LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 223 Ft. Christina Burton, PhD

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

In this episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, Cory Lowe, PhD (LPRC) talks with Christina Burton, PhD (LPRC) about the groundbreaking Canadian Retail Crime Survey developed by the Retail Council of Canada and the LPRC. They explore how the study provides the first comprehensive look at retail crime across Canada, the rise in violence and organized retail theft, and how trends compare to the U.S. Christina shares key findings on product targeting, retailer responses, and the growing role of data-driven advocacy in shaping safer stores and stronger policies. Tune in for an inside look at how research is helping Canadian retailers move from anecdote to action.

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, and good evening, everyone. My name is Corey Lowe. I'm the director of research here at the LPRC, and welcome to the Crime Science podcast. I'm joined today by Dr. Christina Burton. Welcome, Christina.

Hey, all, but please call me Christina. Doctor is reserved for my mother. I feel you. So Christina has joined us today so we can talk about some research that was just released with the Retail Council of Canada on their national survey. So, Christina, I just want to start by asking you, you know, what prompted this research and why is it needed now? Yeah, so RCC had approached us. and when they were talking to us, it was actually you and me, Corey, that they were talking to. I believe they were interested in basically these two interconnected ideas, right?

So the first is they were really interested in trying to get this Canadian snapshot of what's actually happening within the retail storage fronts. They had mentioned, you know, prior to this particular study, they didn't really have a clear picture of what was going on. It was more anecdotal. It was more word of mouth of what people were telling them. was happening, but not really a clear vision across different sectors within Canada. So that was one of the impetus for this particular study. But the second was that the study was conducted with the blessing of the NRF. And so they wanted to take the 2023 survey that the NRF had done, again, to try to help make it cross country compatible.

So they wanted to try to see, like, yes, there might be some unique things that are happening in the Canadian landscape, but how might we compare the that to what's happening in the U.S. landscape. And so those are kind of two things they were trying to tackle this particular study. And now it's funny that NRF has continued adapting their survey. So now their current survey looks very different than the one they did in 2023 and the one that RCC did. But what's interesting is that NRF actually adopted some of the changes that RCC did, right? And so one of the new questions that they were kind of exploring was innovations and technologies

and that kind of started a little bit in the RCC survey. So it's kind of interesting to see how the two have adapted over the years. Awesome. Yeah, I think these are two amazing projects that we have the opportunity to work on at the LPRC. I have another related question, and it kind of gets at some of what you're talking about. But in the report, the retail crime problem is characterized as hidden. What makes the problem in Canada hidden? Why is that weren't hidden use there?

Yeah, and full props to RCC for some of that lingo. I swear I did most of the content. I'm not really buzzy in some of the merchandising and the marketing. But I think what they were trying to tackle was kind of these two things. And I would highly encourage, you know, reaching up the RCC for their take as well. But I think it kind of highlights two, again, interrelated kind of concerns here. So the first was when it kind of tapped into in the first question that you asked me, which is, you know, they didn't really know what was going on countrywide.

They had some hunches. They knew what they were happening in their own retail stores and by word of mouth within their membership or what they've heard across the, you know, the landscape. But they didn't really have a clear picture of like what that actually looked like within Canada. So thus it would be hidden from that perspective. But I also think it kind of highlights something that isn't necessarily unique to Canada, which is a broader problem of just us being able to capture data more broadly. Right. So retailers may have a variation in the ways they capture their data of what is loss versus theft, how they categorize a violent incident, you know, what that actually looks like. And so I think part of the challenge there, too, is also this lack of standardization of this data collection, you know, not just in Canada, in the United States as well. And that creates challenges and understanding the totality of the issue as well. Fantastic. I think those are all critical issues, and it's important that we continue to collect this kind of data. Now, one area that we tend to have better data on is violent crime. We know that violent crimes tend to get reported more often, and because of their nature, more oftentimes, you know, show up in the official statistics. Now, in this report, it was noted that over 60% of the retailers reported in increase in violence. Can you tell us a little bit more about what types of violence they're

