LPRC - Episode 22 – Offenders and the Micro Environment ft. Dr. Lucia Summers

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

The post Episode 22 – Offenders and the Micro Environment ft. Dr. Lucia Summers appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reid Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of Control Tech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. and many more. In this episode, Dr. Lucia Summers, assistant professor at Texas State University, discusses situational crime prevention, how offenders respond to inside spaces, and much more. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at

boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to the latest edition of Crime Science Podcast from Gainesville, Florida. And today I'm joined by my co-host, Tom Meehan, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at ControlTech, as well as Professor Dr. Lucia Summers from Texas State University. And so I thought, Lucia, Dr. Summers, if I could, I'd go over to you. But I wanted to kind of frame things up for our listeners in that we all know that everything happens at a place. It may be a virtual place or space, but it's going to happen there. And as environmental criminologists working with the practitioners, the retailers, the restaurateurs, and law enforcement officers. We want to take a little bit deeper dive into crime and place in the interaction with people

and their behavior and how that comes together. Always with eye toward how do we leverage what we're learning together and individually out there to make people in places safer? It's about vulnerable people in places and helping to maintain their safety as well as secure the assets. So let's see if I could. We're going to kind of freewheel here, but I thought I would ask you, you know, kind of free will here, but I thought I would ask you, you know, basically how and why do offenders choose certain assets in certain places based on your research and others? Hi. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate all the work you do. LPRC is really unusual to see practitioners and academics working together

so this is really nice to see and as you're saying I am an environmental criminologist and just to clarify it's a confusing term because it's you know you're talking about the environment as the kind of the immediate physical environment lots of people get confused think it's got something to do like crimes against the environment or something like that but it comes from environmental psychology and like you're saying that interaction between individuals and what's around them um It's not just about the person themselves. And the reality is that as, for example, in your case, as retailers, you have control over your environment, but you might not have control over individual people. And, you know, so that's the type of research that specializes in, and more specifically, how offenders make situational decisions. So in a given situation, in a given context,

is it worth for them to commit a crime? The offended decision making also comes in in relation to how you're going to choose those assets and those places like you say because more often it's not am I going to commit a crime in this particular situation and then if not the next one if not the next one you know as a as an individual who's got knowledge of different places and different assets it's going to come to a choice like which ones you're going to target and what happens is like at the most basic level it has to be something that they are familiar with because if they have

no familiarity with the place or with the product then you know those opportunities they're just not going to be available to them they're not going to be aware of them, which is why you see them, you know, maybe committing offences in the same store, so it's the same within a particular chain, maybe near where they live and so on, or kind of like principle of least effort, you know. So, I would say at the kind of place level, familiarity is going to be what's most important, because they're going to be aware of those criminal opportunities. At the asset level, there's certain characteristics that are going to make a good target, so to speak. a good target so to speak and there's things you know for example Ron Clark's talks about craved

items using that acronym so you're going to look for something that is concealable removable available valuable enjoyable and or disposable so you see us retailers all the time like these hot products that they they kind of targeted um more often and it all makes sense you know it's all you know we use rational choice theory like to to try to understand offended decision making if you think about it it makes sense that they'll target um those products i suppose in those places that good stuff, and I appreciate it as a good tee-up. Tom, as a recent practitioner and looking at protecting your department stores or earlier on in your career, the big box specialty stores, what were some of the things perceptually you were picking up on

and your people and your team about, wow, things happen differently. There's variance or variation in the types and the severity and the frequency of the problems that we're having at some places and others. We all know that things vary, but what was it around those locations and that location itself that you think help drive differences and problem sets? So, Reid, I think without taking in any of the other extenuating circumstances like drug abuse or mental disorders, things like that, environmental challenges that we were seeing, and some of them were no-brainers, were changes in public transportation where we would have stores and in the DC metro market area and a subway would go right to the store so more access and opportunity

