LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 41 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Tune in for this week’s quick update – our co-hosts discuss pool testing, Operation Warp Speed, Deloitte’s retail industry outlook, tech companies need to evolve, subscription services in retail, fake vaccine scams, global data breaches, and much more. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 41 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio 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 the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Take advantage of the advanced video capabilities offered by Bosch to help reduce your shrink risk. Integrate video recordings with point-of-sale data for visual verification of transactions and exception reporting. Use video analytics for immediate notification of important AP-related events and leverage analytics metadata for fast forensic searches for evidence and to improve merchandising and operations. Learn more about extending your video system beyond simple surveillance in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science

the podcast from the LPRC broadcasting here from Gainesville, a below freezing Gainesville, Florida again and we'll go ahead and just roll in here. I'm joined today again as per normal on our weekly series by our producer Kevin Tran and then by our co-host, Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio. Tony now appointed the global CEO for retail at Prosecure. So we might ask you to just say a sentence or two on that, Tony. But I'll roll in here real quickly on looking at the pandemic since it plays such a critical role in everybody's lives and especially in the area that we're all interested in and what we're working to do to protect and make people and places safer. We're looking at more and more research on this loss or change of smell or taste. And evidently each one has

different mechanisms. Clearly we're not going to go into all that now, but if we lose our smell or our smell changes, excuse me, and things either, everything smells good or everything smells horrible. Those are two different mechanisms, maybe even three there. The same thing with our loss or change of taste. And so more and more emerging research right now about roughly 70% of those that report a loss or change in one or both of those senses, about 70% seem typically recover it within a month. Many, of course, a little bit longer. And then some, after a year now of knowing about it, still have not recovered it.

Trying to understand why some do and don't, why some longer than others. And is some of this permanent, like had been discovered before when people were using some of the zinc-based products for cold reductions, effects reductions and things like that. So more research to come on that. Roughly 40 to 50 plus percent of COVID patients report having a change or loss of one or both senses. So food for thought there. One reason that I'm at least, in addition to trying to protect other people, trying to protect myself, that's not probably a most desirable trait or effect. Another interesting area of research in every area from mood to mental health to physical abilities, and even in this case to how well our immune systems respond to the SARS-CoV-2

virus and whether we get the COVID-19 disease or not or how serious it is, a big part of the variance there, or at least a significant part, seems to be played by our gut bacteria, our microbiome. So, you know, more to come on that, but we know that the microbiome, the gut bacteria in particular, have huge effects on us. And we know that's why, you know, when we are hungry or have an upset stomach, why it's so powerful in our brains. It's not limited to our stomach ache. It really, we can tell that there are neurons, obviously, even in our stomach. So, but the idea of having a healthy gut microbiome seems to play a role in so much of our mental and physical health. And so pay attention, I guess, to diets and exercise, make sure that we have a very wide

variety of a diet and so on. I'm not a medical expert, but another area of interest for us. I think going back now, looking at some of the testing, another area of interest is, and this goes back a few months, but there's been a couple of new studies, one over the UK, for example, looking at when we're testing. And again, I get tested again tomorrow as part of my weekly University of Florida testing. We do a written questionnaire every week, and then you can opt in or out depending on your preference, availability, or symptoms to get tested. Is the idea of pool testing, particularly with large groups, students, for example, where you just test a group of X amount, maybe it's 10, you throw them all in one pot and see if that pool test positive, it can be more efficient and you can do some random

sampling instead of trying to test every single person a lot, which is recommended, maybe you can test, you know, those smaller, slightly larger, but batches of those individuals. And if you get a positive test, now you go and you do the more complete test and trace with those individuals. So it's just an area of interest in some of the innovative thinking coming out of scientists and physicians all around the world. Vaccines, you know, we understand they're probably in the United States and there's a lag in reporting, as you can imagine. Probably at least between 15 and 17 million of us Americans have been vaccinated with at least one dose. I know here at UF, again, probably over 30 plus thousand have been vaccinated, starting with healthcare,

and then all faculty and staff over age 65. So we're seeing a slow but steady, but every day continued ramp up. And we saw, it looks like with warp speed, amazing, amazing job of getting vaccines in testing, getting vaccines in manufacturing, and doing it all without a lot of, a whole lot of, or if any downside risk for the developers and manufacturers of the vaccines. And then massive transport of those vaccines, but the administration at the very local level, particularly when you're having to go house to house or to elderly care places, since you can't necessarily with the most vulnerable, the most exposed, they can't go to a central spot and be vaccinated. It's just not part of what they are capable of doing, for example. And so you've got to go to them and very time consuming, not many professionals that are

