LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 33 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Last week 74.1 billion dollars were generated from the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, rebranded from Single’s Day in China. Nike sees 15 million dollars in sales in minutes. COVID-19 vaccines in phase three trials. On this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including how Walmart continues to evolve overseas, CBS’s touch-free mobile pay, threats of overthrowing the government with a smartphone, and GPS tracking options on shipments. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 33 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. operations, and customer service. Bosch Integrated Security and Communications Solutions spans zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This is our latest episode in the weekly series update. I'm joined by colleagues, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan, and of course, our producer, Kevin Tran.

We'll start off as we have during this 2020 pandemic era, talking just briefly about COVID-19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the COVID disease. Talking a little bit, continuous research flowing out on preventive measures. Masks still continue to get more and more evidentiary support. There's a lot around protecting others, which is the main benefit because it reduces the viral load that we might expel in our breath, our speech, sneezing or coughing, but also now mounting evidence on the protective benefits that masking provides to the wearer, to those of us that are wearing them, because again, it further reduces the onboarding or the viral load that we might onboard.

And we've talked about it's 300 to 600 COVID particles tend to be the infectious dose is the hypothesis here, supported by increasing evidence, comparative again to 13 to 1900 particles for most influenzas or seasonal flus. So it's a little more, if not a lot more infectious, as we can see. And so the masking and the distancing, and particularly masking on both ends, can reduce the viral load because fewer particles go through. And again, the mask is not designed to and cannot block viral particles. They're too small, but can block the droplets that are required to carry the viral particles. So also there's new evidence coming out of Spain and others through some pretty rigorous research. It looks like that as one would expect that the masking is reducing the infection and disease rate for other respiratory diseases like RSV, other seasonal influenzas.

The concerns that they do have, and we've got to appreciate the balanced approach and the objective approach of the scientists, is that what doesn't happen now is more likely to happen later. So as we are reducing the infection rates from RSP and influenza and viruses and other respiratory diseases because of masking, some of the concerns are out there by a lot of scientists, physicians that, well, that means that many or most of us in the population might be more susceptible to those at other times. So we might start seeing peaks and so on. And the same concern with COVID, that we're really putting it off. intent here is to protect the most vulnerable and at the same time try and reduce the load on those that get serious disease from SARS-CoV-2, serious COVID, and overwhelm the healthcare

systems. And so that's the main concern here. So it's always a balance, but the way to try and get through this clearly looks like masking up because of the reduction, the probability that we'll infect someone or be infected ourselves. And again, with very low to no symptomatic COVID infections that are out there, but yet they're still infectious to others, that's where the big concern comes in and why this by and large became a global pandemic in addition to everybody able to fly around and again, being asymptomatic to transmit the disease to people that they're exposed, they expose themselves to. Moving on to the vaccine front, continue more and more pour in. 38 in phase one trials, different separate vaccines with all

different approaches. 17 in phase two trials, 12 now. We're up to 12 vaccine candidates in phase three, large scale, 20 to 60 plus thousand participants divided primarily double-blind studies where neither the study participant or subject nor the administrator of the actual injection in this case knows whether it's saline solution or other placebo or if it's the actual vaccine. And they're randomly assigned people to receive one or the other that they are now in phase three trials that are designed to get an estimate of, again, the safety profile, build that, continually build that profile out. What are the side effects, a virus because that's the symptoms of our body reacting to the virus, in this case, a vaccine. But in doing so, it's trying to build antibody immunity as well as the memory immunity through the T cells and other mechanisms. So that's what's going on there.

Twelve in those phase three trials. Six vaccines now have limited approval. None have full approval yet. The other exciting news on the vaccine front, we heard last week that the Pfizer The messenger RNA vaccine appeared to have 90 plus, over 95% efficacy with a good, robust safety profile, even though they're going to want another one to three months more following all the trial participants to further look at, again, efficacy, but also on side effects. side effects. But now it's joined by this week, the release of the Moderna, similar type of science or mechanism of action, or actually the engineering that went into the vaccine and how it's built. The Moderna also showing close to 94, 95% efficacy so far. In other words, 90 plus people came down with COVID-19 disease in the trial of, you know, in this case, these are 30 to 60,000 participants. So we're looking at anywhere from, you know, 15 to 30,000 people that got the injection. 15 to 30,000 people that got the injection. Almost none of those that received the actual vaccine got the infection. Only those that got the infection, or mostly those, in other words,

