LPRC - CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 80 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

EPISODE 80!!! Thank you all for the support and tuning in! We appreciate you all and hope you continue to enjoy. LPRC Kickoff is January 19th in NYC Bloomingdales Flagship Store! LPRC is Presenting at the Big Show! In this week’s episode, our co-hosts discuss these topics and more, including the Rittenhouse Case has Caused Businesses to Board Up, FBI Email Service was Hacked, Cybersecurity Good Practices are Discussed, and Retail Sales have Increased Again. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more! The post CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 80 with Dr. Read Hayes, Tom Meehan & Tony D’Onofrio appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. 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-s 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. This is the latest in our weekly update series from the LPRC. I'm joined by my colleagues, Tony D'Onofrio and Tom Meehan and our producer, Diego Rodriguez. And we're going to quickly take you around the world at specific issues. Of course, during the pandemic, I kind of start off as everybody knows, and I've been hearing some good feedback from people. And I really appreciate that on this podcast and the updates

you get on this weekly series. But Israel has been putting on some interesting war games. They obviously are very good at that, preparing themselves, typically, though, for terrorism and combat, in this case, looking at what's going to be like if and when there are new, more aggressive, and more dangerous mutations or COVID-19 strains or some other mystery virus. So we'll stand by and put out what we learned from their war games and what their suggestions

are. Meanwhile, we saw waves because of the Delta variant and Delta Plus and its ability to spread much more rapidly, just much more transmissible than earlier variations that spread through sort of the southern states or other places that had reduced some of their precautions like masking and distancing and heavy vaccination to now shift up to places where there have been more controls in places like Denver, Colorado, California, Seattle, and so on, Portland, and then up into the Northeast, and particularly areas that are a little more heavily vaccinated, and there's

much more masking going on to protect, again, the spread of the viral particles. And so, again, this Delta variant is just incredible. It's almost unknowable now what the differences could be, but these spikes are there over in Germany. They're buckling down. I mean, they're evidently, they're reporting their emergency medicine and intensive care, critical care units are overwhelmed and saturated. They're even trying to stop any type of immigration or cross-border travel in a desperate attempt to reduce the waves, the new waves of the coronavirus. And here we are almost two years on, it seems like, and

we can see what happens with something like this. And in the United States over, still well over half a million Americans dying. And I'm sure each of us that are listening today, seeing the news or know somebody, and in law enforcement has been incredibly and firefighting heavily hit by the coronavirus as far as fatalities and so on. So it's for real. It's for real for a very small percentage. But it's we know some reasons we've talked about over and over on here, and you all have heard elsewhere why. Some people, it's just very severe, but there are others that it's very perplexing. They get very serious disease and even die from COVID-19. So you don't want to get it if you can help it, or if you get it, you want to have a very less severe case.

And again, that's where vaccination comes in as we all know. There's a lot of studies as we've talked about on this. Do you get immunity from prior infections? Yes. It looks like there's certainly some to a lot. It's very unclear because each human is so different. And this is again, what we talk about in criminology, how, you know, you can devise the best countermeasure and put it inside a store or in a parking lot or wherever, and it just doesn't work, but for some people, very well. It just doesn't work well. And so we always have that differential response we talk about in crime prevention to whatever we do. That's why we do combinations and we continue to update and change things around.

And the same thing we can see with this virus. The virus is so different and the infection rates vary and wane and wax so much. But individuals and individuals even themselves are vulnerability, are lower immune, just like a specific store or location. It goes up and down. If a good store manager, a really good store manager has a great team, they've got the tools, it's humming, they have to go home at night or sometime.

They go on vacation or get sick themselves. And so we can see the vulnerability of a place change dramatically, an individual much less between our stores or places. And then we have the same thing with humans. So always be thinking that there's, this is so similar and we can learn from each other on what's going on, but that's always sort of the madness of, if you will, of in public health, in personal health. And then of course, even in crime prevention, because it's an individual

place, it's a group of places around each other, and then it's across your enterprise. So we're seeing that the reinfection is difficult to understand because of the differences in humans and in individual human responses. You just don't know if one of us are exposed to this virus, how we're going to respond at that time, partly driven by have we been exposed to it before through natural infection, or have we had the vaccine that activates our immune system to more rapidly and accurately recognize that particular virus? And again, the virus itself is evolving because there's so many infected people. If you reduce the amount of infection, you reduce the amount of, as we all know, mutations going on to more dangerous and more transmissible versions. So, but because the immune response that we have is pretty sophisticated, we've talked about this also,

