LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 215 Ft. Chris Henningsen

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

In this episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, Cory Lowe speaks with Chris Henningsen, Manager of the Real-time Crime Center in Scottsdale, Arizona. They discuss how to set up a SOC, technology upgrades in the field, and the continued collaboration with the Real Time Crime Center Association. Listen in to learn a little bit more about Real Time Crime Center strategies!

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. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. My name is Corey Lowe and I'm joined today by Chris Hennyson, manager of the Real Time Crime Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, and president of the National Real Time Crime Center Association. Hey, Chris, it's good to have you. How are you doing today?

Good. How are you? I'm doing very well. You know, we've been working on some pretty exciting things together for a good while now. I think that we're going to start ramping some more things up pretty soon. But before we get too deep into this conversation, can you just start by telling everyone about your background and your experience on law enforcement real-time crime centers? Sure. I started a little over 20 years ago. and started as an explorer, cadet, became a volunteer,

then went on to a position called Police Aid, and Police Aid in our department is a professional staff employee that's assigned to a patrol squad that handles everything that a police officer would handle with the exception of suspect contact, driving Code 3 in a police bar, or arresting anyone. And so most police aides in our department handle anywhere between 60 to 70% of the paper calls for the entire department.

So that's everything from collisions to burglaries to shoplifts to a variety of other related crimes. Once I was with a police, as a police aide, I, went to the gang investigations unit and was assigned to the East Valley Fusion Center. I was assigned there for almost 10 years during that assignment. I became a police analyst. And then toward the end of my assignment there, I was given the opportunity to come to the police department to start a real-time crime center. When I started that, it was during 2020.

and good old COVID years, we couldn't most, so when most agencies start a real-time center, it is really recommended by the National Association, which we'll talk about here in a minute, to travel and visit three or four different centers to really understand what you want your center to look like. Well, when we started ours, the whole first month was really dedicated to develop, developing policy, understanding what other centers were doing. And it was really hard to travel because we weren't allowed in other police departments because of the COVID restrictions. And so it worked out much better than I could ever expect because we had the opportunity

during that time to connect with other agencies via teams and build relationships with other agencies across the country. Fort Worth, Elk Grove, Miami, New York, Las Vegas. And so I had the opportunity to see what other centers were doing throughout the entire country and not have to travel. And then during that time, we realized, you know what, we need an association. And so I'll cover that here in a little bit.

But first year, setting up the center, I then became a supervisor, and I supervised about three different technicians, real-time crime center technicians. And then just recently, I got promoted the manager, but I also supervised two drone first responder pilots. And so our centers open seven days a week, and the hours differ every day. We're not 24-7. But we also dispatch drones to different calls for service to assist with in a certain part of the city. And so with that coverage that allows us the opportunity to help each other, drone pilots are helping

technicians and technicians are helping drone pilots and then ultimately we're helping patrol understand more about the call that they're going to via the different camera feeds that we have or the different resources that we have or the drone that we have to go back to the association side we when we developed the association we developed it in about 2022 so we're only about three years old But being a three-year-old nonprofit organization, we feel like we're much older than we are because of the growth of the association. So I started as a founding president. And in that first year, I had thought we might have 100 members.

And toward the end of the year, we were at well over 1,000. We're coming close to 2000 now, and the membership is really based here in the United States, really to the name National Real Time Crime Center Association. And the association was really built on the principle of helping other agencies develop real-time crime centers, as well as to help them innovate. And so as we grow our centers in our respective cities, we really want to make sure that we're working with our technology partners to figure out what's next, how to make what today is working great and much better, and so we do that through innovation. And so the principle that we focus on is called a dice model. And so D is development, I is innovation, C is collaboration.

