LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 248 Ft. Beau Nutter (LPRC)

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

In this episode of the CrimeScience Podcast, host Tiffany Frison sits down with LPRC team member Beau Nutter to discuss the LPRC Serial Offender Program and its work to advance technology integration in retail environments. Beau shares how the program brings together research, retailers, and solution providers to test emerging technologies in real-world settings, evaluate how they work together, and better understand their potential to help identify and address repeat offending.

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. Welcome to this week's episode of the LPRC Crime Science Podcast. I am your host, Tiffany Freiston, research administrator here at the LPRC. And today I am joined by Bo Nutter, one of our research scientists on the team, Bo, welcome, and thank you for being here today. Yeah, welcome, Bo.

Thanks so much. So today we are talking about a recent research to practice that came out, RTP, the Serial Offender Initiative Phase 1, connecting serial offender activities across stores. So can you just tell us a little bit about the Serial Offender Initiative and what it all entails just in a broad sense. Yeah, so the idea behind Serial Fender is that we're going to examine how retailers and law enforcement can connect death incidents that might otherwise appear unrelated, or can take these theft incidents and add more evidence into them.

So really we want to take these people that are more often committing crimes at the same stores and just hitting store to store to the same sort of store, and be able to connect them together using a group of sensors. Awesome. And I know, because I think this initiative kind of started before you got to the team, if I'm remembering correctly. Right. So, and I, like, I will just go ahead and say, surprise everyone. There's been phase two already. But so what has been your involvement in this initiative so far?

So my broad involvement here is that I put out the research for anything that happens with Innovate Action Team. So Innovate Action Team is the group that gets together and does these simulations, these theft events. And then my job is to then put out the research that comes along with it. So I don't do so much of the planning as I do the writing, the describing, what happened. And I do have an involvement in it And where, you know, for this past phase, too, I did help out And then I helped out setting up the sensors. I helped out playing the serial offender playing that role.

So that's really my involvement. It's I am, I do just write about it, but I'm also hands-on kind of working into what's going on. Gotcha. Awesome. Right. And as you were saying in the beginning, these phases and these simulations are kind of based on technologies in a way and the use of technologies to combat people who are chronically stealing and going from store to store.

So can we talk about the different types of technologies that has been used in these simulations in these phases? Yes. So across the two phases, I'll just group the two together so I can talk about all the different technologies. There's a lot of different sensors. scanners, readers, anything that we really can get access to and put into a store, that's kind of what we're doing. That way we can see what works best together,

what all can we gather, and how can we best build a case to, you know, fight against these serial offenders and give that the prosecution and put them away for longer, give them more charges. So some of these sensors are going to be license plate readers. That's really one of the main ones that they're using and some captured license plate of an individual that's coming into a store and then leaving and hitting the same store just down the road a different one but you're able to capture that license plate so you can give you know a warning to the next door saying here's that same car that's an individual that just stole from the store from store one is now headed to store two so you have license play readers as a big one you have the wireless device detection this is things like signals intelligence okay so that is you know your cell phone has it's a a signal. So it's not going to say exactly who the person is and it's not, you know, taking your, your text, your calls, it's not stealing sort of information like that. What it is doing

is it's capturing the signal that your phone's giving off or other radio waves. I'm not, you know, too well-versed in it. But I know it's going to capture those signals and it's going to save it as a string of numbers and digits and letters. And then that can be a unique identifier. So you can see that same, you know, that signal that it was detected. You can see that across multiple stores if the same offender hit multiple different stores. So store one to store two, store three. You can then use that and say, hey, this person was at all three stores on this day. And they also committed that at these stores.

And it just kind of better connects them. Gotcha. So other things we're using are video surveillance. So we have interior cameras, exterior cameras that are already connected to the stores that we're getting involved. with where we can just take the video that's from that, take still images, videos of them walking. And so that's part of it. And then we also have other video surveillance, which would be the PVMs. So it's the screens that you're able to see yourself on.

Yes. And those are recording you as well. So those are being used RFID tags that are inside of the fake merchandise that we used. And this past serial offender, we had a box that had RFID tags so that when we exited the store, we would set off those EAS scanners. So we didn't actually use any real merchandise. And then in serial offender phase one, this was actually a difference between the two, was that this was not a component of phase one. And only a component of a phase two was implementing these RFID tags. So that's another piece that we were using.

and incidents in investigation management systems, like the different crime management systems we were able to build cases off of online and kind of add it all in together. That's a main piece that we're using in the end to sort of take all these different things, these license plate reader hits, these signals intelligence hits,

the video surveillance, still images, anything like that and putting it all together to create that one case. Gotcha. Kind of mimic what somebody could be doing. Okay. Very good. Awesome. Yeah, and you kind of already touched on another one of my questions was the difference between phase one and phase two.

