LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 42 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan, and Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

523 retail fatalities in 2020. 19% of total retail sales took place online. Our co-hosts discuss the D&D Retail Violent Fatalities report, global consumer trends, vaccine misinformation, upcoming LPRC initiatives, zero-day flaws, Ohio’s unemployment office data breach, and much more in this week’s episode. The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 42 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 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 in the week series, where we're going to go week in review. Joined again by our producer, Kevin Tran, by Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan.

I'm going to start off a little bit of what's going on with the pandemic from what we can tell from the news and reports. Obviously, it looks like the infection rate and the positivity rate, the amount of the percent of tests that are testing positive that are given, and that's, you know, it's an indicator, right? Only some people are getting tested, and there's always variation in the accuracy and things like that. So, has been going down over the last three weeks, it appears in most states. Some states are having really tremendous, horrific spikes in hospital, particularly ICU admissions. I know the CDC gave some guidance around, you know, if you get, if you start to most overwhelmingly, most people that are infected with COVID-19 from the SARS-CoV-2 virus have mild symptoms.

from the SARS-CoV-2 virus have mild symptoms, but drowsiness, the inability to stay awake, confusion, and of course, evidently shortness of breath, difficulty breathing are three symptoms. One or more of those they are recommending, you know, that we go immediately seek medical attention. And so UK, the variant could be not only more infectious, but affects certain people more seriously than before thought. Denmark, who is sequencing almost all COVID-19 samples they can get a hold of, they're showing that the UK variant has hit and is increasing their infections 70% per week, week on week. So certainly seems to me much more highly transmissible, you know, on the vaccine front. And that way, Moderna is testing a booster for the new variants coming out of South Africa and other places that may be not only more transmissible, places that may be not only more transmissible, but create more serious disease and maybe even create higher hurdles for the current vaccines coming online to stimulate a robust enough

immune response or a focused enough immune response, it sounds like according to the media here. The prior administration did hit the current administration's target of 1 million vaccinations a day, it looks like, which is good news. As this continues, 24 million, it's estimated right now at least 24 million, maybe more due to lag in reporting that we've all heard about. Vaccinations have been administered, shots in arms in the United States. So making some more significant progress, we see Walmart and a whole host of other supermarket drug chains dramatically speeding up and beefing up their capability to administer to their own

teams, plus obviously administer to the general public. And I know in the state of Florida, again, the governor DeSantis early, early on had enlisted public supermarkets help, particularly with going first off to elder care locations, you know, areas where there were a lot of people that would be vulnerable to serious disease. And that seems to have paid off in that case. And so other states are adopting that and bringing online earlier than was expected in the phase one rollout. And so that's good news.

We have our second vaccine call here at the LPRC coming up tomorrow, Wednesday at 3.30 PM Eastern Standard Time. So, excuse me, if you're a retailer, you're involved in either transport of vaccines or administration of vaccinations, we'd recommend you get on there. We have NACDS and FMI again,

as well as the experts from several of these drugstore, supermarket and mass merchant retailers that are involved in transport administration. market and mass merchant retailers that are involved in transport administration. And we have now, I think Merck has pulled their two vaccine candidates due to good safety profiles, but not as high of efficacious. They weren't as efficacious as was hoped. And of course, the bar has been set so high with the phase three levels that are being seen. And now I believe we're waiting for now with millions of vaccinations in arms,

there's a lot of data out there as to what's going on with the vaccines and how efficacious they really are. So that's not great news with Merck pulling their two candidates, but they've got one or more very highly, appear to be highly capable therapy candidates in human trials right now, phase one, two, or three trials that look pretty promising. Eli Lilly also has, according to their reports, a very promising monoclonal antibody therapy. And we're going to need therapies because some people just, even if you have 95% efficacy with a vaccine, that means that 5% is just not as efficacious. It doesn't provide the same level of protection because the person's immune system is different or some interaction and so forth. So clearly we would always need therapies for all of us. And again, as viruses continue to mutate, as they have errors in their DNA and RNA, then they've got to stay ahead of that.