That's where we collaborate with other real-time centers, as well as other partners like loss prevention research council, which we'll talk more about of what that project and partnership looks like. And then the last one is education. And so before the association, we were educated by our vendors. And so nothing to say that that's wrong, but we're only going to be educated on what they want us to be educated on. Might be some limitations there in what they're telling you. There is some definite limitations. And so that's the real reason we developed the association so that we can educate each other and be connected with each other as we develop different. products, different concepts. And a lot of these concepts and even products for that matter,

we work really closely with our technology partners together on. And so we have a really good relationship with all the technology partners that you see on our website. We connect directly with their CEOs, their senior leadership. We meet with them regularly. We provide them feedback that definitely will help them from a profit standpoint. But we also really do that because we know that if we help them get better, then we know that the products that they're delivering in our pure real-time centers across the country are going to be much better to protect and make sure their communities are safer. Awesome. That's all very, very helpful. We follow some of some same some of the same models at the LPRC we've talked about you know your development

and the development of the real-time crime center there let's talk a little bit more broadly about real-time crime centers you know how have those evolved over the last you know 10 years or so what are the major changes that you've seen so far So real-time centers, so we're, real-time centers started in 2005, so we're on our 20th anniversary of centers being created. They were created by New York PD, so they were the very first one, literally within about a month, or within the next three to four weeks, they'll hit their 20th anniversary. And so over years, multiple agencies had traveled to go see their center and then had created a real-time crime center based off of what they saw in New York. Now, New York does things much bigger than most of us do. And so their center is going to be much bigger than another center.

We started at the very beginning of the association by telling agencies and police chiefs and police sheriffs, and other police leaders that you can create a real-time center with a laptop, a radio, and a dedicated and committed employee. And so, and that employee has to be proactive as well as reactive as well. They need to know what they're looking for. And with that, they set up anywhere. They could set up in a dispatch center. They can set up in an investigative area. It doesn't matter really where they're at and then over time if they're getting so many different great successes hopefully their police leaders are helping them grow from a laptop to a computer or to a gaming computer and then adding more monitors and then adding more software and so over time they're going to have a center

and so what we really educate police leaders on is that when you go into a real real-time crime center and they have spent five, 10 million, 20 million, doesn't matter how many millions of dollars on a center, that they don't need that right away. They can start with that laptop. The most important part is identifying an employee in the department that is committed and dedicated to help patrol provide additional information to help them with their case or that call for service. And so that's the number one priority. And then all of the other stuff kind of falls in a place. You can start with a portable radio and that laptop with all the resources that they have at the department. And then over time, they're going to add other great resources that you can

see within our association technology partners. Thank you for going back, you know, a little bit further to the early days of the real-time crime centers with MEPD being really the first. So very important history, very important context. What are some of those more recent trends that you've seen in real-time crime center? You know, they started out in 2005, you know, really in the aftermath of 9-11 and a lot of the challenges that they saw, not only dealing with that, but a lot of other things, you know, In the last several years, we're the primary trends that you've seen in real-time crime centers. Is there greater reliance in technology?

What do those trends look like? The big trends that we see is more collaboration with the community. And so that's from working with the smaller businesses to the larger businesses, whether they're retail, and working together to make the community safer. So that's one major trend that we see nationwide, hence why we're kind of working together because your members are retailers, our members are law enforcement, real-time centers,

and they're connecting nationwide on identifying how to keep their communities safer. And this partnership that we have will allow us the opportunity to help reduce crime in our communities, as well as prevent crime from even occurring. And we'll get more into the details on that. But the major trend that we're seeing is that collaboration with community businesses and also transparency with the community on what a real-time center does. Whether that's showing successes through your community engagement or your public information office. But it's really important that real-time centers do not hide this technology from the community. It's really important that you allow that you have a media day, you allow your media to come into the center to see what's going on.

