create dilemmas for individuals that are contemplating or initiating or moving toward harming us, harming another person and their places and their assets? So that's the LPRC Product Protection Summit this week. Go to lpresearch.org for information and ideas around that and our other events. We've also got today and tomorrow two different events. Today we've got AT&T Business coming in. We're going through all the connectivity that they've got inside of, in this case, stores to sell more and lose less. How can you leverage some of their smart hub and some of their other devices to connect various solutions, fixtures, people to better serve as well as protect in those places and spaces. So also looking and exploring TAL

and some of what they're working on, they've got some very powerful connectivity technology in the cloud and beyond that can run an enterprise or can coordinate between enterprises and organizations. So we're especially excited. We've talked a lot about detect, affect, and connect, detecting individuals and their crimes earlier as possible and more definitively, and then affecting their decisions and choices, creating those dilemmas, creating safer places, as well as connect to do the first two much better. And this is a connectivity play this week with AT&T. Day two is going to be slightly different, but AT&T business working with FirstNet, the U.S. government operated and funded, even though it's driven by AT&T,

and funded, even though it's driven by AT&T. FirstNet connects first responders. Over 11,000 first responder agencies around the United States use FirstNet for routine activities, but for special events, for disaster handling and recovery, and looting, rioting, anything that requires absolute connectivity in very harsh, challenging environments. So both teams are coming in. Excuse me, the teams that set up emergency cellular service in the wake of, let's say, natural disasters here in Florida, of course, the ongoing hurricanes that we have. So they're going to demonstrate that. That team will. There'll be some third-party supplier teams in here also demonstrating, as well as FirstNet showing their mobile units and some of the capability and capacity. We'll have public safety officials from North Central Florida, law enforcement, and fire rescue in, as well as emergency operations. And so there'll be,

and some officials, politicians as well, coming in to the UF Safer Places Lab, Innovation Square, where the LPRC is located. So we'll be brainstorming with them. There'll be demonstrations. And part of this is setting up the idea that the UF Safer Places Lab and Innovation Square would become a world-class state and national resource for research and development in these areas for commercial and private engagement for safety and security. So that's the other big play here. I was going to switch a little bit here and talk for just a minute about what we're doing with serial offenders. We talk a lot about crime in place and also high-rate, high-impact serial offenders, those that are creating the most damage, and how we connect them and their crimes to places and events, um, and each other and to again,

generate more serious consequences and to take the most serious high rate, high impact offenders out of circulation, take them out of that, that cycle where they're harming people, their neighbors, their family, their friends, friends, nearby and even distant commercial places like stores. So that's a big role for us in what we're doing, who we're mapping, what we're trying to understand, do our offender interviews, which Dr. Smith, Justin, and Tiffany and the team are doing almost weekly, if not weekly now, multiple offenders. And so we're looking at some of those criteria. Some we've called out before, some we may not have, but we're very interested in how they communicate with each other. How do they coordinate? And the Army used to call it, again, move, shoot, and communicate. They're trying to disrupt their

ability to move, to shoot at us, and to communicate and coordinate with each other. The same thing here. We want to understand how they're planning. Do they prepare at all or plan at all? How are they doing it? Where are they doing it? Are there places they're meeting up? Again, co-located or connected places, just like connected people, social networks, place networks are also important.

And so in this case, the social network and how that ties in with place networks, where they meet up certain bars, barbershops on the street, in some aunt's house or whatever it might be, right? Try and understand, map and focus on those places. We're looking at how they coordinate and who they coordinate with and where they coordinate with each other before, during, and after. Do they meet up at all? Do they talk through some type of platform by cell phone, regular or burner phones?