And that's what we see with influenza every year. So things are moving along pretty quickly in all those areas in a positive way. quickly in all those areas in a positive way. Probably anywhere between 25 and 50 million Americans are estimated to have actually been infected with SARS-CoV-2s and may or may not, though, have developed any kind of COVID-19 disease exhibiting symptoms. So between natural infection and vaccinations, more Americans have been exposed and may have some form or level of immunity. The durability of immunity is going to be what's in question. And that's why you see the first two vaccines approved in the United States involve two doses to that second dose designed to not only boost a near-term immunity for the person getting vaccinated, but also longer-term immunity,

it would be more durable, is the hope and what the science is designed to indicate and looks like it is. And you see even with J&J and Novavax coming online, it's estimated in the next four to six weeks, sometime in February or March, which would be promising because you would have tens to hundreds of millions more new doses. They're a different type of vaccine than RNA of Moderna and Pfizer have put out, but look to be fairly efficacious, if not very efficacious. very efficacious. J&J is touting there's this preliminarily only requiring one dose and also not needing to be stored at such a low temperature. But they also have added a third arm or another arm, I understand, to their phase three trial that they're completing, but where they're looking at adding a second dose to see if they can further boost the efficaciousness. And again, looking at longer term data to see if the durability of the vaccine is longer.

So, you know, what's the duration of the effect as well as the intensity. Continuing to go over to LPRC, you know, we just were involved and very grateful to work with the International Association of the Forensic Interviewing Team, IAI, on their latest elite training. I think there were 700-800 participants, my understanding, and there were four of us that worked as scientists in the field. have, you know, worked as scientists in the field. My role was to be sort of the criminologist that works on crime prevention and what that means in the practical way for APLP or law enforcement security practitioners and just kind of walk through with them, you know, what science looks like when it comes to the practical real-world impact on improving safeguarding vulnerable people in places, which is what we do. And a ton of great questions that were fed to me before, during, and after my session. And it was exciting. I really enjoyed

getting engaged there. And then some of the other speakers had just fantastic information and really a neat effort by IAI. We were proud to participate. We've got, I mentioned the vaccine call coming up tomorrow at 3.30 PM Eastern time. Now, again, we're recording today and this is not going to be released till Thursday. So we're talking about Wednesday. The LPRC's annual research book, which is a compilation of some of our latest research results and findings in the form of very short and sometimes illustrated research findings is coming out. Tran can address that later. And we've got our kickoff meeting coming up. And kickoff, we're always excited. Normally, again, Bloomingdale's and Tom Meehan will be on in a second in a few minutes here, but graciously hosted that and normally have 100 or more executives, including NYPD and other law enforcement, but just a whole host of 20, 30, 40 different retail chains there sharing ideas, planning for that year.

And it's the day after every year, traditionally, in our big show. And I've mentioned this before. Now it will be online and available to LPRC members. Anyway, I'm not sure how that all works, but it'll be February 2nd at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I'm pretty excited about the panels. The panels that we've got this year are pretty exciting, pretty amazing. What we're looking at here as far as look on LinkedIn, for example, or go to lpresearch.org, but we've got some pretty heavy hitters as far as APLP practitioners and solution partners working with our research scientists broken out into

three panels. One is examining artificial intelligence in retail. And we've got a really cool lineup of, we've got Jumbie from NVIDIA, Just, of course, NVIDIA is in many ways in the top two or three leaders in looking at artificial intelligence and particularly computer vision, but also other forms. And so we're going to do some deep dives, but we're going to have some fun and we're going to try and talk about things in different ways. We've got Gopi, who is a sensormatic AI, and just a wealth of knowledge as well. And we've got Eversine. And so, you know, who have deployed, practically deployed computer vision AI across thousands of stores in the United States and more around the world and continue to see how it evolves, particularly in self-checkout.

So we've got experts in what AI is, how AI works, what's coming down the pipeline, what are these definitions, what's the difference between machine learning and deep learning and computer vision and natural language processing and you know all these different terms that are flying around iot um and so we're going to have fun with that panel the next one we've got is takeaways from an unprecedented holiday and year um and so we've got some some nice heavy hitters we're going to go a lot into you know bopus and boris and you know curbside and uh you know, BOPIS and Boris and, you know, curbside and, you know, different theft variations and how just like a virus, the mutations we saw in theft, fraud and violence threats, and there was no shortage, what was done, what the data seemed to show. So we've got some

