LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 206 Ft. Joseph Courtesis (3Si)

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

In this episode, our featured host Cory Lowe, PhD, Director of Research, talks with Joseph Courtesis, Senior VP at 3Si! Listen as they dive into the advancements in Real-Time Intelligence, stories on how crime affects a community, and a look at the continued growth of the partnership between retailers and law enforcement. Don’t miss this in-depth look at the science and practical application driving crime prevention!

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. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. My name is Corey Lohan, the director of research here at the Loss Prevention Research Council, and I'm joined by Joe Cortez's with 3SI. They're doing a lot of really awesome work over there and Joe is just a tremendously interesting human being with a lot of really fascinating background. So Joe, if you don't mind, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and what you're doing today with 3SI. Yeah, absolutely and I love the introduction of being called interesting. I take it as a

compliment. We've had some long discussions and I can definitely get animated on some things that I really care about. So I hope we have a great discussion today and thank you for inviting me to the show. Yeah, I'm retired. I'm out of the NYPD as you know. I did just about 27 years with the organization, held pretty much every rank you can hold in that organization. In my last 15 years or so, I had executive level positions. I was the commanding officer of the 106th precinct. I was the commanding officer of the 105th precinct. I moved from the precinct level and then went back into the investigative space and was the commanding officer of the central investigations division. And I got the pleasure of ending my career as the commander of the NYPD's real-time crime center where I got, I had the privilege of

kicking the tires with all the latest and greatest investigative technology and had a crew of people that were just so smart and understood technology to a level that I didn't realize how, for lack of a better word, stupid I was with technology. I thought I was smart until I ran into this cast of fantastic investigators and technology experts. So very blessed career and wouldn't change it for anything. Yes, sir. So now you're with 3SI and you lead up the law enforcement division over there. Can you tell us a little bit about what y'all do over there? Not only what 3SI does, but what the law enforcement division does specifically. Yeah, so interestingly enough, I was introduced to 3SI through my employment in the NYPD. Talk about a few cases that I leveraged

3SI's technology, but I really had a very close relationship with 3SI when I commanded the real-time crime center. They were one of those technology tools that we had leveraged. And I looked at them as strategic partners. They were never in my office for the purpose of selling me anything. In fact, they were in the office because I called them up asking for help or, how can you help me solve this crime? And they would come in there with their law enforcement division, which was a team of retired executive level law enforcement officers, probably exceeding 700 years

of law enforcement experience. And we would just figure out a way to build a mousetrap to catch the perpetrators for the crime we were investigating. Very successful. Never did I think after I retired that I would be asked to lead that same law enforcement division. And that's where I am now, the Senior Vice President of the 3SI Law Enforcement Division. And we're taking this law enforcement relationship to another level right now, Corey, and it's really exciting. Awesome. So you play both sides of the game now. I mean, you have the 27 years of experience with law enforcement, you know, serving in every rank pretty much, and now you're on the solution provider side with 3SI doing some amazing work over there.

you're on the solution provider side with 3SI doing some amazing work over there. What were some of the challenges that y'all had when you were commander of the real-time crime center, specifically around technology, what were some of the challenges you had? If you think about those challenges, how has technology allowed you to address some of those, and what challenges still remain that you see out there? Yeah, so there were two levels of challenges that I experienced in my career. At the patrol level, commanding, you know, patrol precincts, one of the

biggest challenges we had were backlog of 911 calls. And that backlog 911 calls. And that backlog was caused by a lot of false alarms that were probably unnecessary. Then fast forward when I'm in a unit like the Real-Time Crime Center and I have my fingertips at all of this great technology, which was fantastic. What we did well in the NYPD, and we probably wanted to pioneer us to do it, was integrating our numerous different databases of information. So Corey, at one point, before we put the Real-Time Crime Center together, if I ran your name, or if I needed to find out everything about Corey Lowe, I would have had to run you through probably 35 or more different databases that had different sign-ins. I may not even have known some of them existed. And then I would likely just run you

through what I knew and miss important information, like maybe a potential warrant that you might have had in another state. So when we built the real-time crime center, we built it with the intention of taking all of that information and creating like a data lake, or we called it at the time a crime data warehouse. And we put all that information into one pool and then built a search engine that allowed us

to access all of that information in one query. So that was really innovative and big thinking when we put this together and the real-time crime center was in control of all of that information. Fast forward now, what you see what most of the real-time crime centers are doing is there, they're integrate, where I struggled was the integration of the digital evidence. Where I struggled was the integration of the digital evidence. We had license plate readers, we had cameras, we had all different other types of technology, some link analysis tools, mapping tools, and some of them were standalones. Our camera system on our own infrastructure, yes, we had that built into our system, but if there were other organizations that wanted to give us access to the cameras,

