LPRC - Episode 2 – Command & Control

Episode Date: January 30, 2018

The post Episode 2 – Command & Control appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Crime Lab podcast, the science of crime prevention. With this podcast, we'll explore helpful topics about preventing crime and loss, the science that's the driving force behind these processes, and we'll also hear about and discuss real-life examples from loss prevention and asset protection practitioners and other crime prevention professionals. Today in our second episode, we have co-host Dr. Reed Hayes, Director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, co-host Tom Meehan, Chief Strategy Officer at ControlTech, and our featured guest today to add to the discussion about command and control is LPRC Research Scientist Dr. Stuart Strom. All right, everybody, welcome back to the University of Florida and the Loss Prevention Research Council's Crime Lab podcast. This will be our second episode in the series. And what I'd like to do right now is go ahead

and introduce my co-host, Tom Meehan, the Chief Strategy Officer at Control Tech and former high-ranking official at Bloomingdale's Asset Protection Team. Today, we also have a guest with us, LPRC's own Dr. Stuart Strom. And the topic today is command and control. And what we're talking about with CNC or command and control is we know that whether you're a leader in a store or a district or region or beyond, as well as at the central office, you need to have a heads up. We need to know what's going on out there. We need to understand something's going on or is upcoming.

We need to know who, what, when, where, why, and how about what's happening or about to happen. And further, we need to make some good decisions on that or at least have the right information available for those that do. So what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about command and control. Thank you, Reed. This is Stuart. And so, Tom, again, thanks for being here.

You know, a lot of what we're going to focus on today deals with emergency response. And I mean, in your former role with a retailer, I'm sure one of the things that maybe kept you up at night was, you know, if you have something that happens in store, or if you have something like a natural disaster, how do you respond to that? How do you make sure that violence is limited in the retail environment? How do you make sure that any sort of loss associated with that emergency is limited in your retail environment. So I want to talk a little bit about that. And I want to ask you first, just a brief overview. What are the things that kept you up at night?

What are the three things that most concern you regarding emergency response in your former role? Thanks, Stuart. Thanks, Reed. It's great to be on the second episode. I'm Really excited. And I think for me personally and for my former employer, we really struggled at first when we built our EOC and tried to solve the world's problems, if you will. We really wanted to consume everything and look at it. But what it really boiled down to is that we were interested in, obviously, the safety of our employees and customers first and foremost. So that was the primary objective. The second thing was really business disruption. So during the times that we deployed the EOC, we absolutely, we built this grand command center at the times when there were things happening throughout the U.S. that hadn't happened since the 60s,

arguably. There were civil disturbances all over the place. There were things that were occurring that hadn't occurred in many, many years in large scale. So the timing was right. It wasn't on purpose from our standpoint. So the next piece was that business disruption, making sure that we could understand what was going to happen to the business, the impact it was going to have, and be able to communicate that. And then lastly was brand protection. You know, how do we protect the brand? It was an iconic brand, you know, 140 year plus retailer. So there were a whole bunch of subcategories that fell within those three categories. And briefly, what I would say is the first one, when you talked about violence was,

you know, if you were talking about violence that you mentioned before, it was more of life safety or safety or employees or customers or the perception of safety of our customers. So we tiered that down to, you know, threats of violence. We tiered it from some workplace violence issues. And then in our environment, because we had our flagship in New York City, we even had a focal point on terrorism because it was a very highly visited place. Those were kind of the subsets of the employment safety and the customer safety piece. you know, a lot of times customers, you know, watching the news, hearing the news, knew there was going to be an event. And the more prepared we looked, the better they felt. And so it wasn't for show. It was to make sure everybody was safe. But being ahead of things really helped everybody, both from an employee standpoint and a customer standpoint, to let people know that not only that we cared about it and we talked about it, but we actually took action based around it. Not only that we cared about it and we talked about it, but we actually took action based around it. The second piece with business disruption, very similarly, when we knew that there was a major event occurring, and I'll use the Ferguson outcome, we knew that there was going to be a verdict in the Ferguson trial.