practitioners and they're talking about their experiences in different formats, you know, supermarket or drug or department store and so forth. Then we've also got lessons learned part two, what's next in retail? What are the implications of everything? What are retailers doing now? How are they gearing up with a different panel? And then what's the research team doing right now as we re-gear? And so that's going to be a way for Kenna Carlson and a way for Corey Lowe to really put out there some of the new research, what's going and bubbling up out of the seven LPRC working groups that have come off from all the 20 cluster calls that we held throughout 2020

with the retailers. So look forward to an exciting lineup, some amazing content for LPRC Kickoff 2021 version. All right. With no further ado, let me go over to Tony D'Onofrio. And Tony, let us know what's going on in the United States, the world at large. Thank you very much, Reid. So lots of good information there. And I'm looking forward to your upcoming event. So let me start this week actually with the latest D&D daily retail violence report that was just issued. These are for all of

2020 are the key takeaways. 523 retail fatalities took place in the industry in 2020 which is up actually 40% in the last five years. 123 of these were store associates that were killed in 2020, and that is actually up 41% on 2019. 76% of the deaths in 2020 were innocent victims, such as customers, associates, LP, and law enforcement personnel. 48% were killed in parking lots. 50% were killed in convenience stores or restaurants. Digging into the 2020 specific data, even with all the lockdowns and store closures, fatalities were up for the year up 5% and incidents were up 14% over 2019. For the fourth quarter 2020, fatalities were up 15% and incidents up 25%.

For the entire 2020, 24% of those killed were suspects, 49%, which is an astounding number, were customers, 24% were store associates, and 3% were law enforcement LP security. This last category of law enforcement LP is actually up 23% on 2019. As I said a minute ago, 48% of the fatalities were in the parking lot, 47 percent were inside a store or a mall, 5 percent were off-premises. Of the 123 store associates killed, 71 percent were doing a crime such as a robbery, burglary, or theft, 19% were from workplace violence. By gender, fatalities were 85% male and 15% female. The worst day of the week for the violence was Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by Monday,

and the least violent day of the week, which again was a surprise, was Friday. violent day of the week, which again was a surprise, is Friday. The top three states for fatality incidents in 2020 were Texas, California, and Florida. The top three cities were Philadelphia, Chicago, and Houston. I actually have a new blog coming out this week on the changing crime patterns where I talk about this and also the latest ORC, Organized Retail Crime Report, plus the acceleration of digital transformation and what does it all mean for loss prevention. So look for that on all of my different platforms. So let me switch gear now to retail in general by updating you on a new Euromonitor top 10 global consumer trends

reports for 2021 that was just issued. And in that report, they listed the top five preferred in-store shopping features that consumers are asking for. And I'm sharing these, as you see here, for several reasons. So here are the five. Number one, they just want to select an item and be able to immediately walk out with the purchase executed. So think Amazon Go. Number two, scan items while shopping and make payments directly on mobile phones.

So this is a mobile scan and go. Number three, this was interesting to me, earn loyalty points automatically when entering with the assistance of facial recognition. Number four, view additional information via interactive shelf displays. And number five, virtual fitting rooms, which show how the product will fit. So what does all this tell us? Consumers are looking for more frictionless, more convenient, more contactless shopping, and this has all been accelerated by the pandemic. It also means that for part of this audience, we need to find out new ways to stop these new ways of shopping. How do we address shrink in this situation? And the research also confirms a theory that I've been stressing

for a long time with data is that the consumers really are time-starved and are looking for services that free up more of their time to do other stuff. So all this digital connection is actually eating up more time and we're always looking for more free time. 51% of consumers chose time to myself among their top three life priorities. 87% of the consumers in this global survey own the smartphone. And the smartphone is very, very important because a smartphone means that if you're not delivering that intellect, frictionless, convenient way to shop shop they can instantly switch to a competitor even while standing inside your store so we're heading to a different type of retail and consumers are demanding more of these new ways of shopping so that's one update the last

update that i want to give you is actually from retail dive Dive. And they listed six charts and what they say about the pandemic impact on retail from a USA point of view. So number one, e-commerce soars. Their projections that it reached $795 billion, up 32% from 2019. E-commerce as a percent of sales in 2020 was 19%. So 19% of total retail sales in 2020 took place online. And that would not have occurred on its natural trend of growth of e-commerce until 2023. So again, a view that things are getting accelerated. Number two, foot traffic plummeted and somewhat recovered. So foot traffic plunge, and this is foot traffic inside stores, was down 45% in April.