You allow your community partners that are developing or understanding how this partnership may help them, allow them to come in and see your center, and allowing that community transparency is really important. The one big thing that I really want to cover that I know most of our real-time centers across the country really embrace is protecting privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. Those are the three major important aspects of our certification program that our association has. And that really allows, when folks get certified through our association, it really embraces those three major areas, as well as protecting other technologies that we're utilizing and making sure that there's full community transparency. None of this should be a surprise of your community. and most community members drive on and most of our elected officials drive on public safety and making sure that the community is safe.

And this is a tool, not the tool, a tool that law enforcement can use to help keep the community safe. But the other trend that we're seeing is that you don't always notice community. is calling their center, real-time crime center. You notice a real-time information center, real-time analyst center, real-time operations center. And when I say real-time operation center, the other aspect that real-time crime centers may do, their name is different,

is that they partner with the fire department, they partner with streets, they partner with other city departments to help them with their mission. And so I'll give you an example, in Arizona, a lot of our real-time centers, partner with streets during monsoon time to help them identify what streets are flooded,

what streets they might need to get some barricades to. They'll partner with the fire department and provide some camera coverage to the fire department to allow them to understand where the heat source is coming for the fire, and it allows them to act more quickly and hopefully save the building, save the people that are in the building much quicker by providing this resource. That's really awesome.

You've been talking about collaboration, and I think it's probably time that we get down to some of the stuff that we're working on with the National Crime Center Association. So I guess it was probably about a year ago that we started working together, maybe even longer at this point. But you've been bringing real-time crime centers together nationally, but, you know, also within Arizona. And so the LPRC became involved in that, in the group that you put together. And we've been able to do quite a bit so far together. Can you speak a little bit about that initiative and, you know, what, what you're working to do with that? So, again, most real-time centers, as I share, are really trying to focus on building better relationships with our community businesses which means retailers and my police

chief at the time really wanted us to build a relationship with some of our major big box retailers and we have a good our most law enforcement have a good relationship with the store managers maybe the district managers but about there that's where we stop and so within any organization you need to work with the folks at the higher level as well as the lower level and we can never get to the higher level. And so through your organization, we're able to get to the higher level and kind of share what our focus is. So our focus is to reduce crime from occurring at our retailers as well as even get to a point to where suspects and criminals decide, I'm not going to go to Scottsdale. I'm not going to go to Phoenix.

I'm not going to go to any of these other cities we're partnering with. I'm going to go to another city that is not part of this partnership and commit a crime because these guys take protecting their communities to a whole new level. And so that's our goal. Our goal is to make sure that because when you're protecting communities, especially retailers, prices don't go up in those stores. because they know that's being protected and items aren't being stolen. And what we noticed through some of these partnerships is that some of these big box retail stores,

one big box retail store could have lost $4 million or $5 million last year. When you really get down to the nuts and the bolts from talking with Corey here, you know, $5 million, say your sales sales. tax is 9% or we're just going to round it up to 10% that that means that we lost over half a million dollars from that store last year and so times how many other big box retailers we have throughout the throughout the city or the community that you're in that's a lot of money that we lost because of shoplifts and various other losses to that store. Yeah. And that's the reason we wanted to partner with y'all as well. On the retail side, retail

knows that if they do not partner with law enforcement and with prosecution, a lot of their programs will be ineffective. A lot of what retailers do is kind of based on situational crime prevention, which involves either increasing the effort required to commit a crime or increasing the risk and negative consequences for committing a crime. There's other things like reducing the benefits associated with crime, but the two primary ones are increasing the effort and increasing the risk. But increasing the risk is all dependent on what law enforcement and prosecution does. So it doesn't matter how many cameras you put in a location, if law enforcement can't act

upon that and if prosecution can't act upon that for whatever reason, whether that be we can't get the right information to the right hands, whatever that blockage may be, that risk just isn't going to accrue to the offender. So working with real-time crime centers makes it much riskier for the offender, right? And it allows retailers to focus more on that offender rather than putting in things like locking cases that affect every single person. If we can make sure that we're actually targeting the offenders, we don't have to put in locking cases that affect every single human being, everyone who does or does not have criminal intentions. So I think that's one of the things that I'm most enthusiastic about was working with the real-time crime centers. It makes a lot of what retailers already know more actionable for law enforcement.