I would have to sign in to a standalone computer and view that and not have the ability to layer that over my other data. So those were my technology challenges that I found. Well, we navigated around it. For example, say a 3SI activation, a tracking activation, a bank robbery, and a bank robbery steals the device. Well, we would be looking at the 3SI track on a different computer than, say, our other computer where I can overlay our camera infrastructure,

where I can overlay our license plate readers and getting everything to talk together was probably our biggest challenge and as you could see from some of the work I see you guys doing, you're hell-bent on solving that. Yes sir we are. So of the things that you were talking about, you mentioned the backlog of 911 calls, the data warehouse and bringing together all those data points and then this single pane of glass type idea. Some of those have been addressed a little bit more than others, like the data. I think that those types of problems have begun to be addressed. The backlog of 911 calls is still a major problem, but I think there's some really cool work being done about that. What is 3SI doing to address some of these problems? Yeah, and I'm extremely excited about the direction we're taking our direct dispatch in.

And just to those listening right now who don't know what our direct dispatch is, is when a 3SI tracking device, when we moved from DIPAC to GPS trackers, we needed to get law enforcement on board and have them understand that when a bank gets robbed, there is a GPS tracker in there and we're going to send you information on where that perpetrator is in six second intervals. Of course they were interested. This is, you know, I'm giving them breadcrumbs to a violent felony robbery in progress. In that process, what we did was we went into every dispatch from every location that we had a customer and we put our equipment

into that dispatch. And then when when if and when that location that we had a client with at a robbery, that dispatch would automatically get notified. Well, let's fast forward now 20 years. 20 years later, we're in over 10,000 dispatch agencies direct to dispatch, not going through the traditional 911 triaging process. When our bell rings in that dispatch, they know that this is a verified felony level job and they know it's coming felony level job and they know it's coming from 3SI and they know it's legit. And hence we have up to 70% apprehension rate

on our cases. It's pretty incredible. I'm coming from the commander of a real time crime center, one of the largest real time crime sense, I didn't have any technology that produced that level of an ROI added together. So that being said, we took that problem that I identified to you earlier in our conversation of the backlog. What was causing the backlog of 911 jobs and really what was causing the backlog is burglar alarms. The burglar alarm that the call monitoring centers are sending in burglar alarms at a very high volume. These burglar alarms can be false alarms. This falls into where the 911 operator takes it in they give it it to the law enforcement dispatcher. And the law enforcement dispatcher knows that the majority, or almost the totality of these

are going to be false alarms. So that dispatcher places that entire call structure into a very low priority. However, there are a few real jobs in there, real cases, actual live burglaries, live robberies that are in effect. And what we're essentially doing is we're sending law enforcement to those cases without the proper caution. They're so used to those calls being false that they don't always respond with the proper caution. And I can name three law enforcement officers in the NYPD alone that I know in my tenure

died responding or confronting a perpetrator in those types of situations because they didn't have the proper information. What we did now, and I don't know if you've noticed, is new standards for alarm companies, alarm monitoring companies called AVS01, Alarm Validation System, and it has four levels. What we've done with our clients is we are monitoring their burglar alarms. And when the AVSL 01 reaches a level three or a level four, which means is verified through video or audio or an eyewitness, we are sending that through our pipe. And we're sending that direct to dispatch with our alarm going off. law enforcement knows that this is a 3SI job. They know it's been vetted by us. They know they can trust us.

They see it come in and then that particular call gets put into a higher priority level, the right amount of resources respond to the location, and we're getting safer outcomes that way. So if I were to describe it like this, when burglar alarms come in through the 911 process, they come in as a haystack of information where there are a few needles in there that are legitimate. We're identifying the needles and we're sending that to the right eyes. Gotcha. That's very helpful information and it makes a ton of sense. So what I'm picking up here is that we retailers want law

enforcement to act. They have to make the cost of benefits of action make sense for law enforcement, right? So law enforcement when they get a call for service, first of all, they want to know if one of those valid, that it's actually something that is an actual crime in progress, and that it's actionable, that they can do something about it, that there's an offender still on the premises, that they can act upon. On the other hand, they want that situational awareness, so that the more they're going into the situation, they're not being ambushed or putting themselves in excess danger in that situation. I mean, a lot of it, some of it's unavoidable, it's the nature of the job, but if we could provide more information about the situation, it would definitely boost the safety.

