LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 188

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

This week our hosts discuss some of the newest and latest trends, technology, and LPRC news! In this episode, our hosts discuss the newest LPRC AI Webinar, updates and growth in the SaferPlaces Lab program, underreported protests around the RNC Convention, the continued crime rise in California, and a look at employees' perception of the pandemic responses by their companies. 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 today by co-host Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer Diego Rodriguez. And we're going to talk a little bit about crime and loss around the world. I'll dive right in and talk a little bit about censors. We talked a whole lot about trying to affect offender behavior, their choices that they make by altering the choice structures that might be out there, the opportunity structures that exist,

and the built environment and what's out there in the Ethernet and so on that shapes how offenders ideate, initiate, and execute, progress, and so on, their crimes to victimize others. So we talk a lot about connect, and we're going to go a lot more into that later in another episode where we connect everybody together at the local level, at the enterprise level, at the community level. But we'll focus a little bit on detect, detecting offender decisions, leakage. In other words, things that they're saying or doing that leak out that they don't necessarily intend somebody to pick up on and understand, certainly not to find connect dots that we need to head them off in the past. But DTAC is so important in so many ways. But a couple of things we're working on, we're getting ready to do a webinar. And one of our research scientists, Caleb Bowyer, who is a data scientist, finishing his PhD at the University of Florida in electrical and computer engineering with the emphasis on machine learning and so forth, AI.

together the bowtie model. We had an earlier version of D-TECH and CONNECT along the bowtie, as well as effect, understanding before, during, after a crime, aiming points, what we're trying to do and how we're trying to do it and how we want to test it. So he's put together a much enhanced bowtie model explaining, again, every behavior, every characteristic we want to pick up on. And in each case, in each instance, what specific sensor do we need? And with each sensor, what potential AI models or existing AI models are there to enhance, to augment, to do things, to monitor, and at least give us a heads up, particularly things that are dangerous and most likely dull, that humans, we just have a hard time focusing on.

It may not pick up with all the noise, that particular signal that we really need to, or note that characteristic of a vehicle, of a sound, of an individual, of a tool, things like that, like a firearm. of a sound, of an individual, of a tool, things like that, like a firearm. So he's aligning that along every step and stage that we can think of along that offender's journey to crime, that crime script, and then listing that. What we'll be doing is talking with our solution partners, with our retailer members, members listening in and weighing in to find out and figure out, okay, who has a sensor and or a model or an idea for a sensor and or a model at this juncture for this warning sign online, this warning sign out in the community or in the parking lot or at the entry point into a location somewhere in that space and so forth that will

indicate hey this isn't the individual this is the tool this is the crime or the behavior the pattern the movement the voice the the other noise that we might be listening for and so that we can make sure that our solution partner community which is closing in on 140 organizations, is working on and is thinking about and is referring us to ways that we can do this and do it well. But the main intention then is to lay out our strategy. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to earlier and more definitively detect, catalog, connect, warn, inform those that need to be about very critical signals, characteristics, signatures, things like that to earlier head them off and to maybe prevent a crime all the way up until that last second. And this is going to make this a timely or maybe make it less timeless. But we had this weekend an individual that tried to assassinate, to kill a presidential candidate, the former President Donald Trump, and got pretty close. and got pretty close within, some say within a quarter of an inch of sure death. So how does that happen?

How could this individual, this crime, this contemplated victimization harm been earlier detected so that something could be done about it? If not online, and I know there's a whole lot going on there, looking into cellular activity, to posting activity, to conversations out in the community, and family settings, and so on, that might have been early warning indicators, pre-incident indicators, pre-event indicators. But all the way up until that point, we now understand just little bits come out. It's still fog of war. It's early days. It could take months or years, but certainly weeks to understand what

did and didn't happen and why not to enhance. And I think these are all lessons learned. This is something that we want to pay attention to because of what we do and how we're trying to protect people and places and assets. So, but all the way getting that close, how could they have been picked up? There are now early reports, as I mentioned, during this fog of wartime that an officer, deputy, maybe it was a local township or village officer that probably doesn't have a ton of experience or training with certain things, may have noted, maybe even said something to the individual while they were walking to the spot, maybe a confrontation while the individual was even on the roof, maybe even a situation where the criminal offender pointed a rifle at an officer. That officer retreated back down off the roof and so on. We don't know yet.

