LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 192

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

This week our host discusses the latest in LPRC news, research, visitors, and events! In this episode, our hosts discuss the LPRC IMPACT Conference, the latest Trump assassination attempt, the LPRC Resources available to our members, the newest AI tools that have recently come out, and so much more. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more!

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners as well as other professionals. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science Podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series, and apologies for a little rough-sounding voice today. Evidently contracted some very minor, but enough of a maybe virus or whatever initially to have a little bit of hoarseness. So it took place, I think, my exposure probably at the National Real Time Crime Center Association Conference. National Real-Time Crime Center Association Conference. I mentioned that, recorded from there, and it was just a fantastic event.

And, you know, the LPRC, one thing we've tried to do is, over the last almost quarter century now at this point, is to align ourselves with and be supportive of multiple associations and feature their leadership. And whether it's the Retail Industry Leaders Association, RILA, Elisa Labruno, the National Retail Federation, the NRF, Dave Johnson, but also the NACS, you know, the National Association of Convenience Stores, NACDS, which would be the chain drug stores, ICSC, of course, International Council of Shopping Centers, RCC, which we're doing research for right now as well, Retail Council of Canada. And by the way, the NRF study we've done is pretty much concluded now as well, the analysis and a lot of the writing. But it goes on with the associations that we work with. One that we've worked a little tiny bit with, we'd like to work more, is IACA, which has

to do with Crime Analysts, International Association of Crime Analysts, which obviously are people that are dedicated and absolute experts and professionals in crime analysis, both intelligence support, social network analysis, linking people together in crimes and places, but others looking for patterns and opportunities to be applied precision policing. In that case, there's also the threat assessment group that we are reaching out to now. We've gone out, IECP, the National Association of Chiefs of Police, we're being introduced to others,

major chiefs association, things like that. So we're always excited to work with these groups. And the real-time crime center group just made a huge amount of sense because of what I wanted to get into for just a minute here. And that is, we've had people ask, no, I see you're spending and dedicating LPRC resources and U.S. Safer Places Lab resources on working beyond that particular store location. And in particular, working a lot in the community, maybe blocks or more away from where that store is located and working with law enforcement primarily, but also fire rescue now and code enforcement and so on. And the reason being, just to reemphasize on this episode that

what happens at a place, bad or good, probably did not start there and will not end there. But what happens is that all places in a community are connected. They're connected by roadways and walkways and bike paths and other lines of communication, by the products, the movement of products and people. Everything is connected. And closer places are more connected than more distant ones, right? And so that's why you see us work at these scales.

It's just that parking lot around the building contributes to what good and bad happens in the building space, what happens across the road or next to it or behind that location, the parking area and store structure, if we're talking about a store in this case, also contribute to what happens at that place. And again, the bike paths, the walking paths, illicit or not, ways to the vectors or provide vectors for offenders to move to and move away from. And there's been really good research over the years, particularly on armed robbery, that one of the top two factors that an armed robber might consider, not all and not always, even with those that do consider it, are not just what's there, do they have what I want, enough money or whatever I'm after, but what's the egress, what's the quick escape look like?

So they do consider pathways to and from a crime victimization place. And so that plays a part, is the escape routes, the vectors or the in-routes this place is known about because you can see it from a roadway, from the bus, from your bike, from your vehicle on foot. Another place that might be just as desirable, and maybe even more vulnerable, by the way, might not be observable, and so may not even be known about or thought about in presence, in that person's presence of mind. So, what happens around and in that place are interconnected, even out to beyond that block segment, the blocks beyond that neighborhood,

and that part of the community all the way across the community to a certain extent. And then, again, connected by interstate highways and other roadways, limited access roads, for example, as well as other roads, surface roads. So these are things that all come into account and play a role. And so as dedicated criminologists and researchers here at the University of Florida and at the LPRC, we have to, and we're dedicated again to paying attention to those dynamics, considering those dynamics, incorporating those dynamics into the research and development that we do. dynamics into the research and development that we do. And I want to also kind of let our listeners and our community of practice, the LPRC in this case, our community of practice of 240 corporations and their members of those corporations, is that we are doing tactical and more strategic research.