And it seems like what you all are doing at 3SI kind of touches on all those points. Corey, to elaborate just really quickly, when we open the aperture for this additional verified felony level information to go through our D2D, we didn't just turn this on. We reached out to our law enforcement partners. We reached out to the 70 major chief agencies and pitched it to them, hey, how would you like to get this verifiable information?

How would you like it to look? And we got overwhelming support for this. In fact, not only did we get overwhelming support, they wanted it to be part of the beta processing or testing. So we handpicked seven police departments during our beta testing of this project to help us develop it. What do you want the UI to look like? What do you want the user interface to look like? How do you want it to come in? So our new and enhanced user interface isn't just built for law enforcement, it's built by law enforcement.

So it's really cool. And I know that sounds cliche, but it's actually the way we did it. And it's quite impressive. And I'm proud of it. That's all very interesting. Now, you said that you are in over 10,000 agencies already with the Directive Dispatch platform. How many retail stores do y'all cover?

We have close to, I would say, we're probably close to 80,000 retail clients, and we have probably close to 175,000, maybe more GPS products deployed at those with those clients as well. So we have a huge footprint. Thank you for that. And then the reason I bring that up is because that's a huge opportunity for intelligence exchange and then leveraging, right?

Ultimately, what we want to see is action. You know, there's only so much that retailers do and oftentimes the loss prevention programs kind of. They they they succeed and fail on the action that is that they're able to take right? There's only so much that retail can do. I mean, it's very dangerous today for for. Retailers take action, so if they can get law enforcement to act, that creates some consequences for offenders. If they can get prosecutors to prosecute, that is ultimately what creates those consequences. There's two broad strategies that we're exploring at the LPRCM. We want to understand

more when it comes to GPS devices. On one one hand, that's the, that rapid response model where you have the GPS device that the offender takes when they steal merchandise or, you know, cash. Now, and they, they leave the store and then you're able to track and, and intercept them and take them down. Then it really makes the crime actionable for law enforcement and it's something that they want to act upon because they know where the offender is, they know where the property is that's involved, they know all of that. It's highly actionable. The same thing seems to be true on the prosecution side. If you can improve the evidence and the intelligence

associated with a case, you are more likely to get prosecutors to prosecute and take the case. Can you talk to me about these two strategies and how you see those driving action in the criminal justice system by law enforcement and prosecution this investigation model and versus the rapid recovery or rapid intercept model? Corey, I wrote down what you said because you explained it better than I do.

And that was actually fantastic because right off the bat, our information is actionable. I like the term used there. It is 100% actionable law enforcement dreams. And I'm telling you this firsthand, the first day you get out at a police academy, you dream of catching a police academy, you dream of catching a bad guy in action.

You dream of driving down the street and seeing a guy coming running out of a bank with a mask on and a bag with a dollar sign on it. And we make that happen. We deliver that type of catching the perpetrator red-handed, actionable intelligence. Yeah, I've seen some of the videos of some of the takedowns on pharmacy robberies and things like that. And it's pretty incredible.

And then, you know, and that's how we got involved in the NYPD, quite honestly. You know, we beta tested this on a pharmacy robbery pattern back in 2009. And it took us two weeks to take the perpetrator down. That was it. You know, so now you talk about prosecutable. We're gift wrapping a prosecutable case. We have breadcrumbs, case. We have breadcrumbs, you know, to the point of attack, to the point of apprehension. We have the perpetrator in possession of the items, and then we typically could tie it back to every other sensor that the perpetrator went to. I know exactly where they went. So I could pick up cameras. When they're inside the store, they're wearing a mask.

But when they're two blocks away, they take the mask off. Well, guess what? I know exactly where they were. So I can go canvas for the cameras over in that area and get some more intelligence that strengthens this case. Corey, you're not gonna believe this, but when we get called to testify, but when, when we get called to testify, and when I say we, I'm talking three aside, we testify on these cases. When

we get called to testify and we're testifying at least once a week, we have a 100% conviction rate when we're done. When we're done, the, the, the complaint, the perpetrator either takes a plea or they find them guilty. Wow. And we've never been cross examined. The defense attorney just wants us off the stand immediately. They can't wait for us to get off the stand. Good situation to be in. Going beyond that, you know, that's prosecutable. But there's also these organized retail crime cases where you have to establish that this is a pattern of behavior where this is an organized criminal activity. How can GPS devices be used to track these beyond

