LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 200 Ft. Ben Stickle, PhD

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

LPRC Celebrates 200th Episode with Guest & LPRC Team Member Ben Stickle, PhD This week our host discusses the latest in LPRC news, research, visitors, and events! In this episode, our host and guest discuss Gun Theft statistics and their relation to Supply Chain Protection, Porch Piracy and consumer behavior, Data Data Data the need and its uses for research, two different conferences, 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 latest in our weekly update series and joined today by Dr. Ben Stickle, professor at Middle Tennessee State University and our producer, Diego Rodriguez, and we're going to talk a little bit today with Ben about what he's been up to and what he's going to be doing with the LPRC coming up here. So with no further ado, welcome Ben to the LPRC's lab complex.

Glad to be here. It's an amazing facility you have. I appreciate that. And we've tried to purposely instrument and design this so that we can work on theft, fraud, and violence before, during, and after crimes. So it is pretty carefully instrumented. And it's changing every week.

It's changing new technologies and new ways that we're laying things out. So I want to talk to you a little bit about your background. I know you've got some public safety experience as well as academia. So maybe talk a little bit about your background. How did you get into research? And then what led to that? And then we'll talk a little bit more about what you're working on.

Sure. So I started always growing up wanting to be in law enforcement. So I started when I was in high school as a police explorer and hanging out with the cops every chance that I could. Went on to college and found the security department on campus and a wonderful director there took me in and hired me as a freshman. Ended up working full-time most of my undergrad career, really learning the security ropes, if you will, and enjoying that. Finished up there, went back to Kentucky, and went into law enforcement for about six years, did patrol and crime scene investigation,

and was looking for something to make a little more longer impact on the situation. So I went back to school to the University of Louisville and got a degree in criminal justice and while I was there my dissertation was focused on people who steal metal, so air conditioners, coppers, catalytic converters, and I did that by working in the field and actually finding people who would admit that that's what they were doing and a few times take me with them on some of their adventures, if you will. And so that's really where I fell kind of in love with research and I enjoyed doing that, enjoyed trying to answer the really hard questions that weren't

really didn't have data available per se. So I wasn't interested in downloading a data set and saying, well, let's just run some equations here. I really wanted to actually get in the field, work with offenders, work with victims, find out what was going on. And so that really began what has become a real interest I have in a variety of different topics. Okay, yeah, that's an excellent description.

And we talked about before recording, does metal theft make sense? Well, I can tell you with copper in particular and our retailers, the Home Improvement guys, that there are times that we can see, you can tell when there's a copper shortage or copper prices start to accelerate in the US and around the world because the Home Depot

lows home improvement, others start experiencing very extreme copper theft in addition to their stores, AC units and so on start getting hit. Yeah, there's a lot of research actually, a majority of metal theft related research does look at the price fluctuation, the value of it and its rate of theft. I recently did some studies with catalytic converters and found the exact same thing. So if you look at the precious metals and those and you average their price in the market, it increases or decreases the rate of theft, which is actually really helpful because I think this is one area where you can actually predict crime. And you can potentially have some predictive analysis to say as these prices increase,

be in the lookout for more thefts, catalytic converters from your parking lots or in store or even off your building into the future. Okay, excellent. Yeah, so that's a good intro, I think, talking about your interest and, you know, I, by the way, too, was a police explorer in Winter Park, Florida, part of Orlando area, Orange County, and I got to ride with the officers and see what they were doing. Back then, it wasn't as restricted, the access and what they would expose a 16, 17-year-old to, as far as you could ride along and do whatever. And in fact, by the way, they gave us little badge wallets

and badges and an ID card, and the badge was the exact police officer badge. It just said, instead of officers, it said Explorer, but nobody ever would see that. And we minibuses that go around town and if you showed them your badge, it was you know, they was authorized you could ride the minibus and move all over the place. But anyway, so but I'm digressing. But it was good experience and the scary thing is I know that someday when I retire I'm gonna look back and say, wow I've been doing this stuff for 60 years or something, right?