you know, antibodies, and then there's cellular activity, the T and B cells and so on that we, that we learn about and hear about in the news. So they're not sure, does natural immunity, what protection? Well, that depends. Depends on what you're exposed to, how much of an inoculum or how much you've been onboarded, we onboard. And then again, how our immune response decides to activate at that time. And that's what's driven by it. And that's why the vaccination helps even things out to a certain extent, because it's now both they're finding antibody and cellular immunity is activated by these vaccines. So it gives us a little more of a level playing field in that way. And that's what they're talking about. interesting articles about the CDC is moving from this group immunity or herd immunity or

community immunity, which we talk about criminology for a shopping center or a strip center. How can we work together to be stronger? But it's different if you've got a barnyard or you've got a strip center for us to work in when we're talking about humans. Humans aren't a herd. And if you've got a 30 percent vaccination rate in one city, but one state over, you've got 70 or 80 percent vaccination rate and they're moving back and forth. It's not you don't have that containment. We're mobile humans. And again, we're also different. So it's a little difficult. So the CDC is recognizing that, that there is, we're not a herd and that these places, all these places are so connected in modern days across the globe. And that's why we saw this virus spread so rapidly and continues to do so, including the individual variants like Delta variant is now everywhere in the entire world. So even on islands. So it's an incredible

learning lesson for us and a very dangerous and sad one that we're all going through here. But that's kind of what some of the things that we're looking out. But I think the other thing to remember, and this is part of the herd or group immunity situation with CDC, they're recognizing that our scientists came up, re-engineered existing vaccines for the COVID, rigorously tested in the United States and all around the globe, heavy testing, the most in history of any vaccine, all of these vaccines. But they are very good at reducing the likelihood that we'll have a serious or even fatal response to this virus, the COVID-19 virus. But they're not especially good at blocking the transmission or helping us

not become infected. And nor does those that have been naturally infected seem to have that. So this is a crazy virus for our bodies to deal with. But it's just another reason from my readings that I'm seeing why the CDC is backing off on this great hope that we would have, you know, herd or group or community immunity and get past this thing. We're almost two years on and it doesn't seem to be abating. Our tolerance, our patience is going down, but not necessarily the virus and the infection. So bear in mind that that's what vaccines do. They're not going to necessarily reduce the case rate. Well, cases are up and people will be anti-vaccine because of that. Well, look at the severity levels, hospitalizations or deaths from COVID.

Those are the numbers that we all need to pay attention to. The case rates are up because we're not doing the things that block the viral particle transmission. It's moving the virus from each other, one to another. And again, when it gets cold, people go inside. And in Florida, when it gets hot, people go inside. So you see these levels go up when people are inside breathing the same air over extended periods, according to all the research that we've got that we're looking at. So on the vaccine front, you know, we're looking at these numbers, 170 other additional vaccine candidates, again, that are 51 in phase one, 47 candidates in two, 41 vaccine candidates in phase three, 15 emergency use authorization around the world, including this Novavax. So many have been waiting to see emerge out of the United States. It's a

more of a protein based vaccine. I'm not a microbiologist, but it's my understanding they transmit or they put into microscopic proteins, this specific one or particles, this specific protein that we're talking about. It looks to be pretty highly effective. It's just a manufacturing issue. And I believe it might be Singapore has done an EUA emergency use authorization for that. But it's something that people are looking forward to. It's another way to provide a vaccine. It's an older, much older technology, much more demonstrated over time. It might make some people more comfortable. It also only have light refrigeration. So it's much easier to use in places that don't have high-speed freezers that we've all learned about before. Moving to the therapy front, we didn't prevent it. We've got it. We've looked at this remdesivir

that they've been using, but now they're starting to see resistance, new mutations by the virus to remdesivir, according to the research, sort of scary stuff, right? We're seeing the mutations continue in different ways. And so in this case, something that was one of the only therapies in the entire world to finally, through scientific research, get some approval may, may, and this is early days, we'll have to see if this spreads. But they now have noted that patients have had this mutation and that did not work. We talked about the good news, hopefully, here on the front. It's antidepressants that seems to have some good viral suppression capability as a therapy once you're infected.

