LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 202 Ft. Christina Burton, PhD

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

LPRC CrimeScience Episode 202 with Guest & LPRC Team Member Christina Burton, PhD This week our host discusses the latest in LPRC news, research, visitors, and events! In this episode, our host and guest discuss Christina's academic journey, the relationship between Wild Life Rangers and Retail, the LPRC's unique contributions to retail crime prevention, the research on Supply Chain Protection, 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. All right, welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series. We're going to be exploring all things crime and loss prevention and control, particularly focusing of course as always on retail environments as a special focus. But what goes on in and around those places is very critical, including supply chains and coordinated organized crime activity that affects those places and other

places and the people don't all live there. They are visiting there in this case to victimize other people. So what we're going to do today, I'm going to spend a little bit of time with LPRC research scientist at Christina Burton PhD and Dr. Burton, and I are gonna talk a little bit about the LPRC about Christina Burton and her research and background and why that's critical to this overall ecosystem, where we're going and how we're trying to get there. And so with no further ado, Christina, welcome to Crime Science Podcast.

I read, thanks so much for having me here. I'm happy to be here and answer any questions. Excellent. And so for those who don't know, we currently have on the LPRC team four criminologists from criminal justice or crime or criminology programs. Christina is one of our criminal justice majors. I personally don't see much difference at all. You can certainly debate that. But we're trying to focus on criminal offenders regardless and leverage theory tools and good rigorous methods. So Christine, let me ask you a little bit about why and how did you get into criminology and

criminal justice and how did you get started, how did you get going and how did you end up here? Yeah, I mean, I kind of had a really funky journey. I originally thought I wanted to be a medical examiner, believe it or not. So I took a lot of medical courses. I was in the biology space, but I also dipped my toe a little bit into anthropology and eventually I actually liked forensics a lot. So again, I thought I was gonna take the MCAT back

in the day and go to med school, but as I was working for Target, believe it or not, eventually kind of sat down and said, where do I wanna go with my life? Because this is great and all, but like, where do I see myself in five, 10 years? And eventually I thought, well, crime analysis, right? I mean, that's for ethics, isn't it? Well, I got a heavy dosing that it is. And my mentor at the time, Dr. Will Moreto, who advised me throughout my graduate career, pulled me aside and said, you know, you're kind of good at this,

you know, crime analysis stuff. You ever think you can maybe do it as a career? And at the time I said, no, I was thinking in med school. And then eventually he won me over. And I eventually went into the UCF's graduate program, both for their masters. I still got a graduate certificate in crime analysis at that time as well.

And then eventually into the PhD program and he ended up being one of my co-chairs actually for my dissertation and we still keep in touch in fact we're working with UCF with our their graduate students as interns here as well so we just continue to foster that relationship and I actually got involved with LPRC because Justin reached out he's a former alum at UCF as well, and said, hey, we're looking for a physician. This might be right up your alley. Took a look at it and been here since.

There you go. That's a good summary and a good journey. And anybody that's been around me more than five minutes knows I'm constantly using medical analogies. There is some crossover there and the terminology even. There's a lot of crossover. We use treatment and randomized control. Dosage is a big one. We talk about dosage around here

every week. So okay, well thanks for that Christina and you mentioned Will Moroto widely respected. But one thing he particularly pays a lot of attention to that I think also is a good crossover. Maybe you can talk about the great outdoors and how we can leverage these concepts for that. Yeah, so in fact, my dissertation and my work prior to LPRC was focused on wildlife trafficking. And so looking at the different offenders, what are their characteristics? Why do they commit certain types of wildlife crimes?

But really the emphasis has always been on law enforcement sides. So doing research on, well, what are the people on the ground that are fighting these on a daily basis? What are they doing? How are they feeling? How can we leverage resources to assist them? And so coming here has been able I've been able to kind of bridge some of those

similar topics, because I mean, trafficking is trafficking. It's just it's a different vertical, right? If we're going to use retail language, you know, whether they're doing arms or people or drugs or wildlife or retail products, it's all the same in terms of it's a valued product moving across either internally within different state lines or even internally within the state or across countries, you know. It's just, you know, offenders are just going to pick, hey, what product is not being looked at right now? Let's switch over to that.