trained to do it. And so you're seeing Warp Speed evidently included the private sector for a lot of reasons, particularly our drug supermarket, mass merchant chains, and so forth, that already know how to do this, have a lot of people that can do it, moving them up in the queue to start moving now on mass vaccinations in all these areas. So I know in the state of Florida, for example, public supermarkets was heavily involved from almost from the beginning here. They had already strategized and realized that's going to be a key component, even having employees go to elder care to administer the vaccines to the care workers and to the most vulnerable there. So more to come on that, but it looks like each and every day there's more and more efficiency.

Lessons learned are recycled and spread in the way that the vaccine development itself. And remember, again, there's a big difference between vaccines and vaccinations, and vaccinations are what's going to help us all get back to some semblance of normalcy here. So, you know, I think the vaccines development, we know there are probably almost 100 over 90 in preclinical that keep moving through mouse models or even are in silico and computer modeling, which is very, very accurate now, at least giving good indicators. Phase 1 trials, 41 vaccines now moved into that category with human clinical trials. 22 have moved into Phase 2 trials, which are larger safety and efficacy and dose ranging.

And then Phase 3, 20 vaccines. And then we've got, again, eight with either full or emergency use approval. We know that the J&J, we understand their vaccine and the Novavax vaccine, both U.S.-based or U.S. and German, continue through the phase three process and have been the beauty also, I understand through Operation Warp Speed so far has been this very, very close collaboration between the FDA and CDC and independent panels of scientists, vaccination and epidemiology experts throughout the entire phase

three trial in a much closer, more rapid way than ever before. So we're hoping that between what we've got with the Moderna and the Pfizer BioNTech, and then hopefully with AstraZeneca, Oxford's coming more online or coming online at some point in the United States. And then again, with J&J and Novavax, we'll have a nice suite of offerings. And with the U.S. committed to buy tens to hundreds of millions of doses of each of them, there should be a pretty good abundance coming up here in just months. All right, so I think those are the main things on that. We know that therapies continue, those that block the virus,

those that simulate or know that therapies continue, those that block the virus, those that simulate or stimulate the immune response, and then those that are there to help us to quell our over response of our, the over response of our innate or adaptive immune system. So more to come there, more research on masking does reduce the amount of particles, and particularly with some of the adaptation we're seeing now with three mutations, or three areas of the world, including the United States, that are seeing three different and consistent mutation, or not strains necessarily, but just those that have come out with multiple adaptations on the virus, particularly spike protein, that may make it, it seems to make it much more transmissible. So it's even more important to not get too close

to other humans, to keep our hands clean so we're not spreading it that way. And then of course, blocking the droplets that carry the virus from one to the other. So on the LPRC front, we're preparing, we had another call yesterday in a series of preps for the vaccine call two. This is for those that are transporting retailers that are transporting the vaccine and those that are also and or administering the vaccinations, looking at safety and security and what the role that asset protection, loss prevention, maybe even law enforcement play in those. Working with the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, NACDS, and FMI, the major supermarket food group. food group. And then of course, with the retailers working also with Brosnan on open source and other intelligence and ideas, open thinking on these calls with the leading, again, supermarket, drugstore, mass merchant chains, and again, other chains that are not actually, of course,

administering the vaccinations, but are transporting the vaccine because they have a lot of skill with transporting high risk and particularly those products that are in need of security or higher security. Innovate, we have had Tyco AI last week and then this week, Sensormatic AI, putting in their technology servers, getting everything ready for facial recognition to open secure points or doors. So touchless, two different use cases inside, and then we have multiple use cases outside. The Dell NVIDIA server is now pretty much online for training and inference use. pretty much online for training and inference use.

We've now got on operation, or excuse me, on our project hazard net, well over 700, almost 800 high-risk video clips that are being curated and annotated as we speak to develop models to recognize very aggressive, hazardous inside interior in-store behavior. Very excited about that. We also have Eversine and ADTC. They're ADT commercial working on artificial intelligence computer vision applications as well, supporting those. The University of Florida courses over in the College of Engineering, one being in Computer and Information Sciences Engineering, CISE. CISE, their User Experience

Design class, senior class, has a couple of teams. And then Industrial and Systems Engineering, or ISE, their senior class project has two teams working with LPRC on high value projects. Excited to work with them always. SOC Lab, heavy planning continues, including this week, on taking SOC Lab to the next level. Hopefully, it looks like with JCI, Johnson Controls International, support. The working groups are well underway. Violent crime, supply chain protection, innovation, the retail fraud, which is inside and online fraud. We've got product protection, organized retail crime working group, and finally DOG or data analytics working group.