A cheap, quick, easy way to deal with COVID, hopefully. And then these two antiviral pills we're hearing about from Merck and from Pfizer that are still in testing, but the research randomized controlled trials, placebo, double blind, look very promising to, again, stop the viral replication. Once it gets in our bodies, it goes from cell to cell. These are designed to disrupt and suppress that activity within us so that we can get that our own immune systems can take care of what's in there because it's not as much, it's not spreading, it's not turning a disaster. And again, we've heard so much serious disease and suffering and death come from over-response by our immune systems and they get overwhelmed and so on. So we're, you know, it's exciting that the possibility of some of

these antiviral and even these therapies like this antidepressant drug. All right. So that's kind of from the COVID front on vaccine dynamics out there and the therapies that seem to hopefully be coming online. FusionNet, LPRC FusionNet as a way to post intel, posters, things that they find online or hear from their local law enforcement or whoever, as well as voice channels to talk with each other before, during or after whatever significant severe weather or, you know, during the initial vaccine rollout or during the election, but also these court cases and so on. So we've got that stood up or it's always available, but we've got some retailers using the platform to talk about what's going on in this Kenosha trial with this young man, Rittenhouse, who was there. And evidently there were some shootings, two or three, two individual, I believe, killed and others wounded.

And so he's on trial in that case. So depending on what the jury results are, is there a possibility for violence in Kenosha or violence elsewhere? We've seen like a virus, these violence across the U.S. and even extended across the world in some cases. violence across the U.S. and even extended across the world in some cases. So stay tuned on what goes on with the Rittenhouse case in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And if you're an LPRC member, you're invited to get into our FusionNet program. Just reach out to operations at lpresearch.org. at lpresearch.org. Moving over to LPRC very quickly,

we had a nice, nice, nice turnout for NVIDIA's biannual GTC or Global Technology Conference. A nice panel looking at the use of EverSeen's technology as computer vision AI, looking at, of course, self-checkout for those that aren't familiar with it. In this case, in Kroger Company and the testing that went on there. And so it was a neat case study. We also now, it looks like on January 18th, we'll be in New York, the same panel with

a slightly different, with some new data at the NRF Big Show, Big Ideas. So stay tuned for that. January 18th, you'll see it coming out in the LPRC Connect e-newsletter, on social media, as well as through NRF's marketing. And some of the companies involved, like Everseen and Lenovo, Compass, and so forth, and Kroger Company. Kickoff the next day in New York City, hosted at Bloomingdale's. Again, we mentioned this before in their flagship store in Manhattan. But on January 19th, we expect a pretty good crowd for LPRC kickoff. Standby for the details on LPRC Ignite in Gainesville. And then an upcoming SOC and Sensor Summit, Security Operations Center or Command Center EOC is the topic there as a summit in Gainesville dates and agenda to be determined and released. But we're really excited about it. We've been working with 13 retail chains on their SOCs, or at least getting information from them and to them.

chains on their SOCs, or at least getting information from them and to them. So we expect that we'll probably go beyond that number of chains for a summit here in Gainesville, Florida around SOCs. Very excited about it. A lot more details to come and stay tuned and ask us if you have any requests. And so again, lpresearch.org, lpresearch.org is our website with operations at lpresearch.org. All right. With no further ado, let me turn it over to Tony D'Onofrio. Tony, if you can take us around the world. Thank you, Reid. Lots of good information. I'll start actually with some excellent news that just came across the wire as we were recording this. U.S. retail sales in October for the third month rose higher, boosted by merchant receipts and higher prices and household demand remaining resilient. the most in seven months following an upward the revise of 0.8 in september uh which again excluding guests and motor vehicle sales gained 1.4 percent so really really excellent news going

into the holiday in terms of what's happening to retail sales so strong strong data coming out just a few minutes ago as we were preparing for this podcast. Let me switch to another topic that's been in the news and robots and what's happening with robots. With the labor shortages, interesting data from the Wall Street Journal on what's happening to robots. Robotic orders in North America are on track for the biggest year ever. Total robotic sales for the first nine months of the year are 1.48 billion, topping a previous record of 1.47. In the same period in 2017, sales rose to 1.09 billion for the first nine months of the year. Companies ordered nearly 30,000 robots in the first nine months of this year.

And just in the third quarter, nearly 10,000 robots. And what's interesting, that used to be all automotive. Now it's a lot more outside of automotive. 6,300 of those 10,000 in the third quarter were in non-automotive industries with metals being number one, which saw their year-on-year growth nearly triple. Behind metal was the food consumer goods industry at 40 percent and semiconductors and electronics and photonics, which grew 26 percent. So the robots are coming and this labor shortage, in my view, is going to intensify it, and the data is pointing that out.