Right. I can explain a little. Sure, yeah, go ahead. So phase one was at a drug store. And they didn't use, really the main sensor difference here was the RFID tags. Okay. In phase one, they went into the store, the offenders, which are just, you know, us. These offenders going into the store.

and they took actual merchandise from that store, put it into a trash bag, and ran out of the store with that, pretending that they're actually stealing merchandise from the store. And then off to the next store doing the same thing. So that big difference is in Phase 2, instead of taking actual store merchandise, we created a little box, a little LPRC box, where we were able to put in as many sensors as we wanted that we would find on a, you know, just any piece of merchandise that would be in. in a store. You know, drill, a phone, anything like that.

They're going to have these tags, these sensors so that something gets set off when they leave. So we were able to put all of that into one little box to mimic their merchandise so that when we left the store, we were able to set off their sensors. Gotcha. So that's really the main difference here between the phase one and phase two. Okay. And I don't know if we talked about it already, but just to state all of this was in collaboration with retailers and law enforcement.

Is that right? Okay. This was fully in collaboration with. Just want to go ahead and state that, yes. The retailers, well, we plan it with the retailers. We let them know, you know, this is what we want to do. This is how we can do it. And then usually they come in and join.

So for phase one, you know, I wasn't around for that one. Phase one, you know, their AP leader came in. And really, I think it was a part of the actual phase one. But they would come in and they did it all together. So they were there watching. happen and then law enforcement is fully aware we have a law enforcement officer on standby actually there to participate in the phase and you know have a fake arrest at the end to kind of show off after all of this happens you can get enough information to actually make an arrest

based on all of these signals gotcha so it's not something that we're doing without letting you know law enforcement's aware the retailer is always aware awesome I just want to make sure we also state that for the record um perfect um So from these two phases and the initiative so far, what do you think is the takeaways or like what have we learned here that you could say? I would say the biggest takeaway is that there's no silver bullet technology. Okay. So all of these technologies add a piece of the puzzle. Gotcha.

But it really benefits to have them all together. So we can layer all of these different systems in. you're able to build an entire case instead of just having one piece. So an example of this would be, you know, a license plate reader is going to capture the license plate of a vehicle. We don't know whose vehicle necessarily. Right. You know it's going to capture a vehicle. So if we have a camera and a license plate reader, we can now see who's getting into this car and now we have, and we have their tag as well.

Connect the person to the vehicle. So if this person then drives to another store, we can say like, hey, we just picked up their license plate again. know they're a known offender at this previous store, and then we have them on camera walking into the next store. So we can have that, that new piece of the puzzle. Like, they committed an offense here, and then they went to the next store and, you know, stole something else, going to another theft. And then another layer to that is now adding in somebody that they're working with, so co-offenders. So let's say they're getting into a car and driving off when you see another person in the car, well, now we're able to connect that together.

Or let's say somebody else gets out of the car at the second store. Now we can connect that together and say this car is a known vehicle to commit theft from our store and now we have a different person getting out with them the second time so we can say that could be a co-offender so when we're going the case in the end do these case management systems we can add that person in whether as an accomplice or like a potential unknown extra person could be an offender awesome um great and uh think like honestly um this this has been very informative for me as well because i'm not the most involved in in this project um but can we can we talk about what's next for serial offender initiative if you know like what's coming on down the line um for the for this initiative yes

so i believe right now the next steps for us are going to be connecting different stores to want to nothing. Okay. So in both phase one and phase two, we took, it was two separate stores, phase one and phase two, but in each phase, it would be the same store. So phase one was a drug store, just two separate locations. And phase two was a big box store, just, again, two separate locations. Gotcha. So the goal here would then to be take, uh, you know, those two stores potentially and connect them to each other. Okay. So then instead of, you know, warning, preparing your own stores, what if you can now warn and prepare other stores to let, or or build cases with those other stores.

So combining evidence, working together to build cases against these people that are committing, you know, more theft than anybody else. They're the serial offenders that are chronically offending. So if we can build these cases by connecting stores, that would really be an ideal situation. So I believe that's our goal for phase three is connect different stores together and then put all these sensors at both of them. And then what can we bring out of that? Awesome. Well, the last thing I did want to.

to touch on because we are always looking to collaborate with people and our members and everything so if anyone let's say is interested in getting more information about the serial offender initiative or potentially getting involved somehow what what could they do they can definitely send me an email or any of us an email but they can email me at bow. dot in at lprc.org and we can see what we can do maybe we can have a fourth or fifth phase involving other stores and see how many stores we can get involved awesome perfect um well i almost said do we have any questions from the audience but unfortunately we don't have that capability today um so i i just want to say thank you so much beau for being here today and um yeah and offering this uh

about this initiative here at the LPRC. And, you know, if you don't know already, Bo is also hosting a podcast. So you'll hear his voice many times. But thank you again, Bo. Thank you to all of our listeners. And as always, you can find this report and all the other research that we do here at the LPRC on our Knowledge Center. If you ever need access or don't have a lot of,

access, feel free to reach out to anyone on our team and we can get you plugged in there. I have been your host, Tiffany Fryson, is my name, and we'll see you guys next time. 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 Lost Prevention Research Council.