When I look back at that time, and you will too. So, all right, so let's kind of go through, you talked about metals in particular. We're interested in copper and other precious metals that play a role since we focus primarily retailer crime because of working with 100 major retail corporations. Let's talk about how you and I got to know each other. And that was some of your initial work, I think, on porch piracy, what the retailers often call last mile. It gets to their customer. And we work with all the traditional retailers and others like Amazon or Wayfair That are primarily not brick and mortar

But all of them pretty much are having things delivered what what got you into thinking about porch piracy and doing your work What have you kind of been doing in the area and learning? Yeah, so I began Simply enough I had a student who came in my office and had had a package either stolen from her or her mother I don't recall anymore anymore but we began looking up information on package theft and really couldn't find anything this was early 2019 maybe late 2018 and so we just couldn't figure anything out about it no one was really talking about it in the research sense it was all over the news it was all over social media and so I like to joke we did what any self-respecting criminologist does when they can't answer

a question is we just watch YouTube videos. And so we began our initial study with her looking at YouTube videos to try and come up with how these crimes are occurring. She went on to do her master's thesis on the fear of this issue, which includes some interesting points of who people blame for this, which we might talk about in a minute, that has some relevance with retail. So we did some of the initial research in this trying to find out what's going on. There's still not a lot of data on it, but as I've continued to look in this area and I've gone to different retail and supply chain conferences and things, I realized that there's

just a whole host of challenges and issues that start really from the very beginning when a consumer is on a website looking for a product until they actually receive it. And there just seems to be gaps along that last mile. And that opens the door for a lot of things. It opens the door for consumer fraud that retailers have to worry about. It has issues with returns. It has issues with theft in the last mile, but even beyond the theft you have products that could be damaged by weather, sensitive to temperature and things. So there's a whole suite of issues that go into that that really need to be addressed and I'll just circle back around and say that you know that early research we did found that whether

it's fair or not to blame, usually consumers blame the retailer for their product being stolen or having an issue. And so really I think getting that right and focusing on the customer satisfaction, getting the product that they ordered in their hands undamaged is essential to retail today. And so you mentioned circling back, maybe go back and talk about consumer fraud, the role that they play and how they take advantage of legitimate thefts and things like that. Yeah, so this is a real emerging area, at least as far as I'm aware of, to do a lot of research.

There's not much academically that's known about this, which is a real challenge. It seems like a lot of companies are aware of this, but kind of keep some of the information siloed. And again, that makes sense. Many are competing against one another. But you know, the fraud is probably larger than most retail companies even really know. And understanding when and where that's occurring is really critical. I've come to realize when you look at crime all the way across this,

it's really important to understand where the loss is occurring. And I find this a lot when I talk with a lot of retailers is they know that there's a certain percentage of product that the customer did not receive, but they don't know why that was. Or they might know that there's a certain percent of loss that they think is related to fraud,

but they don't always understand some of the nuances behind that. And as you know from all of your research and everyone listening to this, understanding that the nuanced details of these crimes is really vital to coming up with solutions to how to prevent them. And so it's really important that you get retailers and delivery companies and everyone who touches a product together to share data to talk about exactly how these frauds are occurring or exactly how the thefts are occurring so that we can really come up with the best prevention techniques.