seeing and what they're concerned about? Yeah. So in that particular survey, we had asked respondents to kind of classify different risks that they were seeing, both in terms of theft categories and violence categories. And we asked them, you know, from less to, you know, more of the same. to an increase in their concern of that risk. We gave them a list of different, like, violent categories, whether that's, you know, violence during shoplifting, employee on employee violence, like those kinds of different categories. And so within Canada, or at least within the retailers that responded to this particular

survey, the number one concern from a violence perspective is violence that's committed during a different crime, right? So it could be like violence that's committed during a shoplifting event that just escalates because either the customer is hostile or they're a shoplifter and they have to get away, right? So it could be those kinds of categories. But they also noted two other concerns that have elevated risk to them, and that would be homelessness concerns, and then guest on employee violence, where the other two that were the top categories that they kind of noticed there.

So that's probably the main concerns that they're having here within the Canadian retext, or Canadian context, excuse me. But we didn't ask necessarily like the number of incidents that were happening here. Because we wanted to try to get just some basic information and baseline of what they're concerned about rather than, you know, find details that we might get in like an NRF broader survey. But they just really wanted to start it with more of a baseline. Like, what are you guys prioritizing here? Most definitely.

And one of the other priorities. It shows up a lot. I mean, violence in the states and in the Canadian context is a key concern. Another major concern for retailers these days is organized retail crime or ORC. What types of ORC are the retailers in Canada experiencing most often, according to the survey? Yeah, and there's different ways to kind of answer this question, right? So we could talk about, you know, the methods in which ORC is being done, right? Are we talking about a traditional booster fencing kind of schema?

Are we talking about a gift card kind of scheme where they're stealing the gift cards, recording the numbers, bringing it back and then just waiting for the balances to tip there? Or are we talking about maybe a more orchestrated cargo theft kind of scenario, right? So there's different modalities in which it could happen. We unfortunately didn't ask that kind of question in this particular survey. That kind of developed later. In fact, the NRF survey this year asked those kinds of questions, and so I would anticipate that potentially a future RCC study would also try to explore those modalities here. What we did ask was the classic top 10 ORC products that you are seeing being stolen in your stores.

And there's kind of two ways to kind of analyze this problem, right? So you could see, you know, again, it's kind of this broad list of up to 10 different products from these respondents. How do you condense all of that to something actionable, right? And so we try to use some quality coding to put them into different buckets of where we might place them, right? So we're going to put the food together. We're going to put apparel together, right? So we try to bucket them in those ways. But then you could also classify it by percentage by respondent.

So how many respondents answered that particular bucket or mentioned that particular bucket? Or we can do the total responses. So even if a, let's say, I don't know, an alcohol manufacturer, right, answered the survey. They could say that their top 10 ORC products are all different variations of alcohol. Well, that's one respondent responding to alcohol, right? So one respondent out of the total answered alcohol. But there were 10 different alcohol cases, right? So there was 10 of the total responses.

So, again, we can change how we analyze this question. And I provided both of that to RCC for this particular. the study and I also do that for the NRF as well so that they can make that differentiation. But in this case, what was interesting here is that some of the traditional categories that we might see from the United States were similar, right? So apparel was a top ORC stolen product. But what was interesting, and I actually remember us having a conversation about it, Corey, because you kind of were a little bit in disbelief, but food and beverage was actually one of the top stolen products by respondent. So not respondent, but by respondent. And I know it's a little

on, but when we think about ORC from a more multi-crime perspective, not just the theft part, but the reselling part, it actually makes a lot of sense, especially if we're talking about variations in buyer behaviors, right? And so, for example, earlier this year, one of our supply chain contacts kind of mentioned that one of the top stolen products for cargo theft was eggs. That's because egg prices rose earlier this year. And so what else is going to rise because of inflation, you know, or just broad global changes, right? It's going to be food and beverage.