don't know yet, but that's going to be a critical part as we continue to put together that's the fact is what do you do about it if you detect whether you personally or somebody vicariously reports as a human sensor or some digital or other type of sensor reports a situation? How do you take that in? How do you process that? How do you respond? Are we ready and able? Are we capable of responding, of terminating or neutralizing a threat, or at least disrupting it enough so that the harm is reduced or eliminated? That's going to be E. So the sensors, the connectors, the dashboards to quickly interpret right there at the corporate enterprise level to share with law enforcement and other retailer partners and so on. They are all part of what we're trying to do here with detect, affect, and connect. And I think that's the big thing.

So maybe in this case, the threat wasn't detected online out in Zone 5. detected online out in zone five. But once they entered the curtilage, that zone four, three, two, one area, but certainly zone four parking lot in this building, you know, that they were detected. This individual was detected two, three, four times, but effective deterrent or disruptive or action wasn't taken. And maybe not even documentary other than citizens that also detected the individuals, tried to report verbally to certain people, yelling, pointing, indicating, and things like that. So it's just very instructive, I think, for all of us to understand in the heat of battle during very stressful times.

It's hot. It's noisy noisy you're tired you're sweaty you may not know understand completely what's going on whether you're a citizen or but certainly in this case you're the Guardian a law enforcement officer or the entire group that's there to protect um the people because somebody was murdered. Right. We had two people critically injured and we had a former president and current presidential candidate wounded shot. And if not for certain things, you know, who knows, a split second turn of the head would be dead. And so that's a pretty gross test outcome when somebody is murdered and others are wounded in the chaos that could have come, particularly if it had been even more serious, that we think about these things and that we propose better ways and that we trial

those in controlled situations inside and outside to make it sensible. So that's just giving you some insight. Hopefully it's helpful. What we're doing at LPRC is arraying sensors out there online in the community with LPRs. And then, excuse me, license plate readers, traffic cams, other monitoring devices, reporting apps, the law enforcement communications, retailers reporting to each other to law enforcement, arraying those sensors into a tighter and tighter concentric circles up until where we are, but trying to be cost effective about it. And I think by sharing and comparing, by warning and informing, we get a whole lot more and we don't have to invest as much individually. We can do things collaboratively, collectively.

And so on the Eastside initiative here and Port St. Lucie initiative, the Serial Offender initiative that we're doing with two CVS stores to start. CVS stores to start. And then as we roll up to Atlanta and things like that, everything's designed to iteratively figure out these things to trial and test these things, to break them, to improve them, or integrate series to conduct very realistic scenarios to do the same. All this is what we're trying to get done here. So I think with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Tony and Tom guys take it away so let me start this week with a new article from retail touch points explaining why RFID technologies are still complementary to electronic article surveillance according to the National Retail Federation retailers lost $112 billion to the shrink in 2022, up from nearly $94 billion

in 2021. As such, electronic card surveillance, hard tags, locks, alarms, and other physical and visual deterrents to test have become an unexpected part of the in-person shopping experience these days. Concurrently, as intelligence loss prevention systems that rely on radio frequency identification, or RFID, which also supports inventory insights to help retailers get ahead of retail crime are becoming more common and retailers are considering a change in approach in leveraging these. The increased availability of these systems coupled with the desire to reduce labor costs, simplify operation, and remove friction from shopper experiences and even motivated some retailers to explore the idea of removing EAS hard tags, for example, altogether from their LP programs.