It's interesting and one dynamic we've looked a lot at with porch piracy is, and it's so different, we kind of tend to think I live in a single family home, it's got a front porch on it, it's on a residential street obviously, but that's not actually maybe the most common place that packages are delivered, right? They're delivered to apartment complexes. That means do you leave it at a common place or do you go up into the complex and leave it at the door, right? And on that hallway to that residence door, there may be two, ten, or twenty, or thirty doors on that same hallway. If you guys looked at or discriminated yet, do you have a big enough data set to look at the differences of the delivery venue? We don't have a huge data set, unfortunately, which is very disappointing. I have a huge data set unfortunately which is very disappointing. I have a

little bit of data out of Miami for police reported thefts over a couple of years and what we did find is that there is a huge number of people in apartment complexes who are struggling with this and it does range the gamut both from a package just delivered in the hallway and was maybe stolen by somebody else or a visitor on that hall to a resident. Or it could be that it was delivered to the wrong door and the person just didn't give it to their neighbor. But there's also a lot of dangers in community receptacle areas as well. And some of the reports that I read out of that data set, we're talking about

how on camera somebody went in, they retrieved their package out of a shared area and then took another one they thought was interesting. And so there's again looking at where this is occurring really dictates how we try to prevent it. No, I think there's some interesting points, right? So we always try and tease out with our members, the retailers and solution partners and law enforcement, look data is so important, we need these data, but coding is so important. We're either not collecting that information or we're not coding it or being discriminatory about it.

And that example would be, what was the package of single-family dwelling or a multifamily dwelling, right? Was it left in a common receptacle, a delivery receptacle, or was it left in open, openly? And does, I would think that theoretically, as we would say in academia, it does matter, but it's an empirical question. We don't know because we don't have the data and what data we have might be just,

and to say just, law enforcement, because that's just calls for service and then maybe what they recorded and how they coded it themselves, right? So, may not have been reported, may not have been recorded, or may have been inaccurately recorded, right? How much does the data sets that you have access to or you generate on your own make it, how much of a difference does that make to your research and what you're trying to learn and how you find

it out? Well having data as you know is really critical to all of this and it's really unfortunate I have almost none. So I have the data set out of Miami with a researcher who's down there and then I recently did an online survey of people who admitted to stealing packages. I have about 300 people who filled out a survey for that and as far as data goes that's it. That's really all I have. I've had some discussions with some delivery companies and some retailers about whether or not they had some data,

but even there, it's really challenging. So I'll give you one example. I've done some research with the Postal Service recently, the Inspector General's office there, and even the data that they have is difficult to parse through. So they have complaints, for example, I didn't receive my package. That may or may not have anything to do with the theft.

And then if that is a complaint of a theft, then it's difficult to find that coding, as you said, within that data. What is theft? What is a complaint? What was delivered to a neighbor? And so all of these issues really bring to light not only the lack of data, but then when there is coding to understand exactly what occurred in those situations. In a real quick adder here and you mentioned the term that I was searching

for was DNR did not receive and so when we hear we hear the retailers talk about that we're having we believe we're having an increase in DNR fraud and so here's what we're trying to look at how How do we look at this? How do we come up with solutions based on somebody claiming they did not receive the package? And we see some of the responses now where they're saying, take a picture of it on that porch or on front of that door and if possible have that address as well. And it should be date time stamped.

And now we have an idea, well, look, it was there. Now it doesn't mean that the delivery person didn't pick it up and leave with it themselves. We know that happens a lot. With the advent of Ring and Arlo and other home cameras, what are called closed loop camera systems that may have a role too, but that's another area. These are all hypotheses, right?

What type of location and again, the coding that we're talking about is, was it multi-family or single family? If we say it's a zero or a one, it's single is zero and multi is one, that's coding, and so on. So for those listeners that really aren't familiar with the coding term, what that means. But what are your thoughts around some of that? It is just this mountain of unknown, right? It's really complex and I think you need multiple sources of data and I think that's part of why this has been a challenge. A lot of retail companies get contacted when there's been a package that's been stolen,

but they may not have data from whoever delivered the package. Or maybe even they have a third party provider who boxes the package, the label generator. And so there's all these different steps. Perhaps the package has insurance, and so the complainant calls the insurer but never tells the retailer. And so the problem is there's not a lot of data that gets through to all the parties that need it. So we can't really develop, as you pointed out, that clear picture to know why