And I think that's what we should be doing. We're, you know, for instance, Dr. Justin Smith, Justin works day in and day out on very important, but very tactical things. How do I protect this type of product, this brand, this SKU even, but that category in that store from theft, right? From somebody taking taking it it's not supposed to a shoplifter so um he works on leveraging the layout design of that space the uh protective devices whether it be a fixture or something on that so a zone two or zone one but the zone three the layout design of the area and so on how people employees might be tasked and move around and where they spend time, maybe doing some regular counting or cycle counts. So product maintenance and shelf maintenance and area maintenance. So very tactical things that can be very helpful at doing that.

Dr. Christina Burton, Christina works all the time on the supply chain and looking at, again, very tactical things, what can be done at screening people in and out of a distribution center or that area, that lot, and so on, where the vehicles are coming in and out or being stored, all the way to that receiving area, and then even backward up the supply chain. So, looking at tactical improvements in the process, the layout, the facilities, and, you know, the crime vision to environmental design or SEPTED concepts, how people are positioned, their tasking, and their training, and their commitment, and so on. So, I wanted to let everybody know we're not just focused on the strategic part of what we do.

Tactical is critical. And things like body-worn cameras, safety cameras, as we like to call them, that's a very tactical play. It's designed to provide some deterrence that can wane, that can come and go, that could be very scant or that could be powerful depending on the interaction, who's wearing and who's confronted, what that person has in mind. And there is evidence that can prevent somebody becoming triggered in the first place when they notice the camera is pointing at them and recording. It may reduce the probability or

the severity of some kind of escalation by somebody in that store, as well as, of course, document things so that we can get better. But that's a tactical play. That's something that we're doing in that parking area, in that store, to inject a little bit more potential safety and security there for all the licit, the green actors and the red as well. By the way, if we can reduce the probability or the severity of an escalation. So tactical is very important to us. Operational is important. How does a retailer operationalize these things? What's their team look like? What is their training? Where are they positioned? How do they move around?

What do they do operationally? How do you manage your systems operationally and so on? But then the strategic comes into play. And that's where our role as well comes into the tactical, the operational arch, if you will, and the strategic and trying to understand these things and zooming in and out. That's why UCS invests so much time and effort into creating mapping dashboards with Esri's products, ArcGIS, ArcPro, ArcInfo. And so that's important to us. And we think it's important to everybody to be able to do that. Zoom in and out, understand to apply the right strategy, operationalize that strategy and the tactics that are employed and deployed to do the first two. So that's kind of

a comprehensive look at LPRC and our research and development, how we're trying to do it. Now, it's difficult because we have a tiny team of 20, of which 12 of us are on the research side. The other eight valued LPRC team members are there to support and make things happen. The events, the VIP visits, obviously the critical infrastructure that you need from, you know, being registered, being incorporated, paying taxes, having insurance, payroll, human resources, and all those other things are so necessary and vital to any organization. But with 12 people on the research team, we are beyond saturated trying to understand and operate at the strategic, the operational and tactical levels. And trying to articulate what we're up to takes a huge amount of time. I know myself writing what we call what, why, how is what we're trying to do, why we're trying to do this, and how we're proposing to do it for each and every component we're working on from deterrent signage. That's a what, why, how. A mobile protective unit like those made by Starcom, Ecamm, obviously LVT, Stone Security, but these LVT platforms, what's a what, why, how so that LVT is excited and encouraged to donate platforms for us to use for real R&D, real research out there.

What, why, how on body, one camera. So I've been busy writing what, why, how's for every component. And then the comprehensive part of what we're up to at each of the levels and all that takes a lot of time and also to do it in a way that makes sense that's that provides generates testable research questions well so if we we would expect that if we do this we might experience increased communication or reduced threats or reduced shortage whatever it might. And so that's kind of given maybe hopefully some insight into all the things that are happening. And these things take time. Now, with six research scientists, we're putting out these five research-to-practice R2Ps, we call them, every month.