However, early experiments with the idea have shown that eliminating hard tags could be a costly decision for retailers and have proven that each technology in the loss prevention toolbox has a part to play in an effort and the best is customized strategies in driving the optimized success. Despite the promise of RFID and intelligence-led loss prevention programs in terms of what they hold, it seems that the key to optimizing loss prevention programs still lies in balancing real-time deterrents like EAS and hard tags, locks, and alarms for prevention with analytics-based optimization and monitoring for the added capability of loss identification. After all, visual cues have a significant impact on individuals' behavior.

Research routinely shows that simply seeing security equipment makes all the difference for would-be criminals. It's the reason that the police, proximity, and the presence of alarms at our cameras and exterior lighting all deter home burglaries. There is evidence to show that just having a security sign can reduce the chance of break-ins by 25%. The same is true in retail locations where exits, signage, and hard tags act as visual reminders that test is taken seriously. After launching successful RFID program, several retailers were experimenting with adjustments to their physical security deployment. Nearly all saw increased shrink as a result.

One retailer that experimented with eliminating hard tags from its LP program saw shrink more than double in test locations within one year. Another retailer saw shrink grow 40-70% in test departments in just 7 weeks. A third retailer saw shrink increase by 40% in stores or categories where tags were removed but not elsewhere in the store. It's also important to note that from a labor standpoint, removing hard tags resulted in an unexpected but understandable byproduct, decreased potential workflow safety. Numerous retailers have tried to do away with hard tags, reported that the move negatively

affected workers as the number of theft events increases, so does the likelihood that associates or securities will witness or be involved in an incident. Amputee teams shared that their associates felt less safe in the stores without tags and many said associates' requests for the redeployment of tags played a part in their decision process to reverse course.

Shoppers also report that retail crime affects their shopping habits. A CIVIC science survey found that 38% of shoppers who have LPRC survey finding that one half of the customers interviewed feeling safe was in retail location with visible security measures. Tagging also has an effective alternative to locking cases for open and merchandise considering that 26% of consumers will shop elsewhere if the store put items under lock and key. So interesting data on why I also believe that both RFID and electronic article surveillance are still complementary because of the visual deterrence that in LPRC has been proven over and over ago helps deter crime.

Switching topics, let me go to the New York Post for an update in terms of what they said is the current crime trends in California. Violent crimes overall rose from 193,019 in 2022 to 199,838, with most of the increase coming from jumps in assaults and robberies. Aggravated assaults or attacks with the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injuries jumped from 128,798 in 2022 to 135,046 in 2023. Robberies which involved the threat of use of force to take property increased from 47,669 in 2022 to 49,7 in 2023 vehicle theft also rose from 181 815 in 2022 to 195 853 in 2023 interesting for this audience the largest increase was in shoplifting, which rose 39% from 81,955 in 2022 to 113,916 in 2023. shoplifting reports have increased 78% since 2020 when there were 64,105 shoplifting reports. However, with an average of 96,000 shoplifting reports from 2015 to 2019, 2020, and 2021, shoplifting figures in the 60,000 range are highly anomalous. Compared to the aforementioned post-proposition law 47, which came out in 2014, that turned potential families into misdemeanors,

five-year average of shoplifting still remains 19% above historical level. At a more local level, there are significant disparities in shoplifting. Interesting in San Francisco County, for example, reported shoplifting declined 21% in 2023 compared to 2022, while in Los Angeles County county shoplifting increased 62 percent in 2022 san francisco voters recalled district attorney chelsea bodine the handpicked successor of this county uh former district attorney george eskano became the los angeles district attorney in 2020. George Escan, who became the Los Angeles district attorney in 2020. Boutin's replacement in the special election, Democrat Bocan, ran on a tough, uncrowned platform, is up for a full term in November. So interesting stats in terms of what's going on in California.