Speaking of that, you know, there's a lot of tools that retailers are beginning to use and that real-time crime centers have been using for quite some time, like license plate readers and like drones and like fusion platforms and all these other technologies. You know, what are some of the technologies or other innovative programs? and strategies that you see playing the greatest role moving forward between retail and real-time crime centers? So in regards to technology, technology should only be utilized in order to help protect the community. It shouldn't be used for any other type of purposes. In our department, we're

really strong on making sure that technology is used for an investigative purpose only. like that's it you'll get in trouble if you use any of our technologies for the inappropriate purposes or curiosity and so with that said we really want to make sure that we're utilizing technology to protect areas of the community that need that protection so all of our licensed way readers are strategically placed throughout the city with a purpose and the purpose is really identifying any type of criminals that have stolen vehicles or have stolen plates or have felony warrants that are coming inbound into our city. We also do have it for missing persons too.

And so the connectivity piece is through our Arizona department. So whatever they put into what we call ACIC, which is Arizona Criminal Information Center, those will come through that license plate reader. Now, retailers use license plate readers for a lot more than we use them for. They use them for really tracking suspects that commit various organized retail crime. So license plate readers are used a lot more than not just from a police department aspect, but they're definitely being used for the private side of the house. And the private side of the house can do a lot more things than we can do in law enforcement.

They have resources from facial recognition when you walk into a store to sensors that are placed throughout the store to track different activity from a marketing purpose, but then can definitely be used to help identify suspects that are, involved in organized retail. And so that's good learning for us and law enforcement. That was something that I learned through this process of the other types of technology that are in a retail store that you may not be aware of to a point where when you pick something off a shelf, it kind of connects to you. And so then that's why you get some type of advertisement on your phone a little later on about that item that you might have picked.

off the shelf and put back because you didn't want to buy it. And so it is very interesting and learning in all the different sensors that are in a store. We just cannot use all of those sensors on the road or in our communities without, one, the community knowing about it as well as there's a lot of different laws that are in place for us on what we can use technology for. Yes, and even the retailers. the retailers you know when they start hearing you talk about some of these security technologies being used for other purposes i'm sure some of the retailers who listen to this are going to get a little cagey because there's a lot of technologies that they will not use for a lot of reasons it's like the retailers who are using facial recognition are really tightening that down so it's only used for investigating repeat offenders and knowing when repeat offenders especially bond offenders have shown up in the store You know, that's something that the retailers are very, very careful with in terms of their privacy, legal teams, and, of course, data governance, making sure all that's locked down.

So they have a lot of those concerns. They just have to have them in a bit of a different way. So one of the things that, one of the technologies that's out there today are the fusion platforms. You mentioned all the sensors that retailers have. law enforcement has a lot of different types of sensors that y'all have to rely on as well whether that's traffic cameras the LPRs that you've talked about GPS devices that might be deployed out there that you know when merchandise is stolen you can actually see those devices moving you have all of those sensors retailers have the same thing so these fusion platforms that have come about are we call on fusion platforms because they fuse things together in two senses on one hand they fuse all these sensors together so that you have a much greater situational awareness with what's happening where. And then on the other hand, a lot of these platforms can actually, you know, fused organizations together.