And one of our team members, they take turns rotating, is the peer reviewer. And so as a research scientist writes up a one to two page R2P, what do we do? What do we find? What are the implications? What's it mean? How do we use this? The peer reviewer is going to read that and try and get to make that, help them make it more understandable, more concise, more usable. And so that's why we put out five instead of six a month, because one of our team serves as a peer reviewer and they rotate through that, as I said. So we're trying to get this information out there via our Connect e-newsletter that goes out every week. Diego Rodriguez puts that out on our team. It's a wonderful source. It's a lot, it's very bold. It's big pictures, little words we like to say. It's a beautiful document. It's

a summary, and it's just a lot of opportunity to click and learn. If you're an LPRC member or not, you might receive that. If you're a member, you can click through and gain access to every R2P and everything else that we're putting out there. So, you know, you can see at least 11 months out of the year, we're putting out five R2Ps plus other reports and other executive briefings. So there's a whole lot being generated through our Connect newsletter online. There's a lot being put in. All of this goes into our LPRC Knowledge Center. We're also now putting out every time an R2P is issued onto LinkedIn and Twitter on our website, the announcement and the link to access that for LPRC members. But one thing we've noticed that there's still people,

you guys, I don't see you putting out reports. And so we're trying to get with each and every retailer and SP solution partner member and help them make sure that they are enrolled and that their email is correct so that they get that, that their spam filter is not spamming it. is correct so that they get that, that their spam filter is not spamming it. We're trying to find the best time to put it out so it's most likely to be seen by our members in their email because we know if you're like me and a whole lot of other people that their emails are pouring in, it's difficult to keep something top of mind with that. But we want to put out meaningful, tactical, top of mind with that, but we want to put out meaningful, tactical, operational, and strategic research results to our membership and beyond that everybody can go to work with. So, please let us know at lpresearch.org or go to operations at lpresearch.org. If you're not getting the connect,

you're not able to access the website. You're not seeing the releases and the links on LinkedIn or on Twitter or X. We want to make sure that any and everybody is getting this good work that's being done and able to use that. We also obviously put out the work as sessions. At Impact, we're going to have more content, more sessions than ever. And one way we've done it is what we do is adopt what we do at our scientific conferences. We go to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, ACGAS, and the American Society of Criminology are two of them.

There's a Southern Criminological Association and so on. There's some regionals, but big two, National or ACJS and ASC, I've presented and or headed up panels there. But we do lightning sessions at those to make sure there's enough content. lightning sessions at those to make sure there's enough content. So you might have a panel and each panelist gets five or 10, maybe 15 minutes to go through their research. What the issue is, the research question, what we did, the methods used, what we found, and then the conclusions. And here you go. And you move to the next one, you move to the next one you move to the next one so we've adopted that with some not all of our sessions we'll still have main stage sessions and they're going to be good for instance we've still got regular breakouts and they're going to be good ones uh and then the lightning sessions and they're going to be good ones and uh but

there's gonna be more content than ever so we also put out content at RELA's annual AP conference, at NRF's PROTECT, at FMI, the Food Marketing Institute's supermarket-focused conference, at NACS, sometimes at ICSC, some of the groups I mentioned, the trade or industry groups, at the National Real-Time Crime Center Association, you know, and so on. So we're putting this out in many ways, obviously articles and briefs that go out in LP magazine. A lot of it is picked up by D&D Daily newsletter. So and then a lot of it directly through LinkedIn and other sources. So, we're trying our best to do the right kind of research, do it rigorously as we can, and get it out to any and everybody that we can, and do that on an ongoing basis. they're in the knowledge center um and again you know five to ten per month depending on other reports that are coming out of our labs so there's no shortage of good stuff to work with and use it's just a matter of continually building this community of practice and that's really what i know i saw my father and grandfather's physicians and you see in engineering and other professions where you build communities of practice, you leverage and inculcate science and research in the scientific

method, let's say, and research into what you're doing. It's not the only way you look at things, but it's the most rigorous way and it should inform and connect and confirm and augment what's being done in that community. And so if you're not a part or you're not very involved in our community of practice, we would invite and encourage you to do so by contacting us again at lpresearch.org. In the meantime, we're preparing for LPRC Impact. We had multiple visitors last week from Access Communications, amazing team. Daily Wick, another powerful integrator that's nationwide serving all types of organizations, including major retailers. Just to name two, all of our interns. And it's wild and wonderful to see

so many young students across disciplines in here. I'm going to be heading over to the labs in just a minute here to go work with one team from electrical and computer engineering on the two robots. And then we'll have another group in here working on two-way radios for the WARN and INFORM research and development with the Motorola Tactical Radios.