California. And finally, let me end this week by going to EHS today and look at how well companies handle the pandemic, how they handled and how they could handle the pandemic going forward from a recent survey from the Future Fusion Risk Management Group, which found workers, by the way, were not not pleased the survey found that the majority 83% of employees say that that their company didn't have a dedicated pandemic preparedness plan 53% were not prepared and 43% felt feel that their company could have better supported employees during the pandemic. Looking ahead employees don't see much improvement at 23 percent don't think their current company could handle another pandemic and 26 percent believe that the company needs to improve

its communication regarding health and safety measures. However, there are some positive results from the survey. More than 52% of respondents say their company has implemented new policies because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The top-weight companies have changed their approach to include continued remote and hybrid work options, enhanced cleaning and sanitation protocols , and revised sick and time-off policies. When asked about how the pandemic influenced companies in their approach to risk management, respondents answered as follows. 43% said that there was a more heightened awareness

of potential risk and vulnerabilities. 29% said that their company implemented new risk management strategies or protocol. And 38% said there was an increased emphasis on proactive risk identification and medication. So, interesting, we made some progress in terms of how we handle pandemics, but more work to be done to make employees feel safe in companies. So, interesting thoughts this week overall on RFID and EAS in terms of deterrence,

crime in California, and how well we are prepared and were prepared for the pandemic. And with that, let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony, and thank you, Reid. Not to be repetitive here, but I think it's going to be hard to not mention the unfortunate occurrences this last week with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania marks a dark day in American politics. It really shows just how polarized we are. It's important to note that there is a tremendous amount of conspiracy theories and misinformation that is being spread. And I would encourage the listeners to look beyond some of the things that are being said

and say that this is an unfortunate event. It also kind of calls for the importance of dusting off your threat assessment, civil unrest documentation and guides. This is not the civil unrest of the past. And what I mean by that is we've seen a tremendous amount of protests that really in the last two weeks have not been covered widely in the news, both around the RNC and around that actual event that happened in Pennsylvania where there was an attempted assassination. What I'm not going to do today is I'm not going to spend time reviewing the things that have been said about the attempted assassination. I think at this point you've probably seen the video multiple times,

you've probably heard numerous reports. What I will talk about a little bit is that there are calls for a review of the Secret Service practices. I'd also say it's really, really easy to be an armchair quarterback in some of these events and say what it should have, could have, these things could have changed. I would argue that without, you know, getting too far down the road here, there are questions that certainly need to be asked. But for us as listeners, it's the stark reminder of how important it is to be vigilant. And when you're in a group environment to be aware of how these things can happen. Also, there has been an uptick in civil unrest post this rally. It is not being widely reported. It was a

lot around the RNC, but we are starting to see a tremendous amount of chatter around civil unrest and other things that are occurring. Also on Monday at the RNC, there was a man arrested outside of the RNC wearing a ski mask with a tactical bag with an assault rifle that was folded inside of it that didn't really make national, international news that I would have thought it would. It could be because it was overshadowed by the news of the attempted assassination. It could be any number of things. But I think what there's no doubt about is that what we all know is that we're in a very polarizing event. It's important to note that in that attempted

assassination, there were three bystanders shot, one that unfortunately was fatally wounded. And that as we approach the November timeframe of elections, that there is a high likelihood that we will have more civil unrest than we've seen in the past and attempts of violence. Some experts actually suggest that the attempted assassination could temper some civil unrest and others say it will exasperate it. What I would say here is that what we're here to do at the LPRC is to not make predictions or assumptions and just to simply remind folks of some of the tools and tasks that the LPRC has, like the FusionNet, which is a place where members can go to share information in an active threat environment. If you've been involved, you'll see that there's been

heightened awareness and more activities than in the past. So with that, I will turn over a little bit into the cybersecurity space. And there was a notification that went out on AT&T having a breach, again, with a lot of misinformation around it. Essentially, what appears to be a large, if not all, of AT&T's customers had some call records breached. Now, I want to preference that the information I'm giving has been changing in real time and has not been validated by the LPRC. It's more of just reporting what's occurring. But to date, it appears that the breach has released call log type information. So for information of date and time and phone numbers of folks. There was and has been some misinformation about your actual text messages and photos being shared. Well, I can say that while I don't have any direct

knowledge of that, AT&T doesn't actually have direct access to your text messages in most circumstances. For instance, if you're using an iPhone and you're sending a message through iMessage, it has end-to-end encryption, so there'd be nothing more than the date and the time of a phone number. If it was not an iMessage. If it was using iMessage, it wouldn't even at all times go through the AT&T network. And if it did as an SMS, you would just simply get a text, you know, a notification of the text message went. You could, in fact, get a notification that a photo was sent, but you not there's it's not likely that there's any way that through this type of breach that those the actual photo or message that you sent went out and the reason I stress this is

actually people that I know personally including my mother text me to say hey you know AT&T lost text messages and images but the reality here is that there was a tremendous amount of information. So why I preference or not, I can't say with 100 degrees of certainty is because I can't, but what I can tell you is from my professional experience, what it feels like and looks like here is that logs were released. For the average individual, this is probably not that serious because a phone number is just a phone number without an identifier with it. If you saw a call log, if you had imagined how many people you text or call on your cell

phone, those numbers only mean something if you can tie them to a person. Even then, most numbers are readily available. So phone numbers, dates, and times for an average individual aren't probably a risk. However, if you are in a capacity of federal law enforcement, state, local law enforcement, there could be risk there. So it is a little early to tell, but what I would say is that what's factual here is that there's been a fairly significant amount of data released. There is some semantics of whether this data is PII or not because it's phone numbers without ever attaching it. But by definition, it is personal information. Is it identifiable is the question. But one thing I would say is we continue to say is that it's important to understand that these events, cyber incidents are happening on an extremely regular basis. And this one covers the gamut of folks because I could be wrong, but I think the last time there was an AT&T incident when they had their outage, they were globally the largest cell carrier, which tells you that what I often say is that these type of things that can occur.

AT&T responded very quickly, explaining what the compromise was and that the deficiency was closed up. But I still think it's really, really important to stress what we always say here at the LPRC is, you know, make sure that you're patching, updating your phones, using two-factor authentication, and taking all of the necessary steps to protect yourself both at home and during business. Not going to spend a ton of time on AI today, but there's consistent updates on AI. I think just in the interest of time, we'll save that for another date. I will say that there have been some reports. Bloomberg did a report around sources that the U.S. is considering stricter restrictions to allow chip makers to sell equipment to China. This is something that continues to come up in the news and continues to be one of the things that we're going to see happening as we get closer to the election.

I'm curious to see what it will see, what will see the impact it will have, if any, on geopolitical challenges. I think today we are in a pretty significantly heightened state that around geopolitical risk, we have conflict in Israel and around Israel and Palestine. We have conflict in the UK and Russia. We have conflict that's not largely talked about in other countries in the Middle East, as well as on the border of India and China. So there's conflict all over the globe. And I think that it's important to note that it can spill over to the U.S. in the sense of supply chain disruptions and other challenges that we have to be all aware of. So unfortunately, this update is a little bit more of the doom and gloom. I like to continue to focus on risk

in the space. However, I unfortunately, this time don't have a lot of positive news. What I would encourage is all the listeners to stay vigilant and safe, and we're here to help. We're also always looking for guests. If you're interested in joining one of the podcasts as a guest, whether that be from the criminology standpoint, the technology standpoint, or you just wanted to discuss something that you heard, please reach out to myself, wanted to discuss something that you heard, please reach out to myself, Tony, or Reed, or you can reach out to Diego Rodriguez. You can find folks at the LPRC's LP Research website. And we're always eager to have guests on both within the member community and outside the member community. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. All right. Thanks so much, both of you. Thanks, Tom, for that information. Tony,

good stuff as always. Thank you, Diego, for the production, the time, the patience. And I want to thank you all out there. Please stay in touch. Stay safe. 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.