LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 34 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tony D’Onofrio, and Tom Meehan

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving! Did you know we cook 46 million turkeys each year? The most popular password option of 2020 was “123456”, which can be cracked in under a second. Our co-hosts discuss these facts and more on this week’s episode, including COVID-19 immunity, vaccine security and logistics, D&D Daily violent crime data, “drink and shop”, IoT trends, identity theft, fraud due to Coronavirus, and package theft.   The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review: Episode 34 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. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. All right. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast, in this case, our latest in the weekly update series. case, our latest in the weekly update series. I'm joined by my esteemed colleagues, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan. And we're just going to do a quick run through of what we're hearing, what we're seeing, what we're doing. And so I'll just do as per normal, a quick update. Prevention, I hate to keep harping, but it does still appear that clearly distance and

masking dramatically reduces the amount of viral particles since the droplets can only transmit so far or travel so far and have a very difficult time negotiating through one mask, much less two. And again, the more layers, the more protection for the wearer and in two ways coming out of the infected individual and going in the non-infected individual. Some increasing good news on immunity. I know this has gone back and forth. The latest data that I'm looking at anyway as a non-physician. Again, we're looking at antibodies or the normal initial innate and then adaptive comes later immune responses,

but the initial antibodies, most of us humans, that's what's activated. That's what people have been looking at to see how long is the antibody response active and viable, how long are we immune from the virus or from the disease the virus would give us anyway. And so that's latest data looking like six months, some eight months, some 12 months, some seven months. So it looks around eight months seems to be somewhere the consensus of

some pretty good studies of hundreds of human subjects in this case. But again, as we talked about the adaptive immune system and that continues later to be able to generate antibody responses. body responses. So the T cells, which are the killer T cells, those look to be viable for eight months to maybe a few years. And the B cells also seem to be activated by most of us when we're infected with the actual COVID-19 virus from the SARS-CoV-2, I'm sorry, disease from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The B cells, though, look to be potentially active for years. And so there could be some not sustained memory in our immune systems so that we either are not later infected, or if we are again, it's a much, much lower disease level. So good news on the immunity front, it appears so far from the latest data.

immunity front, it appears so far from the latest data. Therapies, still several hundred of all varying types, as we've talked about, for those of us that have now had the disease activated by the virus to help us better manage the virus and its disease and or even clear it. On the vaccine front, this has been one of the most active weeks we've had during this 2020 period. So, of course, we know we've got the Pfizer vaccine now that looks to have cleared phase three trials. Two-dose protocol. And bear in mind, the second one as well, Moderna, has now cleared that phase three trial, it looks like. Also a two-dose protocol. Both are these messenger RNA, mRNA, new technology, technology that's been used right now on cancer and other very serious illnesses.

And so it's one of the most promising technologies, evidently, in disease prevention and reduction of severity. technologies evidently in disease prevention and reduction of severity. And the downsides of both of these appear to be that they have to be kept cooled at minus 70 centigrade and so on. But the good news is that both of these companies planned accordingly and have been manufacturing for months and months now, tens of thousands of these cases that would allow the transport and temporary storage so that the vaccine could be administered in more remote, less urban areas. Moderna seems to have a little bit of a head start on not, or at least a little bit of a lead on not having to be as concerned about some of this. It could maybe be refrigerated for one to two weeks as an interim measure. But exciting news, both of these companies have been manufacturing millions and millions of these due to the administration's

Operation Warp Speed support. Pfizer not taking the initial warp speed money, but are taking the money for the government buying the actual dosage or the doses at cost. But very exciting. Now, again, the government, the administration, FDA requires several weeks of safety profile data on the med before they'll approve and things like that are happening now. So we may have a vaccine available for administration as early as mid-December.

Some of the administration officials are talking about in the FDA. So, we also know that the Oxford University AstraZeneca, that too, their vaccine has now cleared their phase three trials. And these are large trials, bear in mind, again, 30 to adverse events that might have taken place during the trials, and the likelihood that those were because of the vaccine or the administration of the vaccine, or in some cases the placebo, but of interest, of course, is the actual therapy. So now with three of them now rapidly approaching the approval part, Very exciting news for most of us. And I think that Astra doesn't require quite the temperature drop. It's more mobile. May not so far. The data seem to indicate quite as efficacious, anywhere between 60 to 90% efficacious, bear in mind. They're also, they have a different technology.