that we're that we would see a lot of and then some of the inherent behavioral changes we made in store one of the things that I often think about and I remember when Lucia spoke before was just getting making a subtle small change in a store with signage or a placement and we sometimes would see a dramatic impact and then in other locations we would see no change doing the exact same thing. So I think as we went through, I'm very curious to some of Lucia's findings based on, you know, why certain people do certain things in some locations and, you know, I know that's a loaded question, but how come it works sometimes and how come it doesn't work other times? Yeah, that's really,

that's really interesting and it's so good you say that because that's um i don't know like the whole criminology there's like this crisis in the 70s which is like nothing works and you know kind of like more recently we're trying to get more evidence and it's about all what works and all these systematic reviews and mess analysis and so on and very recently evaluation research they kind of realized that that it's you know you you have variations this is why you get some studies that show positive results and then a different study you try to replicate those findings and then you find something else and sometimes it's seen as a kind of replication crisis in science in

general but the fact is that you know quite often we're ignoring the role of what we call moderators and you know absolutely the place is going to be one of those the context because what works in one place is not going to work in another place even not just the place, but in these offender interviews that we conducted, this was for a large research project funded by the National Institute of Justice. We interviewed 200 prolific offenders in Texas, and if I remember correctly, about 60 of them were shoplifters. We also have some commercial robbers, not as many. But one thing that came through really clearly was that, you know, you have lots

of differences among these offenders. So, you know, you can come up with some general patterns and so on, but what we saw was that some offenders responded to one thing and others responded to others so you know they're not on homogeneous group by any chance and we were just looking at those offenders who had multiple convictions so we were looking at that kind of higher end of the scale that kind of more prolific repeat offenders but if you were to include that kind of thing more you know less experienced one more opportunistic ones you're going to see even more variation which is why so important that you have an array of

measures in place even speaking to them for some of the measures, they had kind of, well, it depends. So the same place, the same offender might respond in one way one day, in a different way another way, another day, sorry. So and it could come down to, you know, for example, the time of the day and how many people were around and, you know, for example, the time of the day and how many people were around and, you know, kind of these variables that are going to change in the same place for the same person, the same target and so on. But there's lots of variables involved. So that's the tricky, that's the tricky part to compile all this evidence because you're trying to come up with

something that is evidence-based, but there's a lot of variation and you're not going to get a full understanding without looking at the role of those moderators also the mechanisms how is a particular measure supposed to work because that particular measure and that mechanism might work in one place because of the offended population that you have or because of the dynamics that you have, but might not generalize to another situation. And often we kind of rush to the action because we have a problem and we want to solve it. But that kind of analysis and really good understanding of the problem and matching

your response to the nature of the problem that you have is really important. So I really strongly believe that what you're going to be able to replicate and generalize is the process of, you know, kind of problem solving, understanding what's going on and coming up with a solution rather than the measure itself. coming up with a solution rather than the measure itself. You can get some general patterns, but it's easy to get, I guess discouraged by this variation that you see and if you work here, why didn't it work somewhere else? I can tell you from the offenders that we interviewed and just to reiterate

these were kind of prolific they were quite active shoplifters. The thing that came through that was fairly consistent was the human factor. So things like you know attentive associates, things like you know if there were items that were close to the registers or where there was an associate then they'll be less likely to target those when we asked about security guards those were not seen as as maybe effective by some of the offenders but something that they said was well if it's an off-duty police officer, they perceive those two to have greater powers and they'll be more deterred by those. But again, there were some offenders that said, no, you know, these things wouldn't deter me.

So there was lots of variations. variations. But in general, from the data that we collected, the human factor came on in general stronger than other measures, perhaps. And it's interesting, Lucia, what you're touching on is, of course, as you know, dosing. And we spend a lot of time with our practitioners talking about it's really, really not what you do, but it's how you do it. And you mentioned that example of dosing as far as human, you know, place protectors like a security guard, who's a civilian, are they armed or unarmed? What type of uniform? Are they standing? Are they sitting? What do they, you know, what, how capable do they look? And then, of course, versus, say, off-duty law enforcement.