efficiently as possible ahead of time and plan for business disruption where we were picking up news of protests and where we were seeing things on social media. So we communicated that to senior management, communicated to the store personnel, and that again made everybody not only feel safe, but also let people know that we didn't just have a plan on the paper, but we were actually implementing it. And then the last piece, which is kind of consumes everything is the brand protection piece of what are people saying about the brand during these events. And they, I think they overlap quite a bit. And the example I'll use is, is if there's an injury in a store, you're obviously could have a business disruption and a brand impact. So there there's overlap, but there's subsets of each of those things. And then while we talk about other things like weather events and all of those other things that occur, that really falls under business impact. So when you think

about a weather event, it's going to impact the business. So the great thing is those three pillars of safety of your customer employee, your business disruption, and your brand impact really encompass just about every emergency situation that you could think of falls in a subset of one of those. So that was our approach. Wow. Yeah. So that's really interesting.

Let me ask you, Tom, were there ever any issues with buy-in from senior management? No. any issues with buy-in from senior management? No, I think a lot of times in our world, in asset protection specifically, many years ago, so 20 years ago when I started and worked for another retailer, I think it was security. It wasn't asset protection. It was very cops and robbers and a different mindset and a different thought process. I think as we evolved into asset protection and you took those steps to be true business partners, I think we didn't struggle with buy-in. We obviously had budgetary constraints like everybody else, but everybody was on board and thought it was important.

It was effectively selecting the right technology, effectively building it, communicating throughout the whole process. And luckily we did not face a buy-in, you know, a buy-in challenges. I've heard a lot of, you know, my peers and folks that I speak to today have a buy-in challenge, but that's generally related to cost more than people believing. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any senior executive in any organization that doesn't think, you know, the

safety of their employees and their safety of their customers is important, that doesn't think, you know, business disruption is important, that doesn't think brand is important. So it's really how do you present it and how do you find the right fit for your organization's budgets and needs? And, you know, when we talk about the innovation chain, you know, or the working group, and as you and I work a lot on it together, one of the things that I often talk about is there isn't a one-size-fits-all. So, you know, some organizations will have a big room. They might even have several rooms with a big staff that's monitoring a special operations command center or EOC. Other organizations might do everything from their phone or their laptop because of the size of their device. So I think the buy-in piece is more

about understanding what resources you have available to you and using them appropriately, not so much the days of people not understanding the value. So I think one of the things that the All PRC does and this working group does is help people get through the challenges and the misconceptions of, hey, if I told anybody on the phone here, I need $5 million to build this. If you don't have $5 million, you don't have $5 million in the budget. $5 million to build this. If you don't have $5 million, you don't have $5 million in the budget.

So the answer is, how do you get the same or close to the same amount of information and what you need for a budget that fits your budget? I mean, we have members in the LPRC that have departments that have three or four members. That's it. Their whole entire organization, there are three or four people that are responsible for asset protection, risk management, and they could have a thousand stores with that. They're obviously going to have different challenges than an organization that has 250 loss prevention executives in it, or 275 staff level people and 50 executives. So I think that's one of the values of this group is helping people get through that. Is it really buy-in or is it building the solution that works the best for your organization? members is number one, one size doesn't fit all. But for emergency response, there is a little bit of a difference. What we usually deal with is, for example, in-store theft. What we usually deal

with is in-store violence. But with emergency response, it's a bit different. And I think there's a lot that retail can actually learn from government response in this case. So we actually visited UF's emergency response organization. And what we found was they weren't so focused on individual instances of emergencies. They weren't focused on active shooters. They weren't focused on civil disobedience. They were more focused on developing certain core competencies so they could prepare for all emergencies or they could prepare for the unforeseen. And we here at LPRC are trying to impart that to our retail members, that developing these core competencies is essential because you don't know what emergency you're going to have to respond to. You're not really sure.