They're using another virus that's non-activated and competent to deliver it. But it looks like an initial, also a two-dose protocol, by the way, the initial dose. If it's lower and then you follow up with the second normal dose, the dose level that you would expect may be more efficacious than if you deliver two at full dose. Some hypothesize that could be the actual virus that delivers the needed proteins, maybe actually something their immune system would react to. And so that could diminish it slightly.

But very exciting news that three major research efforts have already, already in just months, delivered very rigorously developed and tested vaccine options that in between 100 and 300 million doses have already been purchased by the governments and as they're manufactured and delivered. Very rigorous protocols to make sure that each and every batch of the vaccine is up to standard and then each, in fact, vial that's ready for the patient and that the transport and storage and then administration are at a rigorous level. that the transport and storage and then administration are at a rigorous level. A massive global undertaking to administer. And again, as they go through those protocols. Another interesting note, I think, around this whole therapy and, of course, the vaccines in particular issue is security, which is what we're all about.

So Interpol and others have come out with guidelines based on past experience and research on, you can imagine in one case it's been described, some of these vaccines could be equivalent of liquid gold. So counterfeiting, hijacking, theft, and diversion are obviously very real with anything that's got any value, diversion are obviously very real with anything that's got any value, including the vaccine. So you see United States Marshals escorting, you see very high tech security measures, GPS trackers, pretty much every type of technology and highly trained in-person security measure is being evaluated and adopted to protect and maintain the security and the integrity of the vaccines and so forth. So just stay tuned on all that.

LPRC front. We're working away with LP Magazine to come out with some new and exciting things to put out some good information. We are very thrilled about that. Multiple new research projects. This year, 2020, here, as we're in the latter portion, we've seen several solution partners and retailers come to us now with some initial things they've done for improved or combined solutions. So our team is very excited to start to work on some of those projects.

More to come later on that. We're working on our next up cluster call in addition to the regular, obviously our working group calls, but each and every one of those, we're working to get more guest speakers on the seven different working groups that we've got their monthly teams calls. And the team has worked hard. We've got some new mini studies that we're going to be

putting out to maintain the momentum and the excitement. Always our goal here is provide good outcomes here, actionable information for you all, but that each and every call or engagement in person or by teams is fulfilling as a good user experience. So what I'd like to do with no further ado is head over to my colleague, Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, can you tell us about what's going on around the world of retailing? Thank you very much, Reid. So again, great insight from you on LPRC and also the vaccine status. So let me start with the latest D&D daily Q3, there were 128 fatalities, down 23%. Total incidents were up 10% to 348. But for Q3, the incidents were down 5.7% to 116. Of the 128 fatalities in Q3, 15% were suspects, which was down 42%. 66% were customers, down 17%. 18% were store associates, down 18%.

And 1% was law enforcement and loss prevention personnel, and that was down 67%. 39% of the incidents were inside stores or malls. 60% were in the parking lot, which is, again, remember the zones of influence that we talked about in the LPRC, and you understand. And then 1% was off-premise in terms of the importance of having protecting across all the different zones. Of the associates killed, which were 23, in terms of the importance of having protecting across all the different zones.

Of the associates killed, which were 23, 70% were during robberies, 26% was a result of workplace violence, and 1% was murder-suicide. 83% were males, 17% were females, and of the total incidents, C-Store was again the number one location, convenience stores at 37%, restaurants second at 14%, gas station third at 11%, and malls were next at 8%. And finally, in the top five, grocery was at 7%. So that's a little bit on what's happened to retail crime and also

fatalities. Switching to something interesting that I actually published on my social media feed this week, what were the top five worst passwords of 2020? So number one was, I don't know why people do this, but the number one worst password was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Cracked in less than a second, and there were 23 million exposures of that. The next number two was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Again, cracked in less than a second. Eight million of those passwords were exposed. The third one, which this was interesting to me, is picture one. So the word

picture and the number one, it took three hours to crack that, and there were only 11k of it. Number four was password. So the word password, less than a second to crack it, and then there were 4 million times exposed. And then the number five is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, less than a second to crack it, and it was exposed 3 million times. So, again, watch those passwords, as Tom Meehan likes to continue to remind us the importance of having strong passwords. NRF this week also issued an update forecast for the holiday season. Sales in November and December will increase between 3.6% and 5.2%. The number excludes automobile dealers, gas stations, and restaurants and compares to a 4% increase last year and an average holiday sales increase of 3.5% during the last five years. So online sales will increase 20% to 30%, which is not a surprise.