In November, December, it was down 16%. So it's starting to recover, but it still is down. Number three, retail sales bounced back, but apparel fell hard. December sales rose 6.7%. So in general, retail is back, but apparel went through some severe pain. In March, it fell 53%. In April, it fell 89%. 64% in May, 25% in June, and 20% in July.

So some severe drops in apparel. Number four, store closings continue to pile up. So this report, this article, and there's all kinds of different variations, but this article said store closures in 2020 were 8,736. Store openings were 3,300. So net, Openings were 3300. So net, we had a negative of 5536. That compares to 2019, which again was a negative year and 9832 stores closed. 4639 opened for a net closed of 5143. And 2020 was the fourth consecutive year that we had a net negative of closures versus opening. So it was a tough year for stores being closed.

Number five, bankruptcies stacked up more to come. There were 52 bankruptcies in 2020, which followed 32 in 2019. And 2020 was the highest number of bankruptcies in five years. And number six, finally, retail stocks took a beating at the beginning, but actually recovered strong towards the end of the year. So again, retail is coming back. And so my view of all this data is telling you that what was already happening with stores were closing pre-pandemic, just got accelerated. So weak brands or weak type retailers really got hit hard. But retail is coming back and will continue to come back strong, especially for the retailers that have strong branding and immersive consumer experiences.

strong branding and immersive consumer experiences. So I agree also with the article conclusion that 2021 will be much healthier, especially the second half. And that will depend a lot by what Reid talked about earlier in terms of the pace of the vaccine. And to me, key is what we're doing right now to prepare and doing everything that we can in the first half to prepare for an even stronger second half and that's really where I'm spending my time how do I prepare with the right relationships and right strategy so I can have a superb strong second half and with that I'm going to turn it over to Tom well thank you Tony thank you Reed um I wanted to just briefly touch, and some of this will be a little repetitive on what Tony and Reid said, but more on the risk side. First,

just a reminder about misinformation on the internet, especially with all of the vaccination news and information out there. There has been a whole host of misleading or miswritten stories about complications related to the vaccine. So what I would say is that a lot of them are unintentional in nature and could be even from a large news agency. As everybody is aware, as we just talked about, COVID-19 is still a hot topic globally. So with vaccinations rolling out, there are some related and unrelated adverse reactions to the vaccine. There have been two deaths reported. Both of the deaths are still being investigated. I actually got some information this morning right before the call on another potential death. And just it's a really good reminder of not to just jump on a

news article because it's written from a major news association. The news is, in this case, delivering what they're told. And I think they're doing a good job of writing out that they're still being investigated, but the headlines read, you know, died after vaccination. And there's a lot of kind of misinformation or confusion that's being caused by that. And that's a global thing. Outside the U.S., that's occurring as well. I do, just like Reid and Tony, a lot of global business, so I speak to people pretty regularly. And in some European countries that are having a much harder time, they're really having a hard time with getting vaccinations, distributing them, but they're also managing the information of what's safe and what's not.

So just a reminder of that. Switching gears a little bit to risk and cybersecurity, I'm not going to talk about the Russian hack and the SolarWinds piece. I think we covered that quite a few times, but I thought it was important to talk about a couple of new hacks or new hacks that have been reported. One, there's a company called SonicWill, and they were breached via a zero-day flaw. And what a zero-day flaw is, a vulnerability or a flaw that was not previously detected. So basically, this happens very often in software, whether it be PC, Mac, your iOS or Android, where there's a vulnerability that no one knows about and then it's identified and it's used. So, there is no precautionary measure. There's no remedy. It's not known until it occurs. it's important to note this, similar to the SolarWinds tech, SonicWall happens to be a cybersecurity company focused on firewalls. So why do I keep talking about this? Because the

companies that are designed to protect us are being breached and attacked at a very high rate. The LPRC is a perfect example of people coming together and trying to figure out ways to mitigate loss. And what I would say is just like the bad guys are doing this for retail crime, they are for the cybersecurity side. And so it's just a really good reminder of the best tools still require a lot of human intervention and require constant maneuvering and checking up. So more to come on that. I thought it was newsworthy to talk about because, again, this is a company that offers cybersecurity, offers protection services, and itself was breached.

