LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 233 Ft. Rick Beardsley

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

In this special episode of the LPRC CrimeScience Podcast, host Dr. Cory Lowe is joined by Rick Beardsley of At Home, live from the 2026 LPRC IMPACT Conference. They explore the intersection between loss prevention and operational efficiency by leveraging new technology. Don’t miss this insightful conversation straight from one of the industry’s premier events.

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. Welcome to the crime science podcast. My name is Corey Lowe and I'm the director of research at the LPRC. I am joined today by Rick Beardsley. Rick is the Senior Director of Loss Prevention and Safety at At Home.

Welcome, Rick. Thanks, Corey. So, at home is a pretty unique format. It is. And there's a ton of different things that you could do, but what would you say is the highest leverage LP and safety practice that you have that you're doing in your stores that helps you manage laws? So I'll pivot a little bit off of the law.

part but I can go with the impact and one of the things we've been able to do is we've kind of developed our case management system to become an enterprise business tool and it's something that really came out of COVID when things were crazy and were changing daily where we had to come up with different ways to use everything and when we found out we had to do contact tracing you couldn't just go by the contact tracing software. You had to come up with something. So coming from that, we kind of socialized it through the whole organization

and people actually call it out by name and say, couldn't your case management system do that. And, you know, we've been really successful with it. Probably now we have as much different operational type of reporting in there as we have LP reporting. Yeah. We talked about change. You're dealing with COVID and trying to make as much with what you have as possible. There's a lot of other trends that are going to drive things in the coming years.

What do you see as the technology, legal, or personnel trend that will shape the industry in the next two to three years that you are most concerned about and you're working to get ahead of? Well, certainly the buzzword for everybody is AI right now. And I think the, I won't call it challenge, now it's really developing some strategy to figure out what you want to do and then what's the best tool out there to do that. So in our environment, we are underutilizing as a company, not as an LP team, but as a company we're underutilizing the essentially 7,000 cameras we have out there. And AI's the ticket to do that efficiently. Yes.

So that's the thing I'm looking at, and what it does for me with a really small team, is it, I think it's really a, from an LP and investigation and security, it's slam dunk. It's, I won't call it easy, but it's simple. You know what you need to do. But I think the things that we're missing are more of the operation.

things. The thing is that where we can throw out there, all right, I don't have to go look at 229 stores to see if the front table said, I can just ask the software, show me the table that doesn't look like this and throw a, you know, an image up there for it to basically critique and review and then send me back to stores that don't look like that. Yeah. So now I can pass on to the operations here, go call these five stores. Don't go call 200 stores. So those are some of the things, even safety in types of situations, is anybody that's not using box cutter X, send it to me. You know, any fire door that's blocked.

There's just countless things with the images we have throughout our stores that we'll be able to do operationally that will ultimately save money. Yeah, ultimately goes back to managing people. Of course, we're here at the annual impact conference. I actually just finished up a session on training and coaching, and some evidence-based practices on that. And I see a ton of opportunities with reinforcing what is supposed to be done. You gave some great examples as the table set.

Is it set the right way? Are people doing the right things when they're supposed to at the right times within your organization? Just a ton of opportunities there. And we're not even scratching the surface on the utility of cameras. On the other side, the AI poses some very unique threats, too. we got to talking about the role of AI in social engineering scams, which is one of the things that just scares me to death. Yeah.

But there's a lot of different ways that you can design a program. There's a lot of different concerns, depending on what your challenges are. Is it internals, externals, operational? When you're building out your program, what is your philosophy on? building out that program and your focus and building the strategy around those. I think for me, everything that we can do to prevent something from happening is the simple and most efficient way to handle it. So I'm not a big, I'm not overly concerned with number of cases, for example. Yeah. As long as all the other factors are aligned.

up like case value yeah so if my case value is down I don't care that my cases are down yes now if my cases were up and I would be concerned that my cases were down because we're not catching it in time and that kind of thing but from our standpoint if we can stop it from happening if we can educate if we could have the controls in place operationally that would give you know, our impressions of control, as well as have enough real controls where they know that if they do something different, we may find it. Yeah. You know, not that we necessarily will, but we may.

