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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.
This is our latest in the weekly update series, and I'm going to kind of touch on a few things. One, of course, being a seventh generation Floridian, I've been through my share of major
deadly storms, hurricanes, tropical depressions, topical storms, all of which can be pretty
dangerous if not very dangerous, and all the tornadoes that they spawn.
It's my understanding Florida may rank number one, if not two, but
number one in the number of tornadoes. They're typically not as large as what you might see,
say, in the Midwest, but they can be just as deadly. But in the case of Hurricane Milton
this year, we had some very large and dangerous and even deadly tornadoes spawned
from the Hurricane Milton.
But having Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton hit a one-two punch, we had to make
the difficult call looking at the Milton track to postpone, to move 2024 LPRC impact to of course, early 2025,
to that March 23rd, 4th, 5th timeframe.
And we, to be honest with you,
our team for probably a decade has considered
moving the impact conference to that spring
time period. For a lot of reasons, our researchers are heavily, heavily tasked with collecting
data from offenders, from experimental design projects, from major and minor retailers and shopping centers from law enforcement.
So we're always collecting research data in the labs in the field or via some other transport
like Dropbox to conduct our research with.
And so they've got to take a lot of time out to prepare and execute impact.
And we typically take impact as a year round process for us.
The planning, it's a pretty large effort for a 19 person team.
On top of the fact that we also present three summits, we have the integrate program.
We speak at other and presented other conferences, sessions there. We publish
and articles and research to practice briefs and of course the reports from the research that our
team conducts and have almost non-stop VIP visitors to the labs. Year round we of course conduct six working groups that
are year round. We have the advisory panel and program. So you can see there's a whole
lot of things going on with a pretty tiny team trying to work and leverage the scientific
method to reduce the fraud violence. So that's kind of giving you some insight. And by moving
to the spring, the impact conference, combining that with our integrate program and what we
call ignite, which is kind of our winter planning meeting for our board of advisors, kind of
consolidate all those, it allows us to not have a large event integrate in this case at the beginning of the year
and then impact at the end of the year with the summits kind of sprinkled in throughout
the year with the working group.
So it's going to allow us that.
It also is a time when people are fresh in the year.
They can come in and focus with us, tour the labs, work with us in the field, and do all the good work
that needs to be done together as a community.
So we're pretty actually excited to move to then.
The big lift now, of course, is to get all the content, make sure that it remains fresh,
that we're promoting it properly, that everybody's ready to go in March, which I know will be
because we were ready to go in March, which I know will be because we were ready to go in October.
So that's just a little behind the scenes.
We had almost sort of literally a little war room.
I was trying to maintain focus on the track of the storm,
what it looked like, these storms, you know,
wobble going a little north, nope, staying on track,
nope, going a little south, now back to on track, nope, going a little south,
now back to the center, now back to the north of the projected track and these sorts of
things.
What's the speed of the storm?
What's the wind field size?
How far out are the gusts that could be tropical storm and even hurricane force winds?
And even subtropical storm wind gusts can just be do amazing
amounts of damage, particularly when it pushes trees over.
And Florida is a wet state.
This is a swamp.
We're in the tropics and we get a lot of rain here.
And that loosens the roots under the trees.
And now you start pushing them with some strong wind gusts.
And you can just imagine.
I know in 05,
when we had five hurricanes
and we had two tropical storms in the same year,
and in the same concentrated hurricane season,
strike Florida, three of the hurricanes
and part of one of the tropical storms
actually hit Gainesville where we are very hard, very hard.
10 days each of the three hurricanes,
10 days with no power.
People were paddling around in canoes
and john boats, flatbed boats.
And you saw that also with some of these others,
I'd tell you Irma and all the other hurricanes
that keep hitting Florida and have forever.
We've always had hurricanes through recorded history.
And of course before.
So we're excited about impact.
We're excited about integrate.
Dr. Loewe, Corey has worked with the Innovate Advisory Panel
with a handful of retailers to work on the content
and the process for integrate.
More to come on that.
You all might recall again,
Integrate One was a very dangerous shoplifting
with two simulated shoplifting incident
with two boosters that turned violent
by pushing a store employee.