90 plus percent, were the ones that did not receive the vaccination, but rather the placebo. So they both look at this point in time to be highly efficacious. They're looking again at, did they become infected or not, which would be one end point. Did the person become infected? The second one, of course, is if they got the disease, that it reduces seriousness of the disease. And at least one, it looks like the Moderna trial, for instance, and it may be the same in the Pfizer, that it does seem to reduce serious disease. And we know that the research shows through the years that the same thing with influenza, the flu vaccines, they may be 40 to 60% efficacious, much less effective than what's looking like it's starting to happen with the COVID vaccines, but that they reduce serious

disease as well. And so when we're looking at 40 to 60, that's do you get infected or not? So good, exciting news, incredibly rapid response. And some of the science behind the Pfizer coming out of this couple, it's really good information, good reading to understand this couple that were from Turkey

originally and working together there. And then later, and most recently, of course, in Germany, and what, how they've adopted the mechanisms that the type of technology that they use to reduce cancer risk or affect cancer through vaccination, that's the same technology that they rapidly adopted for COVID-19. And a couple take turns so that one of them is working at all times, 24 hours a day, and have for months now, they and their teams. So one is always on duty and the other not to make sure that the science is done right and that they are communicating with other scientists around the world 24-7. So it's really interesting

and heartwarming to see what's going on with the scientist community out there and affecting this and all the lessons learned from fighting COVID-19 that'll accrue to the benefit of all of us for an array of other viruses and other infections and cancer and so forth. So therapies, now over 200, 213 antivirals and various preclinical and clinical testing, 366 other treatments in the same state. So there is a lot of science going on around COVID-19 and it's starting now to take effect. At the same time, infection rates are going up as people are moving more and more about. We're just talking about before recording what each of us might be doing during Thanksgiving. And it's such a tough thing. We know that humans, we like to get

together. We're obviously very communal and it's very difficult not to do that. So everybody be safe, take care out there. On the LPRC front, what's going on with research and development continues on all fronts. We've seen a pretty significant uptick in retailers or security or AP technology companies coming to us now with new ideas, new repurposing of current technology ideas that they would away to try and accommodate all that. A lot of product protection, but also, of course, infection protection, but convenience and security in the parking lots. And as we know, all these high-risk transactions that come from BOPUS and Boris, buy online, return in store, buy online, pick up in store, buy online and delivery and so forth. All the different types as well as curbside and all the mobile checkout options. So a lot going on in that area.

While there seems to mercifully be a lull right now in organized looting, retailers continue to prepare upgrade and our team to support them on r&d on different tactics to coordinate with each other with law enforcement with the community at large individuals in the community and then of course using uh very barriers and technologies so a lot happening there we had again a great session with the International Organization of Black Security Executives. That organization is putting out some of the materials that we use for that 90-minute, hour-and-a-half conference that we did with them. if you'd like to take advantage of that, please look up IOBSE online or on Twitter or Facebook and reach out to that stellar group. We really enjoyed working with them. We're putting more things into our labs. We're working now actually this week, tomorrow to be exact, on Wednesday, we'll be installing a couple of really cutting edge robotic solutions. We've already talked a lot about some of the other artificial intelligence, particularly

computer vision we've been working on. But as we're now gearing up in some deep planning on NLP or natural language processing to work with that, we're having biweekly calls just initiated. work with that. We're having bi-weekly calls just initiated. In fact, today is the next one with a team from NVIDIA that are absolute experts in data set collection, annotating data sets, as well as then training models and then using those to inference and retrain and improve models. So they're providing a wealth of expertise, experience, and information to myself and the team. None of us being, of course, computer scientists or engineers. And so that augments the great information we're getting from my colleagues at the University of Florida

that are engineers and computer scientists. And it was official last Friday, I was moved over into the College of Engineering, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at University of Florida, into what's called FLEX, FLEX Station Innovation Institute. And so did some detailed planning yesterday, as a matter of fact, with that team virtually. So more to come, but very excited on the opportunities that that's going to provide to our team and to the LPRC members and industry at large, as we all work together to safeguard vulnerable people and places. So with no further ado, I'm going to go over to Tony D'Onofrio and learn about what is going on in retail and elsewhere in the world. Thank you very much, Reid, and great update on both the COVID activity and also what's happening at LPRC. Let me start with a couple of interesting pieces of retail news

that I thought that came to light this week. First of all, Walmart, really how they're evolving from their previous plan of being a global retailer, they naturally have been retrenching from a lot of multiple international countries. So two years ago, they divested the majority operations in Brazil. This year they sold the majority stakes in the UK, Argentina, and this week they actually divested

the majority stakes in Japan. They're only making one big global bet and that's in India where they invested $16 billion in Flipkart online business, which is a good bet because India really has a lot of upside with 1.3 billion people. It's a slow growth, and they want to make bigger bets in the U.S., in North America, in Mexico, in Canada, in terms of online and the whole digital, physical link. That's where they're making the bets. And so they're exiting the international markets, which I found interesting because in the past it was all about being global. Now it's about being focused and leveraging technology to optimize your business model. So that was one. The other one that I found interesting this week, CVS started the rollout of their touch-free