There's a lot of information still coming available about this. But when we just talk about the last few weeks, when you talk about the Russian attack and you talk about something like attack, and you talk about something like this, these are companies that are designed to protect corporate entities that are being attacked and breached, regardless of how they're getting there. It's kind of a stark reminder of that. Even if you're investing in the best technology, it still requires a lot of policy and upkeep. Next, another kind of nation-state sponsored attack. And this is kind of important to note, because I think with all of

the things going on in the United States today, between the election just ending and impeachment and COVID-19, we're still relatively distracted from normal things. And so we talked about the Russian hack a lot. Now I'm going to switch gears to Google has made a warning about North Korea attacking Windows and Google Chrome browser. Why is this so important? Because you have, again, a nation state sponsored attack. Now, this information is relatively new in the sense that, yes, we've heard about North Korea doing these things before, but this is a newer piece, and they are looking for zero-day vulnerabilities.

They're also looking at unpatched known vulnerabilities, and they're attacking. But when you have a nation-state actor behind an attack, the reality is that they have unlimited resources from a cybersecurity standpoint. And both North Korea and Russia are very, very advanced in this field. There have been a couple of publications that just recently released, actually Wired Magazine had some stuff in it around the cyber war principle. But in today's modern day, this is as close to an active war as firing a missile would be, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. So a lot more to come with this. It's a very delicate situation because how we respond generally, the world follows. But it's important to note that these attacks don't look like they're going to end.

They've been going on for a long time, but they're heightened today. I think one of the biggest challenges we have together, both government and private sector folks, is that there is just so much going on in our daily lives right now that it leaves us open to some unfortunate activity. open to some unfortunate activity. So I'll keep an eye on this and we'll continue to give an update to the group. But these are two very, very powerful countries that are attacking constantly and are actually having some success. And then just because I thought it was kind of timely to talk about it, there have been several data breaches, but there was another data breach, and I say another, this is not the first one, in the state of Ohio's unemployment benefit office. While it's relatively small, again, I think it just warrants that this is consistently happening. They're saying at this point that less than 150 applications, that's right, 150, if you think about how

small that is, where personal information was exposed that gave their address, phone number, name, driver's license number, of that 131 people, there was an additional 135,000 people that had their social security numbers exposed. So again, just kind of highlighting the risk that is posed. And today, in this stage, we've become somewhat desensitized to breaches because they're so common and we hear about them so much. But I really, really think it's important for all of us to realize that as we continue to much, but I really, really think it's important for all of us to realize that as we continue to digitize what we do, and Tony and I talk about digital acceleration often, and we continue our digital dust, that's what I like to call it, where you're leaving your footprint and your

information everywhere. It's important to just think through what you're doing and when you're doing it. Obviously, if you're filing for unemployment, there is this sense of feeling that it's a state system, but it's going to be protected. The reminder here is not to say don't file for unemployment. Absolutely, if you need to file for unemployment, do that. But in the case where you don't absolutely need to share that personal information, if there's a way to hand it to someone, if there's a way to hand it to someone if there's a way to write you know talk about it then I would recommend highly doing that the perfect example is I recently set up an appointment with my eye doctor who I haven't seen in a couple years like and he had a new system and they sent me all this online stuff and said fill out all your personal information online it's much

quicker and I left things intentionally unfilled out because of the electronic transfer. And when I go to the office, while it might take me an extra 10 minutes, it's a little bit of a peace of mind that I'm handing it to the person. Now, mind you, someone could leave that paper out and not dispose of it correctly, but at least I have control of the chain of custody and I could stand there and essentially I could actually ask someone to dispose of it afterwards. Sometimes that's not possible. Sometimes it is, but I didn't need to give that data. And that's kind of where I'm wrapping around because I, again, use my, my, one of my favorite terms is the digital dust control it and it won't get away from you.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Reed. All right. Thank you so much, Tom and Tony. Always so informative, so much information in a short time frame. I know I appreciate it. I think our listeners do as well. So I think with no further ado, we'll turn it back over to you all out there. Thank you, Tony and Tom. Thank you, Kevin. And thank you all our listeners. Tom, thank you, Kevin.

And thank you all our listeners. Please, suggestions, recommendations, questions are always welcome at operations at lpresearch.org. LPRC and I know the team at University of Florida stand ready and are excited always to work with and support you all out there as practitioners and other researchers. We are all about safeguarding vulnerable people in places. So stay safe. And until next time, signing off from Gainesville. Thank you. Bye. 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.