Yeah. And I think, and we'll go back to AI, and I think that's where AI comes in is, you know, today we're waiting until we see some type of data point that says we should go look at a particular cashier. or an area of the store and then we forensically go back and say yes we were right that that was bad and now we have to fix it whichever way it works out whether it's an operate you know whether it's a policy violation or or a fraud or whatever it may be and we would follow it up that way but if you could theoretically present that at not maybe not as it happens but immediately after or the next day through through some kind of a module just like you're using your eBR now and this would be a a video exception if you will exactly I think we go to almost immediate

remedy of the situation instead of having to go even you know weeks or days or weeks like we would go now until some type of pattern came up with the EBR. Ultimately, your philosophy boils down to getting ahead of things instead of reacting to them. I would be happy to have zero cases and nothing happened. Yeah, that would be ideal. You can make that happen.

Now, a lot of teams live and die on the boring things. This is a question I'd like to have. ask on these podcasts is people underestimate the importance of just doing the boring stuff very, very well. What do you think is one boring thing that is essential to the success of your organization and maybe to others as well? It's probably the exception reporting around policy violations versus fraud. because policy violations are not particularly exciting to investigators.

Fraud is. You know, there's not adrenaline related to somebody skipping a step. Not sensational. So I think those are the boring things that make the difference because you can have that process in place that identifies the policy violation that prevents future fraud. that gives the impressions of control if you're addressing those as they happen.

There's just so many things that if you ignore them, it could change the thought process of the folks that are causing those problems. Yeah, essentially broken windows applied to a retail store. Absolutely. Where you're trying to get in front of the little things because those little things are what,

lead to the big things, the big serious, sensational things that sometimes were distracted by. If you can get ahead of those small and noncompliance, everyone knows that you're watching, and maybe they don't spiral into worse and worse situations. Now, operational effectiveness and reducing operational shrink. One of the things I like most about you is you have had a very interesting career in in a few related fields. But what do you see is the greatest opportunity on the operational side of loss

for your organization and the industry in general? You know, I think, although not everyone in our group has responsibility for safety necessarily, but I think the biggest thing is the biggest single event, essentially in the stores are some type of liability event, whether it be workers' comp related or general liability related

where an injury or slip and fall, and I'm not talking anything fraudulently. I'm just talking about a legitimate incident that could cost you, you know, tens of thousands of dollars based on your insurance program or whatever it looks like. And there's really not any other single, let's call it, fraud events. That would be that. So I think you have to focus on as we evolve and become better business people and better operators or supporters of the operation that we need to look at the things that cause the most impact. And that's one of the things that I think we'll see. And I think we'll go back to our original discussion about AI.

That's an area that can have a huge impact. If we can know these things or happen and call them out, unfortunately today most times, it happened and now we go review it and say, okay, this particular process is a problem because of XYZ. But had we seen something that didn't look right that was presented as an exception, you could have then prevented that potentially from happening. Most definitely. And getting ahead of that, this is absolutely critical for all the retailers out there.

you've been around for a while a long stored career and made some major marks on the industry what is a lesson that you wish you had learned 10 years earlier than you did I would say delegation for development and what I mean by that is you're always trying to bring your team along and make them successful. And it took me longer than it should have to learn that the only way to make them successful is to have them do things that they're not good at. And then live with the consequences of that, through coaching, et cetera. And I've been really good at that for the last probably seven or eight years.

and my team has grown exponentially because of that. And I think that's the one I wished I learned earlier. And then I also, you know, it was really hard to do everything. Yes, it is. It is very, very difficult. I was saying yes earlier because it's a lesson that I'm learning right now, and I wish that I had learned earlier. When you're trying to do everything, you're burning yourself out,

and no one else is growing. So you're falling behind. and everyone else is too in one way or another. Well, Rick, it's been fantastic talking with you today. Great having you on the podcast. It's even better having you as engaged in the LPRC as you are. And you're what makes our community what it is. So thank you very much for everything you do for the LPRC and for the industry.

Thanks, Corey. Thanks for having me. 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.