And so I think that's largely where we're seeing some of these ORC big offenders rather than like the small time petty thieves and that kind of thing. So bridging those kinds of things. Recently wrote an article for LP magazine, you know, I'm sure it's going through some edits right now, but just framing what we call captured. So it's expanding the craved model that we tend to use for what makes a product enticing from a thief's perspective,

but expanding it to understand that, well, there's other actors that might be involved in the totality of that crime. So ORC, right? You might have your boosters, steal something, but then you got the transformer, right? They got to hold the goods until they can resell it, right? And so there's those kinds of offenders

and they're going to have different priorities and expectations of the product on their end as well. So, you know, trying to, again, bridge what we've learned in other disciplines to try to bring it forward into, you know, retail spaces. Yeah, it's really helpful. And we had a team member bring up when we're talking about concepts

during our weekly research meetings sometimes and a lot of times we try and focus a little bit on the tools, the frameworks and how to look at the world and how do we use that to make a real difference and I think things like craved model from 99 from you know Dr. Clark and crew they we've gotten a lot of mileage out of that and now with CAPTUR3D. But the idea again for the practitioners out there is we're always looking for frameworks, explanatory models that we can use that explain why this happens or doesn't or this way or that way. And then based on that, how do we leverage that information to build tools and improve those tools and integrate those tools to make a difference, right? So whether it's wildlife theft or trafficking of any illicit, I guess, group is going to use those.

And by the way, as an aside, I got in this whole field because I wanted to be a wildlife officer in the state of Florida. Seventh generation Florida, we grew up hunting and fishing here. We rarely ran into game wards, but whenever we saw a wildlife officer, I thought, oh, that's what I wanna be. And fun fact, there's only like a handful of fish and wildlife people within the state of Florida.

They often try to get assistance with local law enforcement to do some of those game monitoring and things like that because they can only go so far. Yeah, yeah, they really can. It's interesting because the wildlife officers in Florida, there are not many, there's anywhere from I think minimum of two per county. The county can be massive geographically as well as population wise. And if you think about your one of those counties down the Everglades, or even here we are in Latchwood County, that's a big area and there's a lot of hunters and fishermen and other people out there.

So they have to, like you said, leverage the Sheriff's Office or the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or city municipal police. I know I got to know a friend, Gene Newman became a Lieutenant and later retired from, it's now FWC, but it was used to be GFC, Game and Freshwater Fish

Commission. But as a lieutenant, when I went to the Orlando Police Academy, he came in with a live gator and unleashed it and then re-caught it and taught everybody how we would be catching gators out there. So anyways, he leveraged that understanding, elicit marketplaces and movement in that environment and then translated it. What are you doing right now? What is your research focus at LPRC

to support our practitioners out there? Yeah, I get asked that question a lot and it's sometimes really challenging because the way I try to describe it is I tend to have my hands in a bunch of different cookie jars here. So I'll try to give like a brief, you know, smattering of just some of the stuff that I work on. So, for example, I am the co-facilitator for both the Supply Chain Protection Working Group and the ORC Working Group.

So for Supply Chain, we're currently working on the summit. So we're trying to get the planning done for that and the content built out for that, as well as we're doing our annual car with a survey. So that's been ongoing. And we're distributing it, we're hoping to distribute it to some of our other partners like Tapa and ISCPO. As well as we're trying to figure out developing smart guides or we're calling well, they're called POC guides and policing, but we're trying to figure out developing smart guides or we're calling, well, they're called POC guides in policing, but we're trying to figure out a new name

for problems specific guides of what is a specific problem that you're dealing with? What are some solutions or partners you need to coordinate with? And then where are the gaps that we currently have in- And POC guides real quickly for the- Yeah, certainly. So problem-oriented policing is a strategy within law enforcement agencies across the country. And what they try to do is, hey, there's a really, really specific problem that we're dealing with.