How are they talking to each other and coordinating throughout the crime? There's, again, left to bang, at and right. In other words, pre and during and post kinetic event, how are they talking and coordinating? How are they converting stolen goods to cash? How are they trying to do those things? Where are they doing them? How are they doing them? We're interested in those offenders too. They vary by attack frequency. Some might attack daily, some might attack weekly or monthly or some random interval, but that frequency of attack, their movement plays into how impactful they might be and ways that we might plan ahead and figure out where they're going to hit next and try and do something about it provide provide greater guardianship or protection um

we're interested in their attack search range how far they range are they trappers they just do deal with those that come to them or nearby them or are they more more predatory as far as movement and their search and attack range? Do they move out in the neighborhood? Do they move out beyond the neighborhood, the greater community? Or do they commute and go outside of that area so that their awareness space, their activity spaces are much larger? Are they going to other communities? Are they going regionally? Are they even going nationally or globally? So those are all important. Their planning and preparation, their coordination at different points before, during, and after their crimes, the frequency that they attack, the search and attack range, their mobility. And it is driven a lot by ability and capability, their resources. Do they have a vehicle, a serviceable vehicle or a reliable person to drive them around?

Is there mass transit that they use, buses and other forms of transportation? Do they have the resources to go on trips, rent cars, steal cars? Do they fly on aircraft commercially? So those all play a role in understanding and charting and affecting the offender crews and groups and individuals that are attacking. And a big part of this is the impact that they generate. How much violence do they generate on average per strike, per event, per attack? Is it pretty benign and you don't even know they're there? Is there some level of diversion?

Is there intimidation? Do they wield or display weapons of any type or act aggressively or worse? Do they get violent? What kind of fear are they generating? Again, is it benign? People don't seem to notice they're there. Or if they do, there's no confrontation, no aggression. Or is there a little or a lot of fear generated?

Is there concern because they're wiping out certain product categories and it's creating a lot of tension, concern, and worse from the customers and others because you're out of stock. So we take a look at all those things, the type of impact they're having, how much they take per event on average. You know, what is the hit? How much damage are they doing per event? And what's the aggregate amount of loss and that they're in fear and so on that they're creating? what's the aggregate amount of loss and that they're in fear and so on that they're creating. So a few things to think about is planning and focus and understanding. It's one thing to take an offender out that that is kind of a one off or here and now that can still be helpful. regular versus somebody that's high frequency, high impact per event creates fear and aggression by using aggression. So just take a look at those things and it's something that we're working on a lot. So let me do this. Let me, while we're planning for impact and so on coming up this

October, we're also planning to see people out at the National Retail Federation NRF's Protect Conference in Long Beach and the LA area coming up in early June. We'll see you all there. Should be four or five of our team involved there. We're grateful to the NRF team and grateful in the way that we are to the FMI and NACS and ICSC and of course RILA

and others, the foundation, LP foundation, just so many great, so many great groups that are pulling people together clear and on and on. So we're excited to go to the NRF conference and we're excited to look at, meet up with you all you all with no further ado let me turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio and we'll go to Tom after that so Tony if you would take it away thank you Reed for all those great updates let me start this week with a disturbing yet interesting study that was just published by ChainStorage. According to their reporting, a wide majority of retail workers feel unsafe on the job. 80% of retail workers are scared every day as the clock came for work, and 72% have experienced incidents in which the staff couldn't respond

to a threat because their store was understaffed according to the 2024 retail worker safety survey conducted by teatro according to the survey 37 percent of workers reported spotting the need for discrete emergency alert systems and 31% reported wanting communication devices with established code words for emergency situations. Nearly three quarters or 73% of retail workers are considering leaving their jobs and 64% were considered suing their employer over their store crime incidents. Again these are very disturbing statistics in retail and they reflect the increased organized retail crime

and retail crime in general that we're seeing all around us. So interesting that the data is validating the need and the increased need for employee safety. Sticking with chain storage but going to a different story in another study and the concern over shopping online in online marketplaces. According to this new survey on U.S. consumers from the search engines Shopico, virtually all respondents have at least one fear about shopping in online marketplaces. The study classifies online marketplaces as any platform where a peer-to-peer online transaction can occur, such as Craigslist or OfferUp, as well as Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shop, and TikTok Shop. shop and TikTok shop. Respondents ranked the top three anxiety-inducing online shopping scenarios as paying on sites that lack secure encryption, clicking on unsolicited offers via mail or email