someone did not receive this. Or is perhaps the issue where the package originated from. Maybe they did put the wrong item into a box, right? And so without all those pieces of data being put together, we're not really going to solve the did not receive challenge that we're having. And so it's just vital that we actually start getting that data, connecting it across everyone who touches a package or product. It's huge. And I think we don't want to run into the ground, but I think for our listeners to crime science, that this is a big challenge for our members, 250 members of the LPRC community. And that is, look, we want to look into everything we can. We want to get to the closest we can to what the actual events on the ground look like,

as well as in the aggregate. At the top level, when you pull everything together, what's overall it look like. Or overall, look like by type of event or location, or type of event times location. Those kind of things are also important for us, but we lack one thing for all of us to work together on that data, right? We've got to get that. And we just onboarded a new part of our, a new vice chair of the LPRC's Board of Advisors.

In this case, this chair is in charge of what we call R&I, research and innovation, arguably the most critical part of LPRC, obviously, as a research entity. And so Mike Jesse, the vice president for Luxata, Luxotica, which includes Sunglass Huts and many, many other chains and brands of eyewear, he's like, tell me, what can I do? How should I look at things?

What should I help drive? And one of the top things that Dr. Corey Lowe told him is, we need data, we need more, and if possible, better data. And by better, we'll work with you to put together a little spreadsheet that lists the variables and has a little code sheet to interpret those. Could you just fill this out and use our numbers that we put there, our

coding, if we're possible? If not, we'll take whatever we can get and we'll transform and recode or whatever we need to do here. So I just wanted to say that we totally empathize and sympathize with you and with our community. So a call out to the LPRC community and beyond. We need your data and we need it now, but we need to have it complete. And Ben, you called out a key point. Can we have multi-source information?

Could the US post office, but guess what? They only deliver a certain percent, right? And then maybe UPS and maybe FedEx and so on. If they could each be participatory in this and maybe use the same coding or we can again, convert that. Okay, I wanna talk to you a little bit more about some other research you're doing. And one before we started recording

that I thought was very interesting and that was gun theft, firearms theft. It's something of interest for us for a few reasons, right? One, these firearms are used in retail places and spaces, It's something of interest for us for a few reasons. One, these firearms are used in retail places and spaces to intimidate or worse, and they are being stolen from these parking lots. Employees are bringing them in to the stores. Obviously, customers are bringing them in to the stores, and we could go on and on.

But also, what we're trying to do here is do research that may not initially seem to make sense for a retail community. For example, we're working on bike thefts at the University of Florida. We've mapped every bike rack. We're looking at their data. We're doing everything we can to understand the dynamics of bikes stolen for personal use, bikes stolen for, let's say, temporary drunk use, bikes stolen for parts, bikes stolen for the bike, and where do the bikes end up, and what tools might have been used, what protection was in

place, where were they located, what time of day, blah, blah, blah. So those things, but for our retailers, some say, well, wait a minute, what? So how does this look? So if you could go over and talk about gun theft, because we think that gun theft is important and we're working with our local law enforcement agencies on this because we think we can reduce problems. We also can get them, if we can help them with that, maybe that reduces some of the manpower they have to assign there

and they can better help retailers. So long winded question. Tell me about gun theft. Well, gun theft is certainly a challenge and I don't know that it's unique to any state or area. I think some are going to have more of it than others given the availability of firearms in certain locations, but this is really a challenge. We don't want firearms in the hands of people who shouldn't have them and we don't want to have them stolen

from law-abiding citizens otherwise who are victims of this crime. And there's not, again, been a lot of research on this. It's actually really surprising. There's been some studies, but not a huge number. So I have a data set out of Tennessee, and we looked at gun theft across the state over a period of five years. And some of what we saw was very concerning. There's certainly hot spots where these are happening a lot. We also saw a shift over those five years where guns stolen from a residence were declining pretty steadily and almost at the same time but a little bit quicker, we saw an increase in theft from vehicles, which tends to make us think obviously there's more vehicles

that are getting broken into with guns stolen. Now whether these vehicles were targeted because the guns were in there or whether it was just I'm looking for something else and I happen to find a gun and I take it, we don't know the answer to that. So there is this concern, this increase in guns stolen from vehicles, which is harder to investigate in some ways, there's sometimes less evidence there. But this is certainly something that could happen,

it probably does happen in parking lots of retail stores and things like that. And we don't want this happening anywhere, but certainly not inside of a retail establishment. So this is kind of a new line of research that I'm looking into at the moment, but I do think has a lot to do with retail. It really does.