It may be civil unrest. It may be a natural disaster. It may be something with human factors. It may be something that doesn't have human factors. So I think that's key in emergency response. Yeah, I totally agree with you, Stuart. And that was kind of why when we talked about the three focuses, you didn't hear me say we focused on active shooter. You didn't hear me say we focused on a hurricane. You really said, hey, if we can take these three topics and umbrella anything because to your point there are things that are happening today um that just haven't happened in our lifetime and uh even weather events that have

just never occurred before so i agree completely with you you know what you say and i think that's why we although it was a little bit of a challenge we resisted the urge to say that we're focused on this type of event and really tried to say let's create buckets where everything we can think of even a nuclear disaster fits in those buckets so like we really that was the goal so i agree. And I also would tell you that one of the benefits of the LPRC is that you get a different exposure to law enforcement than you would in your local or state. You know, I was fortunate that I worked for a retailer that had a footprint, a fairly large footprint. So we dealt with a lot of major metropolitan law enforcement and federal law enforcement. But one of the things that I've

seen with the LPRC is that the LPRC is really opening the door to meet with law enforcement agencies and folks that you just wouldn't think about. You know, so FEMA is a good example. Yeah, you know, you'll meet your local FEMA representative, but you really don't have the level of exposure that you do when you're with the LPRC. And I think it's just another added benefit of, you know, every time I get on the call, I hear something that helps me think of how it could be, it could have been done differently. So Stu, I think these questions are great and I appreciate it, but I think the podcast is going to be a bi-monthly or bi-weekly. So we're going to do this every two weeks. I think the listeners are going to hear a lot from Reed and I. I really, I have some questions for you and I have some

questions for Reed about, you know, some of the things that are going on in the LPRC and what other, what we're learning from our federal law enforcement partnerships and our retail partnerships. So Reed, the question I have is really related to when you did get to visit out in Washington, Washington, D.C., and you got kind of a, for lack of a better words, a behind the scenes look at what happens there in D.C. an overview of some of the takeaways from getting to see that. And that's obviously something that most of these listeners won't have an opportunity to ever get to see or hear about. Sure, absolutely, Tom. And it was an amazing visit. And the way it went down is we had the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center speak here at the University of Florida to faculty and grad students. and I had the opportunity to attend that. He gave some amazing behind-the-scenes look at his career as an NSA officer, an

intelligence officer, his deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in support of the missions there, and then, of course, what they do here in the United States. And the support of the missions there. And then of course, what they do here in the United States. And the mission of the NCTC is to protect life and limb and property of American citizens, U.S. citizens, wherever they are. And so it's Homeland Security, but the home is wherever a U.S. citizen might be at that time. And that their further, their mission is, we are here for foreign or foreign-inspired terrorism, not domestic terrorism. That's the mission of the FBI at the core. And the NCTC is made up, though, of all the U.S. intelligence agencies. As we know, there's a couple dozen of those,

as well as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and others. And they work together in a coordinated way to, again, sort of come up with, detect threats, define them, and then help the decision makers, particularly at the strategic level, the national command people, in other words, the President of the United States, POTUS, and their teams at DOD and state, and so on. And so with that, they built this facility, but they have teams that go out to individual law enforcement agencies, corporations, and others to help them prepare through tabletop exercises and war game exercises. And that visit led, that speaking engagement led to the deputy director coming here to our innovation lab at LPRC here in Gainesville, Florida.

at LPRC here in Gainesville, Florida. And it was made easy because he part-time resides here. And so that visit was an hour or so brainstorming session. We were then invited to bring a core group of retail decision makers to the NCTC headquarters. And so that's where we went from there. Thank you, Reid. I, you know, unfortunately I wasn't able to attend and I still to this day, wish that I was, I heard great feedback on the visit. So another really great example of something that you can only really get here at the LPRC. Stu, I kind of want to turn the table a little bit. And as I said before, you know, I have the, you know, I'm fortunate in the sense that I get to talk to a lot of folks from both

the retail and a vendor solution side and get to participate here as a co-host with Reed on the LPRC. And I think you being actively involved in the group and talking to retailers probably have a different perception on a couple of things. So I just want to ask, in some of these questions, I know that we may have touched on what my feelings were, but really wanted to ask kind of what you're hearing from the retailers in the group. from the retailers in the group, what is the things that the retailers are focused on? So if you could kind of aggregate everything that you hear through the calls and the meetings, what are the three things that you think retailers are most concerned with today and relevant to emergency response?