So when I'm referring to here, things like, I know I hate to, you know, drop names, but like axon fuses or mobile command central aware or flock OS, Genotech, Citigraph, or any, I'm trying to name them all, so don't leave anyone out, 3SIs, directed dispatch. All of those, it's really not, I'm not focused on so much, a solution provider as I'm more focused on the nature of these platforms and what they enable. How do you see these different types of platforms playing a role in real-time crime centers moving forward? I think, you know, you touched on a variety of different platforms, and most of those companies are all

partners of our association, too. So, you know, some things that will help either a retailer or will launch unfortunately is having one of those platforms really removes the ability of having all these usernames and passwords to access cameras that were purchased at Costco or at other retailers for a business. And so, and Costco is the only company that I'm well aware of that sells cameras like that for businesses. But there's probably several other companies out there that do that. And so that really makes the process quicker for a employee of a real-time crime center to get to those feeds to provide real-time information to patrol officers. And so they're able to go right to that location or there's alerts in place that allow them to know that that's

the location that they need to focus on at this time. Most real-time centers are reactive. They're not proactive. And that's what a lot of the communities really encourage. They don't really want that proactivity, nor do the police officers want that proactivity either. And so they really respond to that reactive element, whether it's a collision or a burglary in progress at a commercial facility or a shoplift in progress. Those are some common calls that we go on. And you don't utilizing cameras that are in that area, you'll see all within that one frame of what's going on. What, you know, where's that individual at? And then really directing patrol and to make contact with that suspect.

Before real-time crime centers, the ability to catch a shoplifter could be hours or days later or months later. It depends on the situation. They have a vehicle. they leave. Now with real-time crime centers, we're catching suspects in minutes, in seconds, for that matter, by the resources that are available. And so it's a total game changer. And, you know, if you look at it from the, you know, the strategic long-term aspect of a department without a real-time crime center, you're going to, most communities will be spending thousands of dollars on different technologies to help them hopefully get to this

identification of who the suspect is. And you're also going to be spending not thousands, but probably millions of dollars in overtime for detectives to help them find these suspects. And so real-time centers really save communities, millions of dollars. in overtime. One good fact that we saw was in Spokane County. They did a study on a homicide. You know, a homicide back in the day without a real-time crime center. They were able to solve within an hour or a couple hours of where the suspect went and left and went to. Without that real-time center, they would have spent almost $800,000 in overtime.

to find this individual and so having those successes and that's one of thousands of successes that have happened throughout the country it's really cool to see what other agencies are doing stolen vehicles is a major crime that has impacted millions of people within the in the United States of having their vehicle stolen and that's that's your day-to-day driver and that really impacts on the way that we survive and when you have that car stolen now that parent can't take their kids to school that parent can't go pick up their mom or dad to take to the medical facilities and so it really it really makes a major impact on these victims and so with license plate readers it doesn't matter what company you're

go with, but most license plate readers throughout the country will broadcast to the department that a stolen vehicle has entered their city. And they're able to successfully apprehend the suspects most of the time. They're able to get the suspect to pull over and they're able to get the individual to come out of the vehicle with little to no impact on the suspect, as well as the vehicle is still intact that they can return to the victim. And so that's a major game changer. And when you really

look at the value of what license weight readers have is, you know, various communities track this. But, you know, license weight readers can save, like say 30 to 40 license weight readers in a

community can save a community over a million dollars in recovered stolen vehicles. but they also can do so much more. They can help identify missing people and reunite those missing people with their family. They're able to identify, you know, suspects that continue to come into the city that have felony warrants. They identify suspects that are involved in person's crimes, whether it's a homicide, you know, a major domestic violence case. And so it's really cool to see this type of technology and able to get the vehicle stopped, get them arrested safely, as well as return stolen merchandise back to who the victim is.

And with the retailers, utilized as a license rate readers too, they're able to prevent crime from even occurring. As soon as that organized suspect shows up to their parking lot, they're able to get their right. amount of employees to the front doors and then that employee or that suspect is like there's way too many employees here. I'm just going to leave the store and go to somewhere else. Yes. Those are all some pretty huge wins. A lot of this, a lot of the success is going to rely upon y'all having access to sensors provided by the retailers. So I've talked a little bit about some of this, but how can retailers get more involved with real-time crime centers, particularly the real-time crime centers that are located in cities that are problems for the

retailers? What can they do? Well, like anything, start the communication, start the conversation for the retailers that are looking at building a relationship with the real-time crime center that's in that community. Feel free to reach out to the National Real-Time Crime Center Association, and we'll be more than happy to make that connection for you or connect with Corey and his team and we'll definitely get that communication started. The next thing is to meet with your real-time crime center and have that conversation.