One of our three team members
that simulated being employees,
strong arm robbery escalation,
and then turned into an armed robbery
when a simulated Glock was displayed by one of the boosters.
And so we tried to make it highly realistic
and leverage in-store parking lot and beyond sensors
to figure out how to integrate those,
hence the name, integrate.
Then last year's, or actually early this year's,
and integrate two was an active shooter program
where we simulated at high realistic,
highly realistic level, we believe,
an active shooter event,
and then working with the three local law enforcement
agencies, working with the FBI, curated that event,
including before the event, during and after the event.
This year, or excuse me, the next upcoming,
the next upcoming one is in coming up in February,
well, excuse me, in March now of 25.
And in that case, we're going to have a violent,
an escalation that the teams that are participating here,
the retailers and the SPs
that are in the Innovate Advisory Program
will work together in teams on preventing that escalation,
handling the escalation and then recovering
from the escalation in a pretty, really neat way.
There have been a lot of planning calls. We're so grateful to the retailers that the
experts from the retailer members here
that are helping us orchestrate this program.
We're pretty excited about it.
The technologies here are marching forward.
Will kind of switch here.
We were working a lot now to prepare for
drone integration and we've gotten six more mobile protective units and we're working a lot now to prepare for drone integration, and we've gotten six more mobile
protective units, MPUs as we call them, because they deter, they detect, and they document
crime before, during, and after.
And so we call them mobile protective units rather than surveillance or whatever else
term you might use. LVT, we've just delivered six more of their
highly coveted mobile platforms for us to deploy initially on the east side of Gainesville in our
east side test area, working with Gainesville Police Department and the Louch County Sheriff's
Office. And we're excited about that. We've got them up and running. We're putting the different
types of sheriff or police branding on them right now, working with lighting, intensity, frequency,
colors, and things like that that we've been doing some research on as well as
what the brands should look like. We got eight highly portable license plate readers,
L6Qs from Motorola Solutions from their
vigilant team. We have got all those up and running and have been using those and
in fact are creating different scenarios with them and we're ready to go to
demonstrate some pretty amazing detect, affect and connect scenario
demonstrations for impact
and for the innovate advisory panel,
the board advisors and so on and strategy out,
we call it two for the number ones and twos
in the organization.
We're very excited about all that.
We also leverage four mobile flock safety license plate
readers and then two fixed ones that we've got with them.
And so everything's coming together.
And again, the reason that we're working so extensively
beyond a retailer's parking lot is because as we all know,
crime starts before they're typically,
we know there's some insider threat issues
that don't always.
And then unless again, the offender or the offending crew
isn't caught or killed during that event.
And there are several offenders that go in somewhere else.
So we have to work in the community in zone five
beyond the parking lot with retailer partners,
law enforcement and other partners
in areas that we just can't influence very well. So
these scenarios incorporate all that and all of our research and development incorporates
that. The mapping dashboards, everything so we can visualize together, common operating
picture and so on. So there is a method to the madness. We're not trying to boil the
ocean but the Theft-Fraud violence is a community issue. It's a neighborhood issue.
It's a block or shopping center issue as well as being that particular stores issue. And
so we have to look at that in the same way. Again, you would do maybe with some sort of
healthcare issue that that individual is getting sick, but this's because they're exposed to others that are sick. So I think that's where we'll
kind of end up here today, but just let everybody know we're working on about 62 research projects
right now on top of all the ones that we completed so far in 2024 and at the end of 2023. So we're
putting that out as much as we can. We want everybody to check in with us and keep us posted, but it's a growing community.
The dial just flipped again and we've got 99 retail corporations.
We've got 150 solution partner members and we've got a handful of manufacturing partners,
think Procter & Gamble and Wreck-It,
and multiple law enforcement agencies, the retail associations and so on.
So it is a robust and growing community
and it's got to be that way.
It's just got to be that way.
And we're working with our partners from the FMI,
from NACDS, from NACS, from ICSC, from RILA, from NRF,
from Retail Council of Canada and everybody.
It's exciting because there's the only way we're going to tackle some of these things.
The only way we can get ahead of the crime and some of the false reporting and narratives
out there is to truly work together in an organized way.
So I want to thank everybody for tuning in and stay safe, stay in touch. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws 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. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm going to turn it over to Tom.