I think a lot of what I'm hearing is, number one, retailers are all different. Some retailers are more focused on particular emergencies, such as active shooters, violence in their stores, while others are more concerned with things like natural disasters. What I've heard on the calls most recently is, I mean, a lot of our retailers are responding to the emergencies that we had in 2017, and that means natural disasters. There was a lot of concern about how to respond not only to natural disasters, but multiple emergencies at the same time. Organizational emergency response only has a certain amount of capacity. So when you have one hurricane hitting and then two weeks later, you have another hurricane hitting, you have your

resources depleted, you have your personnel just worn out and tired. So they were focusing on strategies and tactics to deal with multiple emergencies at the same time. That's the first thing. The second thing, they really leveraged communication and coordination, especially with federal agencies such as FEMA. FEMA offers training. FEMA offers certification and emergency response. And the retailers that I spoke with, they're saying that this is a great resource to take advantage of. And integrating with FEMA, and I'm talking about things like something as simple as emergency notifications on the FEMA website, emergency notifications on the DHS website. These can alert you to emergencies as they're occurring, or in some cases before

they occur in the case of natural disasters where you could forecast them. So, you know, again, responding to multiple emergencies at the same time, communication and coordination. And then finally, there's this phenomenon where a lot of retailers, especially some of the big box retailers, are becoming, in a way, taking the role that FEMA does in terms of being there on the scene right after an emergency occurs with essential things like water, food, providing, not necessarily providing shelter, but providing tents. So the retailers were concerned within these emergency situations about how to keep that supply chain secure, especially when you're dealing with multiple emergencies at the same time. So those were the three most pressing concerns. And again, it's all dependent on which emergencies the retailers are responding to at the time. In 2017 was a year where we had multiple natural disasters. It may be different in 2018. So it's key that retailers prepare for all contingencies. agencies. Great. Thank you. So, I mean, one of the things that I struggled with, and I'm really curious to what you're hearing from both the retailers and the solution providers is, you know,

information overload. So when we first started monitoring social media and traditional media in my past, we just, we had so much information that it was hard to digest that and be able to create an actionable piece of information from it. So what are you hearing from the retailers? How are they dealing with the information overload situation? What are some of the key takeaways that you're hearing from them on how to deal with that? Well, I think that's still an outstanding issue. them and how to deal with that? Well, I think that's still an outstanding issue. From what I've heard from a lot of retailers, they're depending a lot on federal agency notifications, number one. You have to be able to discern whether this is something that's

actually happening or something that's just rumor. They deal with it by making sure that any piece of information has multiple sources. So if you see something on Twitter, if you see something on Facebook, if you see something on CNN, you can be pretty assured that it's happening as opposed to if you just see one thing on Twitter. So being able to sort of corroborate from multiple different sources. But beyond that, what they're concerned with is not necessarily information overload, but how to communicate that information to the people that it needs to get to. the people that it needs to get to. Great. And then I guess this kind of ties to that,

this question, but what, you know, what media, what consumption are they doing? So what's the common theme for retailers of where they're consuming information from? You know, I hear always social media and I use the word social media, but social media has changed so the word social media, but social media has changed so dramatically because social media has a lot to do with traditional media.