Also interesting this week is from The Economist. They actually listed 22 emerging technologies that are going to be important in 2022, and I'm going to rattle them off just to get a flavor in terms of what's coming. So here they are. just to get a flavor in terms of what's coming. So here they are. Solar engineering, new generation heat pumps, hydrogen power airplanes, direct air capture, vertical farming, container ships with sails, VR, virtual reality workouts, vaccines for HIV and malaria, 3D bone implants, flying electric taxis, space tourism, delivery drones, quieter supersonic airplanes, 3D printed homes, sleep technology, personalized nutrition, wearable health trackers, the metaverse, quantum computing, virtual influencers, brain interfaces,

and more artificial meat and fish. It's an interesting list. Some of these have been around for a while, but they're evolving to next generation. Interesting that Facebook just changed their name to meta, and one of the key trends listed here was the metaverse. So I'm looking forward to see what's in the metaverse going forward. And let me conclude this week with some predictions from Forrester in terms of what they see happening in 2022. So they open up by saying that disruption has ensued since the dawn of the digital era, but it exploded in intensity and breadth starting in 2020. So, again, as I've been saying for a while, the pandemic has been accelerator of technology and innovation. So some of the trends that they talk about is what's happening in cloud and cloud evolution.

what's happening in cloud and cloud evolution. And one of their headlines is, you can't always get what you want, even when you're a 1.8 trillion hyperscaler. Back in 2019, Google aimed to become a top two cloud provider by 2023 or abandon the market altogether. But after years of serious investment, or abandon the market altogether. But after years of serious investment, invest services on road,

rather to try to catch up to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google is going to fall short. The core cloud infrastructure is becoming interchangeable. So cloud service providers will battle over industry clouds. So specific verticals, the cloud achieved its original rapid adoption because it was generic commoditization,

which means lower revenue for cloud services is coming in 2022 for specific industry vertical solutions. And finally, you're going to hear a lot more about cloud nationalism with countries trying to control clouds, especially in the fight between U.S. and China. In terms of artificial intelligence, some of the headlines are predictions from foresters. Embedded AI is coming. They say start peddling now. One in five organizations will double down on AI inside.

You're also going to hear a lot more about responsible AI. Don't overlook the small waves. The market for responsible AI solutions is going to double. And you're also going to see creative AI. So don't be afraid to test new waters. Creative AI will win with lots and lots more patents coming. And finally, on automation, the COVID-19 pandemic, while it is winding down, has firmly changed the course for business and industries. Among these have forced the enterprise to adopt more sophisticated automation programs that have the ability to reshuffle

priorities on a dime by using the latest analytics. And I truly agree with that statement. I think we are moving in a world where we're actually going to be making decision work real time based on analytics and technology and AI and all the other things I've just talked about. analytics and technology and AI and all the other things I've just talked about. The repercussions of the shift are profound, says Forrester, and they predict that process improvement platforms will converge and be challenged by new AI investments will come into the market to address global work shortages. I talked about some of them a few minutes ago, such as robots.

And really technology is going to continue to take a lead. 35% of service companies will introduce physical robot workers. 5% of the Fortune 500 will adopt automation, extreme fabric innovation. And what that means is a framework to build, orchestrate, and govern a hybrid workforce of human and digital workers. So it will be interesting to watch how companies manage both the robots

and physical people as we evolve into 2022 into the new normal. So that's a little bit in terms of what's going on around the world. Let me turn it over to Tom. Well, thank you. I wanted to just briefly cover two things. One is the Kyle Rittenhouse trial that's occurring right now. And again, when we do these podcasts, we do take them in advance, usually a week or two. So today is November 16th, the time of the taping.

So I'm not 100% sure when you'll hear this. But with these politically and emotionally charged trials, there are a lot of opportunities for civil disturbance. So today, outside of Kenosha, we're seeing some chatter. Kenosha specific has the National Guard on standby. There are about 500 troops that will only be activated with the request of law enforcement. That has a lot to do with U.S. military working on domestic soil. So there are some rules there. They're in standby ready and waiting if needed, as well as there are still some businesses still are

boarded up there, although some have opened. You still have some boarded up. The businesses that are opened at this point are kind of in waiting. There was a barbershop that Fox News interviewed the owner of, and basically he said that unless he has to, he's not going to board up. But some of the local businesses are trying to make do with what they can. There is chatter in all of the major markets that you would potentially see civil servants in. So right now, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Northern California, and the San Francisco and Oakland area, and actually the L. the LA area as well, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, where there are groups talking about potential civil disturbance.