You know, what is the extent of that problem? How do we analyze and determine what's the best approach for dealing with that problem? And then execute on those ideas and then subsequently test to make sure was the response that we gave adequate enough to deal with the threat that we had in mind. And this is sometimes cataloged by the Sarah model, right? Where you're scanning, determining what the problems are and analyzing, determining how you're gonna deal with that problem, what the extent of that problem is, responding, so doing something to address that problem and then subsequently assessment,

assessing whether that response actually worked and what you were trying to do. But pop guides try to basically use those principles, but for very, very specific guides or problems. I should say yeah, and you can go online. Just. Go on to your favorite search engine and put in problem or policing guides or pop guides. Maybe it's in Arizona State. Yep, yeah, it used to be pop center. You can type that used to be at and problem oriented policing guides or POP guides. Maybe it's in every. It's out by Arizona State, yep.

Yeah, it used to be. POP Center, you can type that in. It used to be at Rutgers back in the day or some other location, but anyway. Okay, that's good feedback. So working on an organized or coordinated crime, ORC working group, and then the supply chain protection working group.

And you mentioned a summit. Do you know the dates and location yet for that? Yeah, so that should be May 13th and 14th I believe and that's going to be in Chicago for this year. We should be coming out with an agenda shortly with the registration opening very very soon. Okay and it's hosted in this year by Ulta. Yeah, Ultaie. Typically retailers host this event. I know that one year it was hosted by DHS, US Customs and Border Patrol and that crew down in Miami at Port of Miami. But okay, so supply chain protection. What are a couple things you all are looking at with supply chain protection improvement? What kind of R&D are you guys looking at right now?

In that working group? Yeah, so currently, again, we're trying to focus on what are the broad variety of problems that you're dealing with, because part of the issue has been relatively under looked at in comparison to things like terrorism across the rails or across transportation lines,

like with CT-PAT, rather than Cargivest specifically. But there's some other issues that kind of crop up as well. And they're trying to look at, are there certain technologies or things that we can do to alleviate something like workplace violence, right? So that's a big one right now. There's current interest within the working group right now to look into RFID and leveraging,

how can we use that technology for both inventory management, but also for investigative purposes, but also leveraging maybe some different types of AI to help with some of the analytics within their camera systems that they already have within their distribution centers. Interesting, interesting. Okay, excellent.

We have, for those that don't know too, we've got one team member here who will do an interview with Caleb, a research scientist who is a computer scientist and a computer engineer and specializes in development and testing of AI models, particularly computer vision models like you're describing, Christina, that could be used. And then we have access to a whole host of faculty and graduate and undergraduate students at University of Florida that are in that area. In fact we're getting ready to bring in I think a couple more interns in that field. Okay

so what about an organized retail crime? What are you guys thinking about and looking at now and going forward a little bit? Yeah so we just finished a survey recently where we were trying to just get a baseline of what does your ORC investigation structure look like? So how many investigators do you have that either have ORC within their title or not, but work on ORC cases? How many analysts do you have? But also clarifying, you know, what rules and responsibilities do you have, you know, in your retail front end versus any other types of, you know, security and whatnot, as well as training.

So what trainings do you require of your investigators? And that was prompted by one of our members. They were curious to see what are the standards that exist. So we ended up doing a survey based off of that. And then some of the projects that we're trying to work at is there's going to be an RTP coming up very soon, but I'll give you a sneak preview where we kind of did a focus group with our members

to see what problems did you experience during the holiday season? Were they similar or different to what you experienced in 2023? And then what solutions did you do to try to address some of those concerns? And one of the big ones was traveling groups. So they would get hit in one state and then, you know, several days later they get hit in another state

and it was hard to try to connect all those pieces together and figure out, you know, who are the bad actors and what are you going to do with that? And a lot of them actually, um, subscribed into the Romani groups. So there's been interest to try to do more analyses of, you know, who are these groups that law enforcement have generally identified as, you know, interesting individuals that they want to try to deal with. And then, you know, what are their characteristics? What are their movement patterns like? And subsequently, you know, what can we do to try to bridge some of that gap to get some prosecutions in off the streets basically. Okay.