I would highly encourage that. And I'll tell you that now retailers are addressing this, but LPRC has an annual Supply Chain Protection Summit as part of the working group. Diego, who's here with us today, has put that on. And I was at the one that Diego produced with Procter & Gamble P&G up in Cincinnati at their corporate offices. And during that course, during a break, literally was over talking with a group of retailers that were talking about distribution centers, who works in their DCs, and guess what? A lot of them drive trucks and other things, and guess what?

A lot of them bring firearms, and they're not allowed to bring them in the distribution center, in their workplace. And guess who knows about that or guesses about that? And that would be gun thieves. So they've had to put signage up, they've had to put fencing up, you know, more security for the parking area than they used to have. And that's the kind of another, yet another way that these firearms come into play. And so it also introduces fear of crime and everything else. And when you're a crime victim or a crime happens. So I would highly encourage that. And maybe this is an area we can jointly explore again,

what we're doing at a very local level here and what you're doing in Tennessee and see what we can do. Okay. So I think what are some other things that you see that tie in or potentially tie in that you're working on or interested in working on that would affect crime levels and victimization in retail environments? So initially I just finished a paper looking at the theft of pets. So people who steal

dogs and other types of pets. I thought my theft was for a field, but go ahead. I very much like the niche crimes, if you will, the unusual aspects people haven't done before. But this is actually an issue, right? And so I had to follow, again, there's no national database and even really police data very good on this type of thing. So I had to resort back to how I did package theft. I started looking at videos online of pet thefts. And so, you know, what's interesting is, you know, a lot of these happen at home, but a lot of the videos we had were actually pet stores and commercial facilities. And so, you know, one of the things we were looking for is, you know, were there teams of people that Did they come in? Did they distract perhaps the store employee when the theft was being carried out? Was there a dog, for example, in an open cage or kennel or whatever the appropriate term is for people to come and to come into their store?

But yet if it's by the door, then it makes it easy escape. So starting to look at some of those factors. So that does seem like a very niche crime, but whether it's your personal pet that is stolen, or in our sense, a retail situation, it does raise a lot of concerns. Now, I don't think any of those, maybe two of the cases had any type of violence involved, but it's still certainly an issue when that's done. Okay, so no, I think that's pretty interesting, Ben.

And I can see particularly on the retail front. But these are analogs, right? These are use cases like bike theft, even like gun theft, obviously metal, pet theft, and so on that are good for us to understand. Because another thing we're trying to do here at the LPRC is leverage frameworks, right? In fact, we've had to kind of extend

situational crime prevention to include see, get, fear. Okay, how do we action this and make this relevant to them? Well, that means the bad guy, the would-be offender needs to notice, recognize, and be concerned enough not to commit the crime, at least not here and now, because of making it harder, riskier, less rewarding, and so on, some of the components that we call modes of action

in situational crime prevention, and extended. But the other way is through these action frameworks and talking about what you're talking about. So, Ben, let's talk about now, what you're gonna be doing is working, part-time if you will, with the Loss Prevention Research Council, LPRC, as a distinguished fellow conducting research,

helping us get some of what we're doing and finding into print. I still am getting some journal articles out, but nowhere near what we could. We probably could put 20 out a week because of the research we're doing, but we're not. So you're gonna work with us on some of these things to help us do more, maintain high quality, and get more of what's being done here, the good work, into print. But tell us a little bit about what you're gonna be working on and how you view this opportunity to maybe combine forces.

Yeah, I'm really excited to be a part of this. I think we're kind of transferring what you've been doing so well with retail, where everyone can come together and learn from each other. This is what this organization is doing, this works well, here is something that is easy to digest that LP professionals understand that even the those higher up in the organization understand and we can do these things. What I'm hoping to be able to do is kind of follow that same concept but academically so we can take all of this

great research that you've done and make sure that as much as we can it's getting pushed out there into the academic world. And when we start sharing the information like that, more researchers get interested in this topic, more people say, hey, let me look at this and see if I can investigate this specific crime or this specific issue in retail. And all that that does is just lead to more results, right? So we have more knowledge about what's actually working, more people academically research who are interested in these topics who can then share that both out and within this organization and really just build on

the great work that you've done so far. That's fantastic because that's another part of what we would like to do with you and that is lay down more of a recruiting base out there for criminologists to know about the Lost Prevention Research Council, know about the opportunities that the LPRC for them. You know, like yourself, and overwhelmingly most people that come out with degrees, masters and PhDs, want to go into academia and do research, and we absolutely need that and want to encourage that.

What we're trying to do is find some more that want to go into environmental criminology, problem solving criminology that want to be the last mile, guys, in crime research because people are getting hurt and killed and they're afraid of crime victimization. So how do we get more? And I think with your contacts in the retail, I wouldn't call it an industry, but the retail group,

we do go to some of the conferences and present, but nowhere near like I know like I used to. So we're excited to work with you on some of that. How do we get young up and coming students, particularly those who are gonna pursue doctoral level? Yeah, I think this is really good timing. I feel like there's kind of been a shift in the criminal justice, criminology research, an academic realm. Theory is obviously very important. We have to have theory. It

guides a lot of what we do, but I see a lot more people who are interested in actually applying theory to practical solutions. And so I think this is a great time to say we are here. we have data, we have facilities, we have solution providers, retail, who's seeking answers to these hard questions. And we're just looking for people who are like-minded, who share similar goals and values to say, let's actually take some of this and run with it. And I do see more and more, there was a time probably that you even remember, it could be a challenge to get some things published because it wasn't the right theory. Or applied.

Right, it was applied. We didn't want that in our field, but I think that has shifted a bit in the last couple of years. And so I see more applied things in journals, more interest in this area, which is great. And I applaud people to continue doing theoretical research and research that matters in other areas, but I think we can't neglect this either, the applied research. And so as I see more people who are interested in that and more acceptance of having those articles, this is a great time for LPRC to find, publish their research and to find others who are interested in doing the same thing. Excellent, excellent. Because they're out there. There are literally 200 criminologists that are interested in this and then there are 20,000 that are in other developmental areas more.

But all of it's important and all of it's critical and I often, I've told colleagues, look, you know, across campus, we probably have 1,200 physician scientists over here. But it would be like if 90% of them were working on, you know, biology, microbiology, and then there was only a handful that were working on actual pathologies and helping people get better. And I don't think people would be totally excited about that. I think, yes, if we can get some momentum

in criminal justice and criminology students to say, wait, wait, I want to solve problems and that's not negative, I'm not being a theoretical. We are helping impact and we leverage everyday good theory or what we're calling frameworks, operational frameworks particularly. So, but any thoughts or comments, I mean, on how we continue that movement and I think it's an opportunity to mention ECA, what it is and what you're doing to really promote ECA in the United States.

Yeah, so ECA stands for the Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis Group. It's kind of an informal association, if you will. It's been around for over 30 years. Historically, it meets once a year somewhere in the world, and they've gone to some very interesting and exciting places over the years. I've been involved since I was in my PhD program and volunteered to host the conference for this year. So that'll be in Nashville late June, 2025. And we'll be bringing in a number of researchers from all over the world who study generally these topics,

or at least apply the framework, if you will, of environmental criminology to these questions. And the really wonderful thing about this group is they're happy to be applied, they're happy to be focused, they're happy to talk with victims and offenders and retailers and everybody involved to do really, really good research. And so we're very excited this year that LPRC is going to partner with the ECA conference and we're going to have a section that just focuses on retail crime broadly, trying to apply some of these principles to the issues of retail crime in this space.

That's exciting, and I think, you know, we're going to place a minor role, but a role, and we're really excited about the opportunity during the ECCA conference in Nashville to be able to work with you and the team and see how we can get some more practitioners, and maybe our thought was to maybe invite some up-and-coming criminology and criminal justice students and maybe some that are recent graduates that are particularly interested see if there's a way to get them in maybe even find some scholarship resources for their travel but to see how we can do that get some law

enforcement practitioners and pracademics there, the same on the retail side, and maybe start that. And we're very, very grateful for your reach out and the ideas that you and some of the others at ECA have on trying to do that. And I think when we think about it again, go back to healthcare, what we're dealing about is life safety, reputation, fear of crime leads to avoidance behavior, right? I'm not going there. I won't let my loved one go there. I won't go there at this time. And things like that. None of that's healthy. And here even in Eastside Gainesville, we've got stores that we're working with now and the community is part of our Eastside initiative. The local people won't go in there. They won't work there. They now have to spend money, find a friend,

get on mass transit to go to the place they feel safe. So the work is, I think, to be lauded, and we do heavily leverage theory, and again, theory should be very simple. How do things work? And let me go see, and then let me see if what I found supports or doesn't support that or extends that. I just wanted to make sure that people understand.

The other term, by the way, is when we talk about ECA, its environmental criminology, you can't apply that to the natural environment, save the whales or lions or elephants, but really it refers to the environment and how do we shape the built, the online, the cultural environment to maybe alter choices and outcomes, right? Not just for environmental reasons, but we shape the environment because we can't shape DNA, we can't shape home life experiences, peer groups, whatever necessarily as well as we can what the would-be offender comes into contact with. So that's to me really what we're going to talk about today,

is a little bit about your background, what you're working on, what you've been working on, how does this translate or interpret into where we are and what we're trying to do here, and how you're going to help us go to the next level. So any other last thoughts or something I should have asked you that I didn't? All good reporters say that and I'm not a reporter. No, I'm very excited to be officially involved. I think we've been toying with this idea for a couple of years of some different ways to be involved

and really happy to contribute whatever skills I have to the great work that's being done here. Excellent. So I want to make one last call out. We've got LPRC's annual event, the big one is called Impact. Typically it's the first or so week in October and it has been for 19 years.

A series of hurricanes and one in particular decided no, we're not doing that anymore. We had five, literally five impact conferences impacted by, they impacted our impact conference so we decided we're moving here's our sign because we can't do it now there's hurricane bearing down. So that'll be the 25th and 26th of March coming up here pretty quickly and we've just entered February, so we're able to dust off and use a lot of the content

and things that we're gonna be using during the pre, before I mentioned, Impact Conference. So we have the day before that though, Integrate. And Integrate is part of what we do to test, to push, to break and rebuild interventions. And so we're excited that, I think right now, we're closing in on 60 or 70 retail corporations are coming in for Integrate Alone.

And then most if not all will be staying for Impact. We're gonna have multiple law enforcement agencies in here, but we're gonna be teeing up what Corey, Dr. Lowe and his research component, his team have been putting together with a lot of retailers in law enforcement and our solution partners. So go to our website lpresearch.org, look at Integrate, look at Impact. Integrate is invitation only because it's not designed to be a mob scene. It's designed to really get deep and break

and learn and test and rebuild. So with no further ado, I really appreciate you joining me and Dr. Ben Stickle and Diego Rodriguez here at the LPRC in Gainesville, Florida. 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, and stay in touch. 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.