Invite them to come to your store, invite them to walk through your store and see what's going on from the real-time crime center aspect, invite your crime prevention team with you and allow them the opportunity to kind of share what they're seeing. they're going to be able to provide more information on trends that they're seeing and seeing what's going on around that store, and then provide suggestions of what other commercial properties have done to help reduce those crimes from occurring in that area. We do in Scottsdale, we partner with crime prevention with all of our businesses and really open up that door and have that conversation with them.

we walk all the properties with them the idea of where all the cameras are we only ask for cameras that are in public view so that anything that has a private element we don't ask for those cameras we don't want those cameras we only want that are in a public view aspect so like employee areas you're probably not going to see any type of coverage because that's more of a privacy for that business

and in regards to that technology part partnership, you know, they can provide cameras or you can even get creative and put camera trailers in a parking lot that allow the law enforcement to see it as well as the retailer to see it. And then there's a variety of funding mechanisms that are out there, whether it's community grants through the retailer or it's community grants in the community that will allow for that type of partnership to where the retailer can see the cameras. and law enforcement can see the cameras. Yeah, I think that's one of the things I'm most excited about with the partnership

between the National World Time Crime Center Association and the Laws Prevention Research Council is just getting all of the retailers and law enforcement together. We often talk about barriers to protection, barriers to innovation, and one of the biggest challenges is getting everyone in the same room, particularly the right people from the right level, the people who can make the decisions in retail with those who can work with them on the law enforcement side. So I'm super excited about that. I think we are coming, you know, toward the end of this conversation, but there's one

last thing I wanted to ask you about, which is where do you see us going? What are the things you're most excited about with real-time crime centers in the near future or the distant future? What I'm really excited about is just seeing that ability and learning about what retailers are doing to protect their stores. obviously protect our community at the same time, but really trying to figure out how we can help them to keep their retailers more safer. And by doing that, obviously, it reduces the crime and prevents crime forever occurring at those places. But having that partnership really

will help other businesses that are on the fence of a partner with the retailer once they realize some of these really big name retailers that are coming to the table once they realize okay if they're on board then I need to get on board and so then it really just helps leverage and allows more retailers to partner with their real-time center as well as it allows us the opportunity to learn and understand what the vulnerabilities are of the retailers and have that conversation to figure out, how can we help, you know, either through crime prevention or other resources that the police department or even the city may have to help make sure that every retailer in every community throughout the United States is protected. So I know that what we're doing

here in Arizona, I know our partners in Georgia and New York and California and Florida are already in some regards way ahead of us, but also I understand that the more that we work together and we share best practices from the law enforcement side, and then from the retail side, they share what they consider key considerations. It really helps us all understand. See, I've gotten your link to go down. It really helps us understand how to be better. Excellent. Speaking of the future, I think there's something important coming up, September 22nd through the 25th in Atlanta, Georgia. What do you all have going on at the Real Time Crime Center Association?

Speaking of Georgia, we're having our national conference up there. You can learn more about our conference at NRTCCA Conference.org. You'll understand more about the sponsors that are there, as well as we'll be released in the agenda here soon. of our various classes. We do have one whole track that is dedicated to retail and what those partnerships look like between retailers, technology partners, and then of course, real-time crime centers. Yes, sir. And we're looking forward to being a big part of that. So, Chris, it's always good talking to you. I've had a great opportunity to spend a good bit of time with you over the last year, and I'm looking forward to spending quite a bit more. So thank you once again for everything.

thing and for joining us today on the podcast. Thank you 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 Podcasts.

are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.