mobile pay solution from PayPal and Memco in all stores. I found that interesting because really mobile pay and touch-free is so behind the rest of the world. So one of the examples that I've used in many of my presentations in March alone, 800 million people in China use mobile pay, touch-free. It's part of a normal day-to-day activity of doing business. So the U.S. in that part of technology has a lot of work to do. So CVS getting started is actually being behind. Speaking to China, last week I spoke to a preview

of what happened to Single Day. Well, the results are in. They happened right after we recorded our podcast the next day. So China's Singles Day was extremely successful. They rebranded it this year as Double 11, so 11-11. It actually was an 11-day shopping festival this year, not just a one-day event. In those 11 days, they generated $74.1 billion just for Alibaba, and that's nearly $7 billion a day.

It is a global event. There were nearly 32,000 international brands from 84 countries that participated. Alibaba also did a heavy outreach to small businesses, so 2.1 million small businesses onboarded and participated, and big brands did really crazy things. So, for example, Cartier did a major live stream with about 800,000 people. And they even tried to sell a necklace that was valued at $28 million via live stream. U.S. brands had about $6 billion in revenue in the Double 11 or Singles Day, and they are the largest

country contributing outside of China in terms of total revenue. 90% of all the brands participated exceeded their sales from the previous year. 28 live streaming channels each surpassed $15 million. And even Magic Johnson this year from the U.S. joined in a live stream selling one of his products. One of the big things about Double Eleven or Singles Day, it's a big party. So this year they couldn't do it live. So they had a concert from Kate Perry being virtually broadcast to all the attendees. And they had all kinds of technology supporting it. So they had autonomous delivery robots, 30,000 packages were delivered to autonomous delivery robots. At its peak, 583,000 orders per second were being processed. And the logistics process had to process 2.32 billion packages for shipping, which is up from 1.88 billion

the previous year. Nike is one of the more active brands in the single day double 11. So for example, Nike sold $15 million worth of goods in one minute. So it gives you an idea of how active and how entertaining this process is. So Alibaba's Singles Day 111 was 16 times as many sales as Amazon's Prime Day that we talked about in a previous podcast. And part of it is scale. So 800 plus million consumers joined in the shopping frenzy during those 11 days. So what does it tell us? Retail is back in China. It's strong. And really, it's a good indicator that retail is a vibrant industry and that it will be back in the rest of the world. And the shopping festivals are really an area that the rest of the world has got to learn from and grow in terms of these types of activities, in terms of engaging consumers.

Also this week, some really interesting data in terms of what is retail innovation in 2020 and what is here to stay from Euromonitor. state from Euromonitor. Absolute growth of online retailing globally from 2019 to 2024 will be $1.5 trillion. 56% of all global retailers are looking to sell to additional digital channels in 2020. 73% of global retailers believe this shift to online sales will be permanent. Going forward, expect more live streaming, which is a good sign because, as I just talked about, single day, greater focus on reducing delivery costs to robots, curbside pickup, and click and collect options. In terms of store space and design, 50% of global customers feel safer in standalone stores in 2020 compared to just 10% who prefer shopping centers. And 35% now want those grab-and-go, contactless experience similar to Amazon Go. So that's a trend that's going to continue to

increase. And then 45% of global retailers are looking to add perks to loyalty programs in 2020. So how to engage consumers more. And 53% of global retailers are looking to add more online experiences, such as digital events and live streaming. So making shopping more entertaining. So we are headed indeed to a new normal out of all this. And the reason I bring all this stuff up is this is the time to stay engaged with LPRC in terms of how this impacts both the green and the red shopper

and becoming, because understanding that and dealing with it is becoming much, much more important going forward. So with that, I'm going to turn over to Tom. Well, thank you, Tony. Thank you, Reid. And this week, I just wanted to give a brief update on the FusionNet. I know that we've been talking about it pretty regularly, and I still encourage everybody to get involved in what the FusionNet is.

It really started out many years ago and evolved into this virtual special operations command center into what I would say today is really more of a collaboration tool about how information is shared through the members with the law enforcement community. And it centers around major events throughout the U.S. and globally. Obviously, we talked a lot about the election and civil disturbance, but it's also about weather events and any other type of event that could be disruptive. Reid had mentioned that luckily, and I would say it's great news to see that there hasn't been mass civil disruption that was potentially going to occur after the elections. There are certainly still some hotbeds or pockets of activity throughout the U.S. certainly still some hotbeds or pockets of activity throughout the U.S.