So I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you, Reid. And I apologize if there's background noise. I am in a car moving around. So apologies in advance if you hear the background noise. Not going to cover a lot today. First and foremost, Impact is just right around the corner. If you haven't signed up, sign up. There's still time to register. It is my favorite event. I've been going for several years now. I'm not 100% sure when my first impact was. I think it was somewhere around 15 years ago. What I can tell you is that the event is not like it used to be as far as participation, the amount of folks that attend, the content. It really is a fantastic event. fantastic event. Other thing as just a quick reminder related to the LPRC, something that I need to do more often, and I saw a post yesterday and it prompted me to, which is don't forget to visit the Loss Prevention Research Council's website. If you are a member, there is a tremendous

amount of research studies and great data in the resource center. Yesterday, I was reminded myself, I saw a post on LinkedIn and said, huh, I want to read that. And I logged in and something that as a member, you should be doing often. It is a great resource and it's a members only resource. The Loss Prevention Research Council is a member organization where both retailers and solution providers are both invited to share collaborative information. It's all about education and collaboration. So don't forget to check out the website. And if you're going to impact, I'll see you there. I'll change gears a little bit to a story that I'm sure if you follow the news or even if you don't follow the news, you've seen with another attempted assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump while he was at his golf course in Florida. They did apprehend an individual.

There are some mixed stories about whether shots were fired or not by the individual. mixed stories about whether shots were fired or not by the individual. There's also some mixed stories of whether or not the Secret Service fired shots at the individual, but nonetheless, they did recover an AK-47 style rifle with a scope, a GoPro camera, two backpacks. The individual was on the fence line. Again, a lot of misinformation here being reported. Some reports say this individual was as close as 300 yards. Some say 500 yards. Regardless, it puts an emphasis on the danger around former President Trump and that, you know, if you think about history, having two assassination attempts very close together, there is really somewhat unheard of in modern times, especially in the U.S. population. If you go to some countries, this isn't uncommon.

But here in the United States, this would be a very, very uncommon phenomenon that we're starting to see really all too often. And this has led to a heightened level of arrests and interviews by the FBI, the Secret Service, and local law enforcement around threats or comments made on social media. One of the challenges with monitoring, active intelligence monitoring through social media or through other channels is there's just a tremendous amount of chatter and being able to sift through who's just having a bad day and makes an off-color comment and who actually is going to do something is a very, very challenging role for law enforcement. And what we're starting to see is videos pop up all over social media of people being questioned on

what they said. And there's this fine line between freedom of speech and keeping people safe. And I always say that, you know, main threat, even a male threat is not under the protection of speech. However, in this case, someone saying, you know i i hate that person i could kill them becomes in the question of do that does there need to be action taken because there was assassination time so this is a an interesting trend we're seeing a lot of videos throughout the internet of people being approached and what they're saying is they're exercising their rights but kudos to law enforcement for investigating them all. But this is where you have this challenge of too much information, too many threats, too much chatter becomes almost overwhelming.

I know that at the fusion that we monitor active threats. Personally, when I did manage a SOC and when I do it from time to time today, it does become overwhelming of what's real, what's not accurate, and then what is someone perpetuating a different version of the story. And I often say when you're thinking about a live event, misleading information isn't always intentional. about a live event, misleading information isn't always intentional. Sometimes with all the best intentions at heart, someone is identifying something that's occurring and they're doing the very best they can to demonstrate what they think is occurring. My example would be, you know, three to 500 yards difference makes a huge difference in an assassination attempt. But when you're reporting it it really doesn't someone they're just trying to get that information out there so there'll be more to come on this assassination attempt they do have someone in custody they have not really

released motive or information um but this really talks or speaks to the challenges with a sitting president or former president or an electoral candidate and the challenges with a protective detail, especially at an event like a golf course, which is by design super open areas, generally surrounded by woods. And as a former president or an electoral candidate, the level of protection seems seemed appropriate at this event. However, it is still a challenge to make sure that the former president is safe. In news around artificial intelligence, you will see, or if you are a chat GPT user, a new version of a model.