At this point, most of what I'm seeing is relatively calm and more talking about what if this trial has a non-guilty, where people will meet. There are some folks in the Northwest markets saying that they're going to do demonstrations regardless to just show their support to the public and a lot more talking about defunding law enforcement, which isn't really related to this, but they're in some of those groups as well. The LPRC will most likely activate the fusion net, so stay tuned for information here as we did throughout the last couple, you know, really two years to help deliver information.

And we ask that if you have any information, share it with us. This is a very volatile situation. And based on everything I'm seeing, it looks like there'll be some level of demonstrations regardless of the outcome. Weather does play a role, as we know, in civil disturbance. So as it gets a little cooler, there are groups that are talking about earlier in the day and keeping it daytime based on the weather. So we'll continue to keep the audience apprised of what we're seeing. Switching gears to cybersecurity, and this one's an interesting one. Over the weekend, the FBI's email system was hacked.

And I want to just preference that it wasn't their corporate email system. It was their law enforcement enterprise portal. And a lot of us who are listening to this are probably on it. That's where they disseminate information. So that was hacked. And someone was able to get in and temporarily gain access to the portal's email system and sent out several thousand fake or misleading notifications. So when we talk about risk and cyber risk and the brazenness of some of these hackers, you don't get much more brazen, right,

than attacking the FBI's systems. Now, we know this happens all the time. There basically was the emails contained a fake warning to address an ARN database. I mean, there was all sorts of fake ones. I'm not going to get into the technical details because it's probably not actually that useful. But the email just basically was an R intelligence monitoring indicates extraordinary. And then it kind of went through and explained what it was. November 13th, I believe, and 14th, I'm not 100% sure if it was both days, it went out and the FBI was able to take the

infected hardware off of the network. And it was important that the FBI responded to the incident and says that there's an ongoing situation and that the impacted info was taken offline. ongoing situation and that the impacted info was taken offline. They didn't have any more information at the time. And basically, there's no reason to believe that the FBI's corporate systems would be affected. There's a lot of different theories of who is behind this. The Dark Overlord is one of the names that comes up. So there are these groups that we talk about often on the podcast here. But what's important to kind of talk through is that nobody is immune to this, and we consistently and constantly remind people to have good habits when it comes to cybersecurity.

And then I would just layer in the importance of that, you know, not only do you have to have good habits, but you have to be prepared to respond. I thought the FBI did a good job of creating a press release and giving information, and this is an ongoing investigation. And you can be sure that the FBI is going to really push to identify this person for sure. There is some chatter of person or persons who did it, but there'll be more to come on it. And we will definitely keep everyone updated here, especially being that getting into one system potentially could lead someone to be getting into others. So there's a potential that this attack could be larger. That is speculative at this point. Right now, it does seem that it's contained in this network. It's important to note, though, at this time, we don't know what information was gained. So were they able to just blast on email? Do they have a list of all the

members of that? Do these information bulletins in the future become less relevant because of this attack? So a lot more to come on it. That occurred, I think, on the 13th and the 14th. And again, we're taping on the 16th. So this is very, very fresh info. Short today, just under seven minutes for me. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Reid and Tony. All right. Well, thank you so much, Tony, for that. And Tom, for your insights. You know, everything is looking like it's turning to a certain extent. At least humans seem to be adapting, using science, using innovation in so many different ways.

It's encouraging and exciting. in so many different ways. It's encouraging and exciting. And I want to extend to everybody, again, the invitation to talk with us, talk with Melissa at lpresearch.org or via operations at lpresearch.org about a virtual or even a physical visit to our labs. We just had a large contingent

from the JCPenney Asset Protection Team as they reconstitute and energize their efforts. We've got solution partners in every week, literally one or more organizations in here, putting more of their technologies into our labs, integrating, innovating, using, again, our Safer Places Lab, the entire square block here at the University of Florida's Innovation Square complex. And we just want to make sure that everybody feels welcome, wants to learn more about it. We're more than happy to set up virtual calls with you all, do show and tells, or again, in-person visits. But we also look forward to seeing you all up there in mid-January, if at all possible, in New York City. Or again, we've got a series of events that we'll be having here in Gainesville, Florida. So, signing off and on behalf of Tony D'Onofrio, Tom Meehan, and Diego Rodriguez,

and the entire LPRC team, I want to thank you and let us know what you think. 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.