And I actually attended a LP magazine webinar last week on strategic cargo theft. And one of the things they're also seeing is different supply chain theft Gangs are targeting food and beverage because it's easy to resell them. So I wouldn't be surprised if there might be more of that happening in the States than we're capturing. But one thing to keep in mind with any of these surveys, whether that's this RCC one or the NRF, it's going to be wholly dependent on who responds to the survey. And so if you have more food and beverage people or more apparel people respond to the survey, they're probably going to say what their products are is within their. sectors, right? So that's another caveat to keep in mind when we look at these kinds of numbers is we have to be mindful about who responded to the survey. Most definitely. Now, we've talked

about violence. We've talked about organized retail crime. And those are our concerns for retailers in Canada and the United States. Based on the results from the Canadian survey, what were the key things that the retailers there are doing to address these concerns and mitigate these risks? Yeah, and it kind of depends, again, on if we want to look at some broad changes from a security perspective, both in technologies, right? Are they adapting certain technologies to address this issue, or are they making certain changes within their stores more broadly, right? Are they changing layouts of their stores? Are they closing stores, things of that nature? And I think what we saw here, at least within this particular survey, is the Canadian context weren't adopting necessarily too much new technologies.

At least we didn't see too many of them. I think the two technologies that they were kind of focused on were EAS pedestals and locked cases more broadly. They weren't innovating in the same way, but that's okay. I mean, that's just might be what the Canadian context is looking for and what's necessary for that predict specific situation. But we also asked them if they were making just broad changes generally based off of impacts on retail crime and social and physical disorder broadly. And the top two responses that they provided were adding security guards and adding additional security investments to fortify that location. Now, what that means is unclear we didn't necessarily tap into what does it mean to. fortify, does that mean that you're now buying more locked cases or you're starting to explore

innovating those different technologies, right? We didn't get to ask them to degritty there. But broadly speaking, they're just fortifying their stores is what it seems like they're trying to do here. Awesome. And you've actually been hitting on a few of other questions I had, which were the similarities and differences between the U.S. context and the Canadian context. So I'm just going to go ahead and skip some of those questions that we've discussed. I wanted to, you know, focus on where do we go from here? You know, we have several members that are Canadian retailers. You know, how do you think the LPRC can continue to support not just the U.S.-based retailers,

but those with a presence outside of the United States, say in Canada, for example? Yeah, and really it just goes back to that earlier data question, right? I mean, at our core, we are a research institution that communicates that research to our broader base and our broader public, right? And so I think our main role needs to be, right, is to divide, I say this all the time to members, is that let me help you provide the resources for your own advocacy, right? And so by doing these kinds of surveys, by exploring what's happening at the ground level, right? It provides you with, let's say, the ammunition to provide it not just to your managers, right? So if you're trying to secure resources in a budget for your own security budget, right, then you might need the numbers to back it up of why it might justify that return on investment.

But it could also help from the legislative perspective, right? If you're saying that there's an uptick in these types of crimes and limited prosecutorial or law enforcement resources to deal with them going in front of legislation to try to secure that, might be in your best interest, not only to you as retailers, but also for your customer base as well, the broader community. So I think the way forward, right, is again, continuing to do some of this baseline research, a better understanding what that context looks like, what are those concerns, how are not only retailers responding, but customer bases as well, right? It would be great to understand the Canadian customer base. We really only captured here the retailer

perspective, still important, but it's missing some, you know, key stakeholders that be involved in this process. But, you know, I think the way forward as well is just, again, continuing to work closely with these partners to better understand what that context looks like and how we can best support in those efforts. Most definitely. Well, Christina, thank you very much for joining me today. It's been a fantastic conversation. And thank you for all the awesome work that you do at the LPRC. If any of our members want to find that amazing work, you can go visit our Knowledge Center via the link at our website. So, Christine, once again, thank you very much, and thank you all for listening

today. Thanks so much, y'all. Bye, all. 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 LPRsearch.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.