So, no, that's excellent. All of our interviews here with offenders is showing its capability. What's your intention and can you carry it out? And their quick glance or some feedback they've gotten. That's great. I appreciate it, Tom, for that question. I guess, you know, what are some other things, you know, Dr. Summers, that the offenders that you all and others have talked to from your perspective, what are they noticing, intentional deterrence, or maybe things that they're environmental, but they weren't

intentionally placed there purposely by that place or that business or residence that the offenders seem to really pay attention to and don't like? I think, I mean, for example, when we ask them just, you know, it's an open-ended question. So before we go through kind of a list of the things that we want their answers on, we kind of ask them in general what kind of things have you noticed and you know i one that they notice all the time for example is security cameras because they're so you know they're so prevalent they're in every store so they kind of expect them um expect them to be there um some of the ones that we asked them about they're not as as prevalent perhaps or something that they hadn't seen as much for example you know when you have a control entry and exit in a store

that's more likely to to be in some sort of you know jewelry store or something like that but I think to some extent they you know the the more prevalent a measure is, the longer it's been in place, you get that offender adaptation, so to speak. So, you know, they're going to come to expect them there. They're going to be maybe more likely to try to circumvent those somehow. to circumvent those somehow. The newer things, you know, it kind of throws them a little bit. And you will have seen because you do all those, you know, experiments with the offenders when you're trying something new. And, you know, that uncertainty of not knowing, you know, what it does, how to get around it, then that's always going to be you know an effective deterrent but of course it's kind of time limited. They did notice of course all the tax, all the EAS, all the anti-theft tax that you get on the products and they had views you, about some of them came up with ways in which you could get around them or, you know, some of them that might have been perceived to be more effective than others.

So I think that general in general, they they're aware of of. Certain things like that, especially if they're if they're really prevalent really prevalent you know how is that going to be a deterrent so you know and again that interacts with the type of offender you have is a drug use in offender they might be more desperate or they're not fully in their capacity then they're going to be less likely to notice it so anything that you can do especially for new measures that you're putting in place then you know that's going to that's going to help with with that or you know when you have the labels that explain how something works because you know all the studies that you've done that explain that

because they might not understand how it works so of course it's not going to be it's not going to be a deterrent but the type of measures that we asked about they they were probably those that are going to be more more commonplace and in general they they seem to be generally aware of those and to some extent they will expect to find them. They're not universal. So we saw some evidence of, well, if I'm seeing this in place, I'm just going to go to a different store or I'm just going to go to a different area of the store, depending on what the situation was.

But in general, I will say they were generally aware of those more commonplace ones and they knew it was something that they had to deal with. Now, that's great. And like you said, so much of our research is kind of reinforcing that see, get, fear, the notice, noticeability, the recognizability, and of course, all importantly, the credibility of whatever it is. And, you know, in some of the researches, you know, we found the offender somehow assigns greater or lesser credibility than is reality. They may see a radon detector.

They believe that's some new high-tech sensor and things like that. But by and large, our biggest challenge does seem to be we prime them with some sign or arrow or lighting or noise and then try and take it from there yeah yeah you see that quite often because it's all about perceived risk right and perceived effort and perceived so if if you can give that perception um the the kind of other side of that is that sometimes some offenders they're going to be like, oh, maybe they're just bluffing. You know, if they see some signs about cameras or even if they see cameras, they think, well, maybe they're not really. So some of them will underestimate that risk, but others will, you know, overestimate it. So, you know, but you need to yeah, you need to provide that information and alert them to it. Because as you say, if you don't even notice it in the first place, then your chances of deterring them is going to be nil.

That's great. I had a quick question. We talk a lot about, as you know, theory or logic models or frameworks. Can you tell us a little bit about why and how you leverage some of our opportunity theories that we've got available in your work? Well, the most obvious one, these are all theories that you say, opportunity theories, they all inform environmental criminology. And I guess the most obvious one is, you know, rational choice perspective. And there's different kind of variations of this theory. The one I'm referring to is Cornish and Clark,

is the evidence, sorry, the emphasis on effort, risk, and reward. So how hard it is to commit this particular offense, how risky is it, and how do those two weigh against the anticipated reward? And like we were saying, it all comes down to perception, right? So an offender is going to make decisions based on what they are perceiving the situation to be. So they're going to be doing this assessment. It's not going to be, of course, like a perfect rational decision or assessment because it's based on the information that is available to them on how they're perceiving it and so on. But that framework is really helpful because it informs what we refer to as situational crime prevention.