and let some of that product go so that you can do further investigations into these more complex ORC rings. Yeah, so we have two deployable methods, depending on what the end goal of the client is. So we have some clients that are saying, look, I don't want, first of all, the perpetrator stealing things that are not rising to the level that law enforcement wants to arrest on. Maybe it's not meeting a felony level. But we believe this is an organized team

and this product's going somewhere and we need to know where it's going. So we do have two product lines. We have our direct to dispatch where when you want law enforcement to respond and make that apprehension right there, we're going to get them that message faster than anybody on the planet.

Then we have another product line, which is more of a covert product line. And it runs off of a completely different app, and it's on a need to know basis. So if you have an investigative team that just wants to build a strong long-term case, find out where the fencing operation is, or where they're storing the property,

we have different products that will last, will have a longer battery life, obviously, and we'll be able to get you to that end location. And then we build some intelligence on, well, how many different, you know, I don't wanna name companies on a podcast. So, but let's just- I think I can understand that.

Yeah, but let's just say we have like a beauty company, you know. There are multiple different beauty companies out there that compete for business, but if all of them are getting robbed and the property is all going to the same location, well, 3SI is the only one who knows that, you know, because they're all clients, you know, I'm not saying they're all clients of us, but we have clients with multiple different people in that space. And we can lend that information, we can build prosecutable cases. I'm going to give you a story real quick. Because we used to, we used to not give that to retail. These long-term operations we used to do exclusively to law enforcement. We had our retail product line and we had our law enforcement product line. And we were very

discreet about what we gave law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't want anybody to know what they're using to do their cases and to track and what have you. But I had, when I was the commander of the 105th precinct, and this is a true story, it is so crazy, you're not going to believe it. All right. But when I was the commander of the 105th precinct, I had a burglary pattern. And we had close to 30 burglaries in this pattern, same perpetrator committing these burglaries, but we couldn't, and it was residential, and we could not solve this case. We wound up getting some intelligence that the perpetrator was in this BMW, this blue BMW. We identified the car and we reached out to a district attorney. We got a search warrant and I used one of these three SIGPS trackers, and I wired the tracker into the car. Once we got the wire tracked

into the car, we found that the perpetrator had, and he was on parole for burglary, just to kind of put this out there. So we felt we were on the right track here. We found that he had two more cars. We got search warrants for those other two cars, and we put GPS trackers on all three cars. Now, this is in Queens, New York. I don't know if you're familiar with New York, which is the border of Nassau County. So all three cars go live at one time. Me and my operations lieutenant are following one car. I have another anti-crime team following another car, and I have a burglary team following the other car. My car and another anti-crime team following another car and I have a burglary team following the other car. My car and the anti-crime team's car went dormant and parked and probably went to a friend's house. The other car was clearly casing outhouses. It

was obvious what they were doing. So the team leader reaches out to me and says, hey boss, their car is leaving New York City and entering into Nassau County. Do you want me to follow it? And I said, yes, stay on the vehicle. I said, because I know this pattern is entered across the border. So don't go too far, but just let me know. He reaches back out to me a few minutes later. He tells me he's on, I'm gonna call it ABC Street. Yeah. He's on ABC Street. And I said, well, wait a second.

I live on ABC Street. Where are you? He goes, well, I'm on the corner of ABC Street and First Avenue. And I'm like, wait a second. I live on that corner right there. I go, he goes, well, which house is yours? I go, my house is the 10 house on the corner. I go. What are they doing? He goes they're parking in front of your house

He goes what do you want us to do I'm like, I don't know I just hold on I called my wife on my other phone I told it a lot the doors Because I was afraid we were gonna be chasing this guy through the backyards at some point and I didn't want him running into my house. So the perpetrator exits the vehicle, walks two houses down from mine, goes in the driveway, comes out the front door of that house with a pillowcase of the perpetrator of the victim's goods inside the house, gets back in the car and my unit says to me, do you want us to pick them up? And I said, no, don't pick them up right now. I cause we all this is going to happen is going to be a foot pursuit. You catch them right now walking out the door. They're going

to run. I'm going to have them hiding in my garage somewhere. So, so I said, let them drive off. We know where they're going. We got a GPS on the car and we put up, they got back in the car. They drove off about another three miles and we safely stopped them and made the apprehension and closed out a 34 pattern or 30 something pattern burglary in front of my own house. So you can't make this stuff up, but that's a true story. But that, if you, if anybody ever asked me what got me sold on this technology, that's, that's what got me sold on this. That's when I realized, this is powerful, this solves crimes. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. It's been a while, but that's...