So all seven working groups humming along, added some new leaders and have projects identified. Safer Places Lab continues again with some of the robotics from USC, UF's USC team led by Dr. Hu and his five PhD students. Save Unpackeded setting up the computers and getting ready to interface some smart machine or mobile robotics with other countermeasures in our engagement lab at the LPRC which is a simulated store environment we'd encourage you to go on to lpresearch.org and check out so much of these things so let me with no further ado I'm going to go over to Tony D., Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, take it away. Thank you very much, Reid.

So let me first comment exactly what you said in terms of the prosecutor role, my new CEO role that I just started. So I'm excited by it. It's good to be back in the LP game. I see an opportunity actually for mutual growth from this. And I'm going to leverage a lot of the knowledge picked up here at the LPRC. So I think it's just a building of our past experiences into a new next adventure. So we'll see how that goes. Secondly, I actually want to congratulate this team on this podcast.

We didn't even talk about it last week, but we crossed over our 40th episode, and that's really a great milestone. So my appreciation to our producer, Kevin Tran, and to my co-hosts, that's a nice, really, milestone to reach. And I'm looking, we're looking forward to record a lot more of these. And then, Reed, before I jump into the retail update, to add what you were saying in terms of the discussions that retailers are having, one of the LPRC members actually is working with a major retailer and embedding security technology inside the refrigerator to protect them. So there's a lot of good stuff going on. Really, you need to stay in touch with what's going on with LPRC because you'll be ahead of the game. So let me switch now to an update in terms of what's going on in the retail industry. And there's a lot of focus right now in terms of continued projection. So this is Deloitte's

2021 retail industry outlook. So first of all, they listed the retail investment priority for 2021, according to C-suite executives. And they are number one, digital acceleration, 88 percent, supply chain resilience, 78 percent, health and safety tied at 78 percent and realign the cost structure at 72 percent. Deloitte then goes into details on each of these. So on digital acceleration, the key trends they see or strategies that retailers should adopt is to create connections and convenience to the right portfolio of digital assets, derive the full potential of your data

and predict and react more quickly, meet shoppers, privacy concern with clarity and transparency. Seek out digital savvy talent. Then on the next one, supply chain resiliency. They talk about winning at the last mile means moving beyond the doorstep. Fortify every link in your supply chain. Drive decisions to the consumer, closer to the consumer, and then put more resiliency measurements in terms of how your supply chain is doing. In terms of safety and building trust through health and safety, infuse health and safety throughout the operation, embrace technology and redesign the retail journey.

And then finally, in terms of cost realignment, focus on the profitability, which may require new business models and alliances. That's Deloitte. This was interesting. It actually was from Bain, and this one is really more targeted at our listeners, our solution providers. They had an industry infographic that talked about what happens when you fall behind. So why tech companies must quickly evolve to stay in the game. Technology leaders can easily be knocked off their leadership,

and recovery after that happens is difficult. In their study, Bain found that 55% of technology companies underperformed for three or more years between 1996 and 2018. Once you fall behind, and they actually show some charts on this, so I would encourage, I actually published that today, today, Tuesday, that infographic. Once a technology company trails its sector for three or more years, the chances of turning things around are very low. And they recommend two key strategies for successful transformation. One is win a platform battle to create and maintain value and then boost growth by repositioning a core business or extending capabilities in their new domain. So that was interesting, especially for our solution provider.

From total retail this week, the top trends for 2021, the future of retail, they see these four trends into 2021. Subscription for recurring revenue, and I agree with that. You'll see a lot more subscription services coming out of retail. Flexible payment options, enhanced loyalty across channels, and rewriting the rules of retail. And then finally, from retail dive,

nine retail trends to watch in 2021. The pandemic will forever alter the brick and mortar landscape. The calling of the week retailers will continue for the year. The generous giants will try to consolidate their 2020 gains. The distinction between direct-to-consumer retailer and traditional retailers will continue to blur. Some pandemic pivots may not stick. The pandemic boom will continue, but so will the challenges. Apparel will attempt to bounce back or at least not bleed out more.