It's more of the delivery method. So, you know, ABC News posts something on social media. It's still ABC News. It's just the delivery method. So what is what are you hearing as far as consumption of information? What are some maybe the two or three most common sources of information that you're hearing from the retail community? Well, from what I've heard, again, this is going to differ

depending on the kind of emergency you're facing. Number one is going to be what you hear from your employee, your staff. If something is occurring in store, it's going to be, you know, we can't discount the immediate situational context, right? You don't need social media to know if there's an active shooter in your general location, you're going to hear something. So that's number one. Number two, from what I've heard, and again, it's going to differ from retailer to retailer, it's a lot of official sources. What I mean by official sources are government agencies, news media.

A lot of retailers have their own emergency operations center. So they're going to be focused on those sorts of sources. So, they're going to be focused on those sorts of sources, but also they're going to be taking other sorts of, there's going to be other sorts of informational intake, including phone calls. If someone calls into an emergency operations center, one of their employees, that's going to be another way they're hearing about this. So, it depends on the emergency. If it's something like a natural disaster or a hurricane, you're going to depend more on the official sources. If it's something like an active shooter or civil unrest, you may focus still, I don't want to say it's an open question, but retailers are still learning how to use this new type of media. And when it comes to emergency response, you don't want to respond to an emergency that's not there, that's going to waste resources that possibly could even result

in loss or people getting hurt. So retailers are still learning how to use social media and corroborate information they find on social media. Yeah, I think that I'm hearing similar things from everybody, especially when it comes to social media, that the first report is often incorrect. And, you know, that tipping point of when to react. I guess the next question I have is, for the folks that are listening to this podcast that really don't know a lot about the group, it's a two-part question is, how do they get involved? And then the second part, what are some of the things that the group is working on today as far as a project or something that's going to be delivered to the retail community? Well, the first one's easy.

The way to get involved is we have monthly calls for our command and control iChain. We encourage all of LPRC's retail members to join. We encourage all of LPRC's solutions providers to join our calls because the more we have retail participation and the more we have solution provider participation, the more easily we're going to find solutions to these really pressing issues. And I can't stress enough how pressing they are, not only when it comes to asset loss, but really, and more importantly, when it comes to violence, loss of life, people getting hurt. So if anyone is interested, we will provide contact information at the end of our show. I am the person who facilitates the command and control iChain

working group. And I do want to say that within that working group, we have our SOC lab, which is essentially a research tool located right here at our innovation lab in Gainesville, where we aggregate all these different sorts of information and data to better understand the situation, to better detect emergencies, to better define emergencies, and to better respond to emergencies. And we really like to use that as a research tool and a simulation tool to do things such as improving response time for emergencies and improving decision making for emergency responders. So that's how folks can get involved. Now, we've just started this iChain. So what we're doing now, we've created this matrix of different issues that retailers are facing.

And what we want to do is we want to get solutions providers involved. I think the value added here at the LPRC is we are evidence-based. And not evidence-based in terms of asking retailers what their best practices are. There's a role for that, to be clear. But we want to make sure that we're measuring, we're using actual metrics, actual success metrics, and using rigorous research methods such as randomized control trials to define whether or not a solution works. So what we're working on now is getting together essentially a list of problems that retailers are facing, and we're going to be working with solutions providers to test their solutions in these actual retail environments.

And we're looking forward to that. That's going to be coming up soon in the next couple of months. So what we're going to focus on specifically is how to facilitate better communication in a retail environment when responding to emergencies, how to better detect emergencies, and using all sorts of different media, things such as shot detectors, burglar alarms, integrated devices that can better detect threats, as well as integrating this information. This is where our SOC lab is key.

We're really interested in how retailers can use these security operations centers or emergency operations centers to really streamline their emergency response. And, Tom, as you said, these emergency operations centers, it doesn't matter if you're a huge retailer like Walmart or if you're a smaller retailer. Solutions providers have created interfaces that allow a small department to essentially have a security operations center right on their mobile device.

So that's what we're working on now. Great. Reid, I think I have a question for you. The title of the podcast is The Crime Lab, and it's really about the science of crime prevention. And I think so far we're really doing a great overview of the innovation chain and some of the things we're hearing about. But, you know, Reid, what are some of the challenges to using scientific methods to understand emergency responses? Well, I mean, the biggest challenge, and it's a great question, Tom, is sample size.