or text, and completing peer-to-peer transactions. When asked about their fears and experiences with shopping in online marketplaces, respondents revealed their levels of concerns are much higher than actual incidence rates. Following are the top fears with the percentage of respondents who said they'd experienced them. Receiving a fake or incorrect product. 55% fear it. 15% fear it. 15% experience it. Seller misrepresents item condition. 51% fear it. 21%

actually experience it. Seller disappearing after receiving payment. 50% fear it. 17% experienced it. Having payment information exposed and stolen, 47% feared it, 15% experienced it. Difficulties with returns and refunds, 45% experienced it, 45% feared it, 16% experienced it. Close to 4 in 10 respondents that never had a negative experience related to shopping in an online marketplace. In addition, female and male respondents that had the same three fears, but higher percentages of women had fears than men buying a fake or incorrect product 15 percent of men feared this versus 58 percent of women selling um seller represent mess representing the item condition 47 percent of men feared it, 55 percent of women feared it, and sellers disappearing after receiving payment, 45 percent of men basically feared this, 55 percent of women feared this. So this is an interesting study, and it's why I mentioned this is actually one of the things that my wife actually

mentions when we try to sell some things on some of these online marketplaces. So increasing safety actually is one of the things that's got to get looked at because this is a concern that comes up. But it's good to see in the data that the fears are actually much higher than the reality. Although for the people that get caught up in that reality, that's probably extremely very painful. And let me end this week with a story from Business Insider on organized retail crime. The Los Angeles County Department said it had arrested eight people in connection with an organized retail crime ring that stole millions of dollars of products from retailers in the region officials said in the march 3rd 2024 that they had recovered merchandise including cosmetics over-the-counter medication and hygiene products which had been stolen from retailers in nevada arizona and california items were then brought to multiple locations throughout the L.A. County and sold to other crews who would then sell them to the public, the Sheriff's Department said.

Cash and guns were also recovered. The announcement follows raids last week in which corporate investigators from Walmart, Target, and CVS joined law enforcement to identify and recover boxes of merchandise from a dozen locations as witnessed by KCAL News. Authorities told the TV station the products were connected to a string of smashing red robberies and cargo theft incidents. One warehouse in the area was so filled with goods that it resembled a Costco said KCAL News and investigators said most of the items are sold online including on sites such as Amazon. So organized retail crime is here it is

extremely expensive these big cases are interesting because, again, they're extremely well organized with people picking goods and people processing goods and people selling goods online. I've seen other cases like this. This is something we all got to keep combating, and it's good to see the work that's being done at the Loss Prevention Research Council to go after some of this. It's important for the entire retail industry. And I'm really happy to be part of the Loss Prevention Research Council and the work that's being done in this space. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reed.

Today is a big day in generative AI. Chat GPT 4.0 was announced. And, well, I'll kind of do the best recap I can here on a podcast without spending the whole entire time talking about artificial intelligence. But ChatGPT 4.0 is the next version of ChatGPT. Some were surprised. I think some people really thought that this would be ChatGPT 4.5 or 5. but the reality here is this model is an updated model that offers a pretty significant speed boost the one of the things that I would note before I get into the specifics is they did what appeared to be a live demo as opposed to some other folks like the google demo that was pre-taped that allows you

to see what some of the latency is and while i wouldn't say that the demo went flawlessly the demo went pretty well and was pretty impressive if you follow artificial intelligence and chat gpt one of the things that you could say is alarming is that this is really, really rapidly moving forward faster than I think any of us really anticipated. The thing I would say is that one of the things about ChatGPT 4.0 that we all should care about is a live image recognition engine. While there are some apps that are out there that do this for visually impaired individuals, imagine a space where you'd be able to hook to chat to PT up to a camera or smart glasses and then you can actually have it teach you about whatever is in front of you. One of the examples they gave in the live demo is they wrote out a complex math problem and had a live conversation in natural language