I think they're the typical beds of activity where we see protest activity. So I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. One thing that has come up in the last four to five days is, I don't want to say alarming, I would say interesting, videos and posts from very, very small, subsetted groups with either threats of violence or overturning the government. This is not uncommon at all on the internet. But what's interesting is the production value of some of these videos is reminiscent

of what Al-Qaeda would do or an anonymous video. Now, we all know today that everybody has a high-deficit camera in their pocket, as well as a video studio in their pocket. So you have to take that with a grain of salt. That production value in 2020 looks very different than it did even three years ago. But these videos talk about overthrowing of the government, anti-police activity, and quite honestly, a lot of violence. They don't talk about looting. They don't talk about things of that nature, but they really talk about the change in society.

And a few of the videos, because I've now seen, I think, four from the same group, really segment the stark differences and similarities to the country in the late, in the 60s, and where the movement went, and, you know, where are the, you know, where the movement went wrong, if you will. So stay tuned for more of that. One of the things that I would say is the LPRC will be monitoring and using the fusion net appropriately. Again, I'm not calling it alarming because these are super small, unvalidated type videos, but they're definitely propaganda in some nature. I was able to tie one to a European

group that is actually pretty substantial in Europe, but mostly non-violent and more of a protest or anti-government type scenario. So that would be interesting to see if that segment comes over to the U.S. It's predominantly found throughout the Netherlands and France. And it is similar to the Black Lives Matter movement, although it has a little bit different pretense. And there's definitely a tie there. The person that did the video is a very publicly well-known figure in Europe who happens to actually be a dual citizen. very publicly well-known figure in Europe who happens to actually be a dual citizen. He was in the US for many, many years

and actually was active in the Los Angeles area and the New York area. Again, not a, I would say not looting or disruption, regular, some of the service, a normal protest and actually very peaceful and very organized, filed for forbids and things. So hopefully these videos just turn out to be nothing more than propaganda. Switching speeds a little bit to some of the things Tony talked about with, you know, the contractless payment and some of the things that are happening at a more rapid pace. One,

we are behind, and I think Tony noted on that. We're also behind in the fraud and risk modeling side of that business. So as we incur these new things, the retailers are taking the brunt of the risk for fraud. I think one of the most notable things is, and I talked a little bit last week on the American Cash Council Society show that in the past, a lot of these contactless payment providers needed to influence or incentivize retailers to use their service. And the way they did that heavily was by basically assuming all of the fraud risk. And, you know, you use our service and you will not have any fraud. You know, we will We will run the food.

Well, that table is starting to turn dramatically as one could imagine when retailers need the service, there's less need to incentivize. So it's a bit of a cautionary tale. Anytime we bring any type of new payment segment in, we have to understand what the fraud implications are. I personally think the PayPal QR code and the Venmo and Zello and all of the QR code

payment systems appear to be fairly safe and have what I would say is the best demonstrated practices and safety standards. But because they're so new, we don't know how they'll be exploited. And then turning my last kind of topic which I talked about last week is organized retail crime in 2020. Notice I didn't say around the election and COVID because I think 2020 is just such an interesting year with so many different things going on. Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge throughout the U.S. There are, I think, similar pockets of areas around major metropolitan cities that we always see. But as we continue to institute mask swearing, as one would imagine, when you can't make an apprehension, the police are less likely to make an arrest

and you have a masked individual. what was already an extremely difficult case becomes even more challenging. Retailers are heavily turning to technology and computer vision to use technologies like LPR for license plate recognition. And also, while I would say that it isn't a direct correlation with anything that's going on. Facial recognition continues to be controversial, but the algorithms continue to improve with mask wearing. While it certainly is not a perfect science, the use of cell phones have really helped dramatically improve algorithms to identify with masks. Obviously, it depends on the type of mask

and where you wear the mask on its face, but I've heard from many folks here that are dealing with significant ORC problems that that is one of the things that they're turning to, as well as the GPS options to kind of track the items to a single port of origin and keep running through. So these are all things that we're going to work on here at the LPRC, So stay tuned and over here, Reed. All right. Thank you very much, Tom. Amazing, interesting.

And thanks for sharing some video evidence that you're referring to as far as some of the fringe elements, what they're posting. Um, and it's somewhat reminiscent of what you see in a way because only because I'm, uh, familiar with it, uh, some of the Al Qaeda or ISIS type, uh, propaganda videos that are sort of narratives with a slow motion, uh, activity in the background and, um, just kind of an interesting way to communicate, um communicate with people at large. So I'll leave that to others too that are much more expert in the dynamics and the context of these postings and other things that are going on. Even as you said, how long has this been going on? Is this new or is this something that's been around and how significant they might be. So with no further ado, I want to appreciate both of you all, Kevin Tran for his production and direction. And most of all, to you all, the listener, please, everybody stay safe out there. Always operations at lpresearch.org. Please let us know your recommendations, your questions, your comments.

Always appreciate it. Signing off from Gainesville, Florida. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. 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 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 Office of Prevention Research Council.