So how can we modify the environment of the situation so that we're increasing that effort, increasing that risk to the offender and reducing the rewards? that risk to the offender and reducing the rewards. There's actually other categories and the situational crime prevention they got added on later on but kind of from that original framework those were the three areas where you were being focused. Now shoplifting is a really interesting one. It's a really interesting type of crime to try to prevent with situational crime prevention because any other type of crime, for example, if you're trying to prevent vehicle crime, you know, increasing the effort is going to be a very effective means because all you have to do is just lock the car.

You know, you'd be surprised how many, what proportion of the auto thefts that because someone left the car unlocked. And that's easy enough because I'm the only person who needs to access the car. Now, in the context of retail and preventing shoplifting, that's a lot more complicated because you're trying to prevent a potential shoplifter from stealing the item while not stopping a potential customer from accessing that same item. So, you know, if you engage too much in effort-increasing measures, then you run the risk of, you know, reducing sales as well. So that's where, you know, technology and, you know, can maybe be really helpful in trying

to implement type of measure that is going to affect one but not the other. But all that type of intervention is going to be grounded, I'd say, on national rational choice perspective. The other one that is also helpful is a routine activity theory and that's going on Felton. What that theory says, it was kind of groundbreaking because up until that point all the theories and criminology they were all about the offender, the criminal, and trying to explain why someone was a criminal and the next person wasn't. What routine activity theory did was to expand that to the whole crime event.

And they're saying, look, for a crime to happen, it's all about opportunity. Three things need to come together in place and in time. You need, yes, you need a motivated offender, but you also need a suitable target and you need the absence of a capable guardian. If one of those elements is not there then the crime is not going to happen. So that was quite helpful because you're saying you know if we can't do anything about the offender you know like we can't rehabilitate them or prevent them from becoming criminals in the first place and so on there are still other things that we could do. And because of the space and time intersection, that theory is helpful because it kind of highlights that temporal aspect as well.

So, for example, in our interviews, it was quite common for the offenders to talk about the best time of the day or of the week to go to a store and, you know, and steal some items from the store. So because if it's really busy, you know, those associates that might be attentive and kind of guarded against the shoplift, and they're kind of totally overwhelmed dealing with the customers, they're not going to be able to be those capable guardians that they could have been another time so in other cases they will say well they're tying up the basic times to for example paydays there was we conducted some interviews in the military community they're getting paid every two weeks and offenders were aware of those patterns as well. So the routine activity theory, I'll say,

is really helpful in that, that, you know, it helps us focus on that temporal aspect, and also the role of guardianship, which, like you say, has to be someone who, you know, is capable, who's willing to do something about it, and who's able to do it at that particular time and place. That's great. Tom, I want to ask you, Tom, for some comment on or some questions around crime and place, something that's relevant from your experience as a practitioner that might really help our listeners out there.

Yeah, I mean, so a couple things resonated with just what Lucia said. And one thing was in my previous life when we did a lot of research and really, I think actually some of it was with the LPRC of when people offended for us. I don't want to use the word. We absolutely didn't necessarily could identify. We had some theories of why, but for instance, you know, the middle of the week, we had a spike in shoplifting at times that it was busier. And, you know, so we weren't necessarily able to determine an actual cause. And I think, Lucia, what you said is when it was busy,

it was what we identified. When it was busy it was what we identified when it was you know there were some shoplifters that we interviewed and offenders that we interviewed that stated oh well I like to shoplift when it's really busy because I blend in and no one sees me and then the other extreme is oh I like to shoplift when it's not busy because the store is not staffed so I think to your point earlier we heard both both kind of you know ends of the scale. I actually had a question for you and when you're doing these offender interviews how do you deal with self-selection bias? So how do you

overcome that? So we have to you of course, with any research you do, unless you're using data that have been collected for other purposes, so then you can, you know, you can access kind of all records. We had to go through the IRB, which is the Institutional Review Board Ethics Committee at the University, and you know