with ChatGPT 4.0 and asked ChatGPT 4.0 to walk them through how to solve the math question without giving them the answer. And I believe there was about a 200 millisecond delay so it was a very naturally sounding conversation could you tell that they were talking to computer potentially but when you're watching the demo it was very impressive of it watching actually going through and explaining this so not just asking a question but being able to look at it and conceptually

understand what was there. The other really, really good thing that I think we'll see is this is now the perfect meeting assistant. You'll have an AI assistant during a meeting and not only be able to summarize it, but look into a company in real time and give you kind of what's going on. You'll also be able to work out data analytics problems in real time. I think that that feature will be a feature that a lot of people will be able to do. You'll be able to prepare for interviews and prepare for things really like you've not been able to do in the past. What it is, is you can say something or ask it a question and get feedback with natural language. So this isn't the chat GBT or chat apps that you're seeing today,

where you ask a question, you see that wheel spinning, and it answers you, you could actually and they demoed this live again. I'm nervous. The demo they used was the individual said they were nervous before they were speaking in an event. What were some things they could do? And ChatGPT explained breathing and the person was breathing erratically intentionally and ChatGPT recognized that, explained it, even made jokes about it. So this is that kind of transition where ChatGPT sounds like a human.

Now we know it's not a human, but it does sound like it. And I think it's something to really, really look at. I think this is great. If you're asking it a question and asking it for advice, you're getting a much more human-like answer. The other thing that I thought was really impressive is live language translation. So ChatGPT 4.0 cannot just help you with translating the words like in the past, but actually, you know, being able to pretty much understand any language in real time. So I, that demo wasn't as easy to understand, but it looks like it's going to be great. They also announced a desktop app. So for coding and for other things, this is really impressive. Why it's so interesting, the desktop app has the ability to share the

screen and it can see the screen. So for coding and programming and data Linux, I see a huge, huge advantage. Something that I'm not sure is super practical, but it allows, you know, because of the natural language, you can have two chat GPTs working together. A little bit strange. They actually had it sing a song together to different chat gpt's and while i would argue that it was near human like um i think it still wasn't perfect but it was absolutely um amazing that the two were able to have a conversation and do something a lot of vision a lot of vision applications where this is live vision or near live vision i don't believe it's ingesting video i i believe it's ingesting frame by frame but similar to other things that you may have seen

in the past with visual detection you could essentially in this in one of the demos they actually had the person hold the camera up and it said it looked like you're in a studio potentially doing a presentation, talked about the lighting, talked about it in very, very great detail. I see a tremendous amount of applications for the visually impaired, but I also see a tremendous amount of applications for compliance reviews and other applications where you need a second eye to look at something to see if you missed it. So really, really exciting stuff. Not sure there was an opportunity for actually ask two different chat GBTs a question. Ask one to be devil's advocate, one to be pro it, and actually get information on both sides. So I thought that was really, really interesting. What does this all mean? Well, before I get into that, the first thing know is uh that i didn't mention early on the other big thing about chat gbt 4.0 is sam altman

came out and said because it's so efficient because they were able to keep the cost down by doing this they're opening up a lot of features that were only available to paid users on to free users on chat gb 4.0 so this is a pretty big um announcement this is also in my estimation a monumental kind of uh announcement because if you remember when chat gb came out and um it was commercial the first time consumerly available was on it really changed the landscape of artificial intelligence because it was consumerly available. Now they're taking all of these really high-end features that were only paid features before and making them free as well, which really will change the landscape. There were a couple features they showed that they said were not fully released yet. Specifically, the live natural language conversational piece with no

delay has not been fully deployed yet but will be it's important to note too that they made this announcement very strategically the day before google's ai announcement so by the time you're listening to this podcast google would have probably already made their ai announcement so we're going to probably see a huge, huge change in what these generative AI models will do. If you're asking yourself the question, what practically does this do for me today that I don't do is I can personally and professionally say that the voice human natural language piece is probably the thing I'm the most excited about because you could put your phone down next to you and have a human-like conversation when you're doing research, when you're asking it to prove something.