I'm sorry for the long story, but now that product line, we offer certain products in that product line to retail investigations units. If you're a retailer and you have an investigative unit and you wanna do some long-term investigations, we do have a limited product line in that space that we will allow you to use for longer-term investigations, and we will allow you to use that separate portal that is on a need to know basis. You don't, you may just want you and your team to know what's

going on. And that's all all very very helpful. I guess where we can wrap things up, this conversation has been fantastic and those stories and you know everything we've talked about so far has been pretty helpful. What do you think the future of law enforcement and retail looks like? I mean, where are we going in this industry, do you think? I think we're going to find a level of cooperation. I think we're going to find a level of cooperation. I think the, the, the, where we all agree right now, we, we retail wants law enforcement

to respond to their serious jobs. Law enforcement wants actionable intelligence that will help them process and prosecute cases, make an arrest and have strong prosecutable cases and put recidivists away and ultimately, you know, reduce crime in these communities. Where I think the hurdle that we have to the hurdle is and and this is Corey where you and your team are doing a great job and you're helping us build that bridge of the hurdle of sharing information. Yes. And getting retail comfortable sharing that information with law enforcement. I feel fortunate that I happen to work in this space where we are that bridge. We've provided that bridge where we're a trusted partner of law enforcement and retail can

trust us with that information and verifying it and sending it into a direct directly to them. And I hope we can we can be that bridge. And there are many other bridges out there. There are many other companies that are doing great work with with you know a similar approach. We're not just trying to do this by ourselves to re-assign you know and I don't want to name companies on here you know that we're working with almost everybody that you have on your team and they we give them access to our information and they give us access to theirs we just we just got to get retail comfortable sharing that information and that's that's our hurdle right now. That's what I see. I don't know if you agree, but that's what I do. I do agree. I thought, but I think because a lot of these all the times a lot of conversations are had where the question is OK, can can we share

share information then without considering it further? It's just kind of a no. I think where we're getting to is explaining what type of information needs to be shared, how it's going to be shared, how it's going to be protected once that information is shared. All of that stuff. And I think that will enable retailers to share a bit more than they have historically. And I think it will enable a lot more, but that's what we're primarily working through, is how do we make the retailers feel confident that they can share without it coming back

to bite them in the butt really. And I think that's where the industry is going. And I think that I appreciate all the work that y'all are doing to work together with others. Whether that's any technology partners or retailers and of course law enforcement. So I could tell you how I approach it. And if I were to ask you, Cory, in, let's talk to a major university. Yes.

And I asked them, a major university, I said, hey, how would you feel about giving unvetted access to your cameras to law enforcement? I see you laughing, and you know, and that's the exact response I would get. No way we're not giving law enforcement unvetted access to these cameras. I get it, I understand it, and it would be problematic. And then let me rephrase the question. How would you feel about giving law enforcement

access to your camera systems when there's an active shooter there? Yes. Right? Let me rephrase it. So when you rephrase it, how would you feel about giving law enforcement access to your cameras when there is a robbery in progress? No. And you're going to get a completely different answer. And I believe that's the bridge, Corey. The bridge is can we, you know, what are you comfortable with?

Exactly. You're saying what level of sharing are you comfortable with? We have the technology to write the logic into that technology that will fit that. And you gotta, if a 911 job or if a call for if there's an active shooter, that should be a seamless that shouldn't be me calling the school and getting the guy who has the key to the camera room to unlock the camera. You're like this is you know, this

is the reality of it. It should be an unvetted access to public safety at first and that's what we offer with direct-to-dispatch. When you press your panic alarm you are telling me that you are releasing access. You know what I'm saying? You are releasing access when you press that panic alarm because it crossed that level. It crossed that level of comfort of where you're comfortable. So I think that the control is I think that giving retailers some level of control to win that access is the key. So this has been a fantastic conversation. There's a ton of really wonderful things happening in the industry that are making this making collaboration between law enforcement and retail easier. And I'm really

excited to see where where things go from here. Joe, it's been a it's been a fantastic conversation. I always love talking to you because I learned so much every single time and you just got some really, really cool stories. So thank you very much for joining us today. We look forward to seeing what we do together in the future. So thank you. It was my pleasure, as always. 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.