We don't have many incidents that are happening out there, many of these events, and we could measure how many copper fittings we lose per store per week, let's say at the Home Depot or Lowe's or someplace like that as part of a randomized controlled trial and see if something changes when we put an intervention in. But like you're probably alluding to, it's really difficult to do that with violent crime events. They're just relatively rare. There are too many of them, but they're relatively rare and very difficult to measure changes as a result of something we do or change ourselves.

And so that's probably our biggest problem here as far as research scientists go. Reed brings up a wonderful point here. You have low occurrence, you have a small sample size, but also this isn't something where you can... These are really important events. Emergency events, you don't want to trial something just to see if it works. You want to make sure it works. So when you're actually talking about randomized controlled trials, which basically means you have a treatment and you assign it randomly, you don't want to assign a treatment. You don't want to assign an informational system or a coordination or communication system that's not going to work in an emergency situation. So that's another challenge we face. work in an emergency situation. So that's another challenge we face. And then finally, you know,

we run a lot of these simulations, but simulations don't always reflect reality. You have a fog of war that occurs. People aren't going to be thinking the same way. They're not going to be perceiving emergencies in the same way when their heart's racing. Great. Yeah, I completely agree. And then, so, and this is probably more of a dual question. I know we talked a little bit about it before. But Reid, when you guys had the opportunity to visit the, and I'm not sure if it's called a SOC at the UF, but what was the key takeaways when you had that visit with the emergency response folks at UF? If you could share what you think the key takeaways are that would help retailers better prepare for an emergency response situation. Well, I would go back and reiterate that we have been focusing initially on situations and how to handle an active attack or a natural disaster or a civil disorder. In this case, UF taught us their emergency operations center team. That's great, but you need to work on these core competencies or components of those situations so that they are very, very good at executing. And so I'd say that's probably the greatest takeaway, and that's what's going to lead to what we want to do as far as serving our members,

get an idea of where they are and where they're going, and then putting together tabletop and war game exercises. Well, for our second episode, I think it was a great episode. It was really exciting to have Stuart on the call to talk about something that's going on. I think what we normally do and we will continue to do when we wrap up is, Reid, I want to just turn it over to you and ask you briefly, what are some of the other things that some of the members might not be aware of that the LPRC is working on? And to encourage everybody who's listening to this podcast to please write in to the LPRC, either to Stu, Stuart, Reid, you can also reach out from myself or Jesse or Kevin or any of the LPRC members. If you have a topic that you'd like to hear on the podcast, or if you'd like to be a guest, if there's something that's on your

mind, this is a really good medium and format to get things out there. So we'll continue to develop topics and run through. And before we sign off here, I just want to turn it over to Reid for some last words and some things that the LPRC is working on that the general public might not be aware of. I appreciate it, Tom. And, you know, we try to do everything here at the LPRC with a purpose, within a framework. And so, you know, we know we're here to identify problems and what to do about them and then test those. And then we're here to inform our membership and the industry at large. And then finally, in some cases, help our members integrate and install

what we've learned together. And so to that end, we're always looking at how does LP and AP support their overall company, their organization's mission and success. And that means we're trying to work on on-shelf availability. What the retailer is selling is there when she comes in, when your customer comes in, it's there. But then also that there's a secure, low-friction checkout experience for her. It's low friction. She can get out of there quickly, but it's also secure for the retailer. You get your money. And then thirdly, we're here to make sure that when she's on property, whether it's your associate or your customer or another visitor, they always feel safe and secure. And so you can see that's what we work on.

And in the case of command and control, we're looking at extreme situations from weather and people so that people are still safe and secure. Thank you, Tom, for being our very skilled and talented co-host. I want to thank Dr. Stuart Strom, a research scientist here at the Los Vincennes Research Council. It's a pleasure. It's fun. It's a blast, but I think it's critical.