Consumer will be stuck, and that's a problem for retailers. And then finally, new owners take the center stage. And by that, they mean Simon Property, for example, investing in actual retailers that they actually have inside their mall. So retail is changing accelerated by the pandemic. So with that, I'm going to turn over to Tom. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, Reed. Just a couple brief updates. And one is to remind everybody who is a member to, if you can participate in the FusionNet, the FusionNet is kind of our virtual special operations command center. And we've had several calls. We had one last week, one yesterday, and we have one today at 6.30 p.m. Eastern to really

talk about the risk and some of the things that centered around the inauguration. I know Brosnan Risk Consulting provided us with a great intelligence report that is available to the members, and we'll talk about that tonight. And as we probably know just by reading the paper, listening to the news, there have been statements made by the FBI as the magnitude of the potential violent threats and civil disruptions throughout the country. In almost every jurisdiction, there's some level of chatter or threat around it. There are obviously some hotbeds that have continued to plague retailers, businesses, and just the folks that live there over the last few months. And we continue to believe that those will be challenging. So the Denver, the Portland market, the Philadelphia market.

I don't like some of the places where I have struggled throughout this process continue to have some heightened awareness. And what the call is, is really discuss how retailers are responding to it, whether they're closing, boarding up, using extra security, and really to share intelligence. We also have a platform that we use. So really great information. And it's not just about the inauguration. It really is about anything that you would want to gather information or intelligence about using this tool to do so. So stay tuned for more information there. And then I just have two brief updates, one which is kind of actually they're both kind of repetitive from the last weeks. We had talked about to a couple of times here to be mindful of online scams related to COVID-19 vaccines.

And officially, there are several websites that are actually out and about today posing as, and this is really somewhat alarming, posing as state sites or sponsored state sites. I actually did see two of them. They look really good, where they're asking people to purchase fake vaccines. And interestingly enough, some of these are poised to get people to pay and don't deliver.

And then some people actually deliver a counterfeit vaccine. So something to really continue to watch with the COVID-19 vaccination struggles, with some of the distribution challenges, as we always talk about. And the forest actors will continue to take advantage of that. misinformation spread throughout the internet. And again, a lot of these websites are generally designed to gather information, registration for early vaccine, registration for other things. So just, again, be very mindful of understanding the source of information and really what's going on to run through. And then on the flip side, something that's important to note is that the states are, in fact, legitimately using websites to register vaccines. So by no means am I suggesting that you don't register for vaccines or don't go to your states.

Just take that extra special few minutes to make sure that it is actually your state that you're on and not just a lookalike website. And then just real quickly, we continue to see some of the data breaches and cybersecurity incidents throughout the globe. I still tend to believe that a lot of this is exasperated by the COVID-19 events that occur and some of the distractions that lay through there. But it's ultra important, not that this will ever change for me, is to stay vigilant and pay attention to emails that you're not expecting, emails that are using computers to go to school virtually. So everyone stay safe.

And I'm sure next week we'll have a lot more to talk about around the inauguration. Thanks so much, Tom. Yes. I mean, it's, we, we believe pretty strongly. I imagine everybody would agree in some form that this is not unique. We've had just incidents, rioting, looting, massive organized retail crime cases that have come together, violent shoplifting events, armed robberies, and things that continue to spike through time. But we all know that 2020 was pretty special as far as the number of horrific events

where they were hijacked and vast areas were burned and looted. And a lot of people's jobs were lost or their reemployment set back because of that, including what's happened in Washington, D.C. limits set back because of that, including what's happened in Washington, D.C. So because of the non-stop effects of all of this behavior on these retail environments, which is our primary focus as far as trying to help, you know, better protect these people in places in these environments, you know, you'll see this emphasis on what Tom was talking about on FusionNet,

You'll see this emphasis on what Tom was talking about on FusionNet, an emphasis on our SOC lab. How do we get better and better handling within the enterprise, the preparation, the alert and understanding of events and handling them in a better way, and then finally recovering more rapidly from it and lessons learned and continuing the cycle. So that's what Sock Lab is all about. And we're really excited to take it to the next level. It's been about four years in process with some great people that run EOCs and Sock Labs around the country from leading retail chains and government entities. So we're excited about that. So let me do this. Let me just say thank you all for tuning in.

Please stay safe out there. I want to thank Kevin Tran, our producer, Tom Meehan and Tony D'Onofrio for all their expertise and taking their precious time to put this information to you all. And any and all suggestions that you have for this podcast or anything else LPRC,

please send it to operations at lpresearch.org. Everybody stay safe. 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 of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Loss Prevention Research Council.