And not just because it sounds natural, but because the delay is there. The other real advantage is you can do real-time research. As always, you want to make sure that you validate anything that you do with any generative AI. But what I would say is we're really poised for an amazing, amazing move forward when it comes to generative AI. Probably the most exciting announcements that I've seen, especially making it free for all. There were some other announcements, but I think that was the bulk of them. And I've covered almost 10 minutes on that.

So I wanted to just talk a little bit about some things that we're starting to see in the global front. There was an announcement that the U.S. will increase tariffs on a number of Chinese goods, including chips, solar cells, medical products, and electronic vehicles. There was a ton of international news about this, and it was pretty much everywhere. So it's definitely something to keep an eye on because generally when that occurs, there is some supply chain disruption, especially when we still have a large percentage of chips being made in asia now when i say chips i'm using the the term very loosely so about i think it's uh i don't want to mistakenly but it's more than 70 percent of silicon chips are made in taiwan today but there's still a large percentage of small

capacitors and resistors and other electronic parts made in China so we have to keep an eye on this to see what this means for all of us the EU is you know following on its promise to basically have you know a new gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. Booking.com joins Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft because it passes the threshold of 45 million monthly active users and more than 10,000 active business users. So this is something the EU is doing that we're not really forcing the larger companies to follow certain rules of the Digital Markets Act. We are seeing some of that spill over to the United States, but not as much. We continue to see civil disruption throughout the

U.S. related to pro-Palestine or either pro-Palestine or pro-is-real protests around college campuses. While I think some of the protests have died down in some markets, we still continue to see pockets of this. So it's something to certainly be aware of and be mindful of. We also are seeing chatter around the Donald Trump trial that's currently going on, the criminal trial. So my advice to each and every one of the folks listening to the podcast today would be stay tuned to the Loss Prevention Research Council's FusionNet to make sure that if there is an event that occurs that you can get the most up-to-date information available.

It's pertinent to each and every one of us to share information. And I would encourage you, if you're listening to this podcast, to also share information with the FusionNet. If you don't know how to get involved, reach out to myself, Tony Reed, Corey Lowe, or Diego Rodriguez, or really anybody at the All-Loss Prevention Research Council to get you involved so that we can make sure that you have the appropriate access to share and receive information. There have been a few, I wouldn't say a puffer, a few travel warnings that have come up around some of the conflicts throughout the world. So if you're traveling internationally, just be aware. I think a lot of these warnings continue to pop up

on international travel and U.S. citizens and really around the disruption. As someone that travels globally, I know Tony, myself, and Reid travel globally, I think, fairly often. You get a lot of these notifications. But what I always say is be aware, be prepared, and stay vigilant. And that's how you're going to stay safe. So lots of AI today. I suspect next week we'll have lots more AI to talk about. If you haven't used ChatGPT a little while go ahead and get it get in there and look at chat gpt 4.0 at the surface you may not even notice the difference faster better smarter really really exciting stuff and with that i'll turn it back over to reed all right awesome awesome tom thanks so much for that information uh i want everybody to know that

information uh i want everybody know that we now have an intern uh part-timer working with us on fusion net uh tom me and tom's been very instrumental uh in helping us get that launched and make that effective during the pandemic and up to the present day you'll see us taking that to the next level we're coordinating with tom on ways to do that tony i want to thank you for all the great insights and i want to thank you diego the great insights. And I want to thank you, Diego, for your production. But I also, of course, want to thank each and every one of you. Let us know what we can do, what we shouldn't do, what we can do better, what we can do more of or less. Reach out to operations at lpresearch.org. But refer us, Crime Science Podcast, like us, repostost whatever you can do we appreciate it we want to

get better and want to get the right information out there and connect the right people to make a real difference so stay safe and stay in touch thanks for listening to the crime science podcast presented by the loss prevention research council if you enjoyed today's episode you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.