A survey of USA consumers and how they shopped from Declutter was interesting. And this one, especially with the holidays, one in five respondents say likely that they shopped drunk basically during the holiday season. 41% admitted to doing it, to do online shopping while under the influence in previous years. This follows a March 2020 survey, which indicated that 58 million Americans spent $45 billion for online drunk purchases in the past 12 months. And the average spend was $736. So watch, drink and shop probably don't go very well together. And then also this week from the IHL group, the seven internet things or IIT trends for 2020, and here they are.

Number one, analytics everywhere. Number two, rethinking the checkout. Number three, edge computing. Number four, real-time offers for consumers. Number five, security matters. One in five retailers deploy less secure mobile devices during the COVID-19 surge just to get something out there. Number six, less mile optimization. And number seven, accurate inventory. Again, this is important because these are the things that LPRC can help in terms of optimizing from a science-based point of view all these IoT technology.

And finally, since it is Thanksgiving week, I cannot leave without some fun Thanksgiving statistics. So let me go through some of them. Historians have no record of turkey being eaten on the first Thanksgiving. Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird. The first Macy's parade had central zoo animals as what they actually walked on the street. Snoopy is the balloon that's made the most appearances in the Macy's Parade, appearing the first time in 1968. The first professional Thanksgiving football game took place in 1920.

This one was interesting. Jingle Bells was originally a Thanksgiving song. The Butterball Hotline has been open for the last 40 years. Each year we cook 46 million turkeys. TV dinners are a result of the invention post-Thanksgiving. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is known as Drinksgiving. Black Friday is the busiest day for plumbers. So I guess a lot of things get clogged on Black Friday.

The woman behind Mary Had a Little Lamb is also responsible for Thanksgiving's recognition as a national holiday. Only the male turkeys gobble. Turkey was actually named after a bird discovered by in the Ottoman Empire in the country of Turkey. That's how we get turkey. And finally, we eat a lot. So we eat 50 million pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving. So with that, happy Thanksgiving. And I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Reid.

I'm going to just kick through a little bit. And so today, I think I'm going to not be as repetitive. I listened to Tony's stuff and I'm not going to run through. But I want to talk about a recent NPD study related to customer checkout data and credit cards. So credit cards now make up about 82.1% of retail in-store transactions. That's in the current state versus 78.7% in January of this year. So while it's up, that's a significant increase. In theory, it's not as high as some first thought. The credit card fraud numbers are up, but I would caution the percent of sales

are not up. So there is some incremental increases in credit card fraud overall in-store, but with the sales being down so much, I think we still need to wait till there's a plateau of what's going on before we understand what it really means. More than eight in 10 consumers, so about 86% were victims of identity theft or credit card fraud or a data breach in 2020. That's a significant number if you think about the population, 86% of them were affected by identity theft, credit card fraud or a data breach in 2020.

That's up about 80% from 2019. So you can draw some conclusions that there's relationship to coronavirus. I don't know that there's an actual statistical relationship of the significance there, but we know that there is in fact an increase in attempted attacks. And obviously, with an increase in usage, the landscape is wider. Half of the people that were surveyed in this study experienced a rise in fishing activity. We talked about that specifically related to coronavirus, people going out and trying to gather information. I think in our earlier episodes of the weekly review, we shared a lot of numbers where there was just a huge amount of false sites out there trying to sell PPE, trying to get information, unemployment related,

from a business standpoint, the loans, really everything that could gather information. I think as this data becomes more readily available, we'll understand what the actual relationship is in the increase in fraud to Corona versus just the relationship to the increase in digitization. Amazon, this really in the last 10 days, has released a couple updates to their app and trying to push pickup in store and pickup at locker options really to try to curve the upcoming influx of packages. This is something that happens every holiday season, but obviously with some of the impacts that are going on. So don't be surprised when your Amazon app is pushing you to go to a local store. Expect some incentives.

I would expect incentives to come to try to get people to pick up. If you've had anything delivered recently, you probably noticed that there was a low. Early on in coronavirus, you had these extended dates for essential shipments. Then that kind of fizzled out. And now that's coming back to trying to manage the shipment. And it's a pure velocity standpoint. So just keep an eye on your, whether it be Amazon or any e-com interaction that you have, there will probably be some incentive to pick up and store.

I know just recently, a couple of large retailers had early Black Friday sales, and they had pretty huge incentives to pick up in store versus getting it shipped. Significant gift card offerings and things of that nature. You also should have seen, and by the time you hear this podcast, this will be far gone, that most, if not all, retailers have changed their Black Friday strategy. I know Tony talked about this, I think, last week, where they're making it spread over a longer period of time. This is not just to increase the offering for the sales potential. It also allows to spread out some of the shipping and order processes. It also alleviates some of the stress online.