And then R2P, again, for those uninitiated research to practice briefs, and it sounds like our upcoming POP or POP type reports, the SMART papers, will be slightly different. Would they be more in depth than say an R2P brief, which tends to be one to two pages or whatever? Yeah, although sometimes if a topic requires a little more pages, we might do a couple more pages within an R2P, but really they're supposed to just be snippets of, you know, here's a snapshot of what we're doing, but if you want more

in-depth information, you know, you can contact the scientists or things of that nature, versus the POP guide would be more about a very tailored and in-depth deep dive into a very specific problem and then how it's addressed. So for example, the first one that we're going to be working on is fictitious pickups or what they're called fictitious pickups in supply chain, which is, you know, brokerage load fraud. So, you know, you might have two brokers who are, you who are moving the product through the supply chain. They have to change hands over and over throughout the supply chain

as they're traveling down that route. While someone could claim that, yep, I've got your load right here. They purchased it and turns out there's nothing in there because they were stolen. So there's certain drivers that our members have identified as we don't work with them because we tend not to get our products. So it's a deep dive into that type of cargo theft or brokerage fraud here, rather than something like pilferage, which might require. So pilferage is like, you know,

light taking of some items that are loose in the pallets or in the boxes that might require a different set of solutions than you would get from more strategic kinds of cargo that after things of that nature. So. Yeah, that makes sense. Like a point of sale exception reports.

Avoid after could be different than avoid during or different than a fake refund or. Right, or a gift card scheme is gonna be very different than a wardrobe thing, right? So each of those problems are gonna have very specific characteristics. They might have very specific offender types and thus there's going to have different solutions because of them. Yeah, I love that. So that's situational crime prevention in a nutshell.

Yes. Yes, right. We're looking at very specific situations scripting it out. So, okay, you talked a little bit about the upcoming summit in May for supply chain protection hosted by Ulta Beauty and that information will come out in the Connect newsletter from LPRC that goes out weekly to any and everybody that would like to get it. It's a digital email version. It'll be on our website lpresearch.org and it'll be talked about on the working group calls. It'll be on our website lpresearch.org and it'll be talked about on the working group calls. It'll be talked about at the Impact Conference coming up 25th and 26th of March coming up pretty quickly as well. So stay tuned.

If you're a retailer or a solution partner or a member of the LPRC, remember we have six very active monthly working groups including Organized Retail Crime and Supply Chain Protection. So what are you working on? What are you gonna be talking about at impact in late March, Christina? Yeah, so one of them is going to be looking at cargo theft

and how we did a survey last year and we're doing a survey this year, again, continuing in that theme of annual tracking of some of these incidents. But we're doing a session on that, as well as how do law enforcement partners and retailers work together to address that. So we're also trying to get a law enforcement speaker

to kind of have a conversation with our members about, here's what it's like on our end for investigations and what we need and things of that nature. And then from the retailer's perspective, you know, what are your barriers, limitations, things of that nature? What are you guys leveraging to do so? I'm also going to be working with some of our members on a CEPTED training. So for those that don't know, CEPTab means crime prevention through environmental design. And so the idea is, can we manipulate people's behavior based off of the physical space that you are in? So the classic example I tend to give, if you're at a light that happens to be red at an intersection, what are you

doing? You have stopped. There's no sign that says you need to stop in that particular incidence, but you know that that is the behavior that you need to do at that intersection. And then when it turns green, you move your foot from the brake to the acceleration and then you move forward, right? Again, it didn't say to do that, but you knew that instinctually from the environment or you learned it from the environment. And so that's some of the basic principles. The light is the cue, the stimulus, the response. To get that response, exactly. And we can do the same thing, you know, behaviorally, right? You can, the stimulus, to get the response. To get that response, exactly. And we can do the same thing behaviorally. You can limit where people go into a building