I think you're going to start to see some naming convention changes because now you have 4.0 IO preview and 4.0 IO and 4.0. I think Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGBT, has said, hey, we got to really think about this naming convention and change the way it works. But what this new model is capable of is reasoning. And basically what that means for a large language model is it has the time to look at something for a little bit longer. For instance, it'll look at it and oversimplifying it, it'll actually look at it again. These models are really specifically designed for scientific research and mathematical research while they will work for other things. That's really where they do very, very well. There's also some testing around the safety and the efficacy of these models, and they appear at first testing to be safer than the previous models. We continue to see people using what is termed as jailbreaking

or advanced prompt engineering to defeat or work around some of their safety measures. One of the challenges with large language models is that while they do their very best to not display information that's harmful, they could. For instance, the model has the ability to tell you how to build a bomb, how to defraud a bank, how to get around things. So there are all the checks and balances placed in these models to essentially stop it from saying these things. And there are numerous videos out there that show basically these models creating information that it shouldn't for instance there was a user video that was posted just recently of a very very descriptive method of how to make an explosive device and then there was an

explosive expert on that validated that yes in fact that was accurate and this was done through a jail-breaking methodology where someone uses multiple different prompts to trick the model into giving information. AI is by no means, in my opinion, and I should say generative AI because AI is an umbrella term, is by no means done with this evolution. I think we're going to continue to see this done with this evolution, I think we're going to continue to see this breadth of new models and new options and new things that we can do with them. I'm very, very excited to play with this model. I've actually had some chance to do research and technology, obviously, are what I do. So I think it's really, really helpful for someone like me. I think here in the academic world, it's really helpful to have a model that essentially will

take what could be weeks of research before and put it into minutes or seconds. Again, you're not relying 100% on this data. It is just helping you get there. Switching gears to another AI tool that is somewhat geared towards research also is it's called Notebook LM. It's a Google product. It is free and what Notebook LM does that's unique is it allows you to actually put your own data into a large language model. So it doesn't use existing data. It doesn't use data that's from the web. For instance, it would allow you to take an academic report and you would be able to load it in. It would allow you to take a research study and load it into the report and then use the same feature type

features, summarization, pulling out key facts, finding terms, all with Google's Notebook LM. So it is a somewhat of a private or small or LLM opportunity for you. And they just released a new feature this week. I've not even had a chance to use it yet. So I'm talking about it before I use it. So I'll absolutely bring it up again on the podcast is they've released a feature that allows you to take an audio approach to this and allows the large language model to talk to you about what it finds and on its own identify things that it finds of interest. on its own, identify things that it finds of interest. So this is really an interesting concept. So basically taking that audio piece of it and applying it to a large language model, which you would see with ChatGPT, which you'd see with Google's Gemini, but with your own data. This means you could compile a year's worth of research notes, a year's worth of meeting notes into one

place and ask it to tell you what the premise of the conversation is, tell you what the most common note-taking applications are, and really get a deep, deep understanding or deep dive of information in an audio format. So this is something that I think is going to be really, really useful for folks, even if you're not a researcher, if you're someone that takes notes, if someone that uses a lot of reports to decipher information, I would encourage you to try this. and check with your organization's legal department or stance on what you can and can't use this for. I think that this is a open source tool, so it's very, very important to understand what happens with that data. I use that messaging in everything I say here today, that if you're using Microsoft's Copilot feature,

that is a corporate feature, there's probably a high likelihood that someone's vetted it. But if you're using any of the other models online, make sure that you have the right and the permission to do it so you don't get yourself into trouble from a privacy standpoint. I believe that these models and this data is relatively safe to use, but relative is the term I would use there. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't violate a policy. So by all means, double check that. And with that, I will turn it back over to Reid. I'm going to let everybody go, get back, but please always operations at lpresearch.org. So I want to thank our producer, Diego Rodriguez, and you all, 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.