You know, I'm the other, I guess it was two nights ago, I was making a purchase for my kids online. And this is a very large retailer. And I somehow, in trying to order one of something, ended up getting four of something shipped to me. So very difficult product to get. Sitting here at midnight, it was actually 1 a.m. in the morning when these were available for the kids,

and it processed four separate orders, which are being shipped to me, but this is an item that had a limit of one. We only wanted one. So when I spoke to the customer service person at the representative, they had significant challenges with their online site and one of the bugs duplicated orders. So no harm there except for the fact that there are probably some other folks that really wanted that item that now I'm going to have to return. So you will see those online bugs. It is just an unfortunate circumstance that occurs when you can do all the testing and development possible,

but when your website has pickups of thousands of percent, there are things that occur. The last thing I'll wrap it up with is, and Reid talked about really three vaccines, or two that are really far along, actually one that's in the approval process and then another that is just about to get there, two that require extremely cold storage distribution and one that just requires refrigerated distribution. This will create a logistical nightmare. So one of the things that I've been following, and this has

to do a lot with my day job, is the logistics challenges with trying to distribute literally 50 million vaccines in a very short period of time, layering in the cold storage challenge. And Reid had alluded to the blue box that was designed. Well, some of the challenges with the blue boxes, how quickly can they make them? So expect additional logistics distribution throughout this vaccine. I can guarantee you that if a major carrier has a choice of carrying a vaccine or your package, that they're going to have to carry the package. And the volume is substantial and there are time constraints with it. So we'll be keeping a close eye on that. And hopefully I'll have some more updates for that in the next two weeks. Thinking through some of the technologies that are available that really

are heavily used in retail that will help some of those logistics challenges, whether it be how we track orders today, implementation of RFID or GPS to track those shipments are all things that are on the table today to help be more efficient when you're thinking of a very short period of time. And depending on what report you read and what you know, who you know, the first real bulk of shipments is going to be somewhere between $30 and $50 million that have to be distributed in a relatively short time. And when you think about that, it's a substantial amount of packages that require special handling that have to go from point A to point B. And obviously, some of the normal carriers will be involved.

The other thing that's interesting about some of these vaccines is that there are limitations on flight with them. So it's going to definitely be a logistical challenge. So more to come on that. Back over to you, Reid. All right, always amazing information from you, Tom, and you, Tony.

I'm sitting here taking notes and learning the whole time as well. But as you said, I mean, it is an amazing time. And I think that it's been horrific in so many ways, but then we've seen there are upsides to this pandemic and this year, 2020. But with closing in on 800 unique compounds and development for COVID, so many of these will be repurposed for other illnesses preventively or to treat as therapeutics. And it's just an incredible use of science and the way that sped up the connection, global connection at every strata to allow for the development and the almost real-time sharing of any and every bit of data that could be helpful to another researcher somewhere else in the globe and at every level and as well, obviously, most importantly, and that's what LPRC is here, but to translate science into practice. So that

S2P in the medical world has been amazing. And then the same thing we've seen, obviously, with asset protection. And as you were just talking about, Tom, protecting the supply chain, protecting these therapeutics and these vaccines is so paramount. But that's what we've all been tasked to do here with both the tangible places and our people and all the intellectual property to the assets that we protect. I want to put in a quick plug for Crime Science, the podcast. Overall, we're doing a series of in-depth interviews with some of the leading criminologists in the world that are in the, particularly in the realm of prevention and protection. So environmental criminal criminologists, including Dr.

John Eck, Dr. David Weisberg, Dr. Kim Rosmo, just to name three on top of this stellar lineup of criminologists that have been interviewed so far to date. But Kevin Tran and I are working hard to curate good questions and good dialogue. And we see, and I'm hearing more and more, where criminology courses, professors, faculty, are now including the Crime Science Podcast as part of their curriculum, particularly now in the online times, but ways to just talk to some of these historic figures in this rapidly evolving field. But especially those that are, again, trying to translate science, use good science into practice so that law enforcement and laws prevention, asset protection, and others can be more focused, more effective,

and creates fewer side effects, and so on. So signing off here on behalf of Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio and our producer, Kevin Tran from Gainesville, Florida, at the University of Florida, and at the Loss Prevention Research Council, this Reed Hayes. Everybody stay safe. Have a great Thanksgiving or Christmas or your favorite preferred holiday and event. It's going to be difficult not being able to share so much with family and friends, but please stay safe, do our best, and trust me, 2020 will not last forever. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Laws 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 of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Laws 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.