by locking certain doors. So you try the door, you know you can't go in there, so you try a different door. Again, we can impact behavior based off of those stimuli. And so we're doing a training session about how can you leverage SEPTED and its various principles within your stores, and what does that actually look like. So we actually developed a training booklet that, you know, members that sign up will get and we will run through some of those

examples through that training. And that's, you know, the second impact session that I'll be doing. And then the third and fourth are based on a similar data set, but one is going to be a lightning session and one is going to be a full audience engagement type of session. And that's based off of the Voice of the Victim project where we did with our partner, Verkata, sponsoring it, we were able to do a mixed methods study. So we did surveys and we also did some interviews of retail workers across the United States that either did or did not experience violence within that previous year and about their different perceptions of victimization, what technologies would they like to see, certain demographic characteristics, all that kind of stuff.

Would they like to see certain demographic characteristics, all that kind of stuff? Again, to try to figure out what is the extent of those perceptions across retail workers in the United States and what kinds of technologies do they have or wish they had. Perfect. So, voice of the victim is another major part of the LPRC and Christina is heading up or spearheading that movement. And again, the idea is to literally get the voice of the victim, the people that are really right now working in these spaces and places and are exposed to good, bad, and ugly all day, every day, and to different extents, right?

There's variance there. And so everybody's going to experience different things and they're going to respond against a misresponse in different ways. And we're trying to understand that. But they are, they have a voice as well, not just to tell us about it, but to suggest things, give their perspective on things that have or haven't worked maybe, or that they've heard about and things. So all of this, all of this is designed to inform practice, you know, policy and how we do things, all of our research. And we'll see Voice the Victim research continue to expand in different ways. I think, I believe with FRACADA, we're working on another iteration in the future and coordinating also with Motorola.

They are conducting a somewhat similar, but a little bit different type of research and recording with them to make sure that we're not duplicating each other where it didn't make sense. So anything else that our members and listeners should know about leveraging research to improve practice and results outcomes? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we on the scientist side wish we could help more with is leverage the own data, your own data that you already have to inform the decisions that you want to make, because you all collect a lot of data. It's just you know, how do you make sense of it? Or how do you put it together into something that's actionable? And that's something that, you know, we as a scientist can assist with

in any capacity that you're looking for, as well as, you know, provide you with, you know, any kinds of action items that you think might be of interest to both you guys internally within your own organizations, but also to other members who might want to see, hey, you know, I have this specific problem. Has anybody else, you know, suffered with this before? What did they do?

And this is what happened. So I would say that's another thing as well that you can leverage is we as scientists are super happy and stoked if you want to give us data that we can, you know, do analyses with. That's literally my bread and butter. And I'm more than happy to assist in your own research capacities as well. No that's a good call out and yeah there's so much going on with transactions across the supply chain and within the store particularly a checkout but how many people are coming into

your store do you have people counters we'd love to get that as sort of the denominator on some of the things that we're doing so any kind of data that you all have out there, it's a big call out by Christina. We are very, very open and excited to get data. ARC's program we know is every retailer that we work with, and others, and others, providing their incidents, what they're experiencing by store to us as a data set, as well as inventory losses by category and by store, and both of them in the aggregate, but overall, because that is right now, we've got over 30 retail corporations

that have now sent us their data. And the maps that we're able to create and are creating, that have been created, are powerful. You can zoom in and out down to the store level to that community, that county, to that market, to that state and beyond to get a much better idea of what in the world's going on on top of just overall nationally,

here's how much people are losing, they think, they think to employee theft, to dishonest customers, to errors and omissions and things like that. So, all right, well, to errors and omissions and things like that. So all right, well I think I want to thank you on behalf of the crime science community and welcome you back and good luck and best wishes with all your research endeavors, with all the summits and events. And we were talking to the group by the way this morning about we this is so much about

what we're doing. We can't just be a research operation. We need to translate or put out what seems to be indicated from the research to the practitioners and keep building and building together. So with no further ado, I want to thank everybody for tuning in and stay safe and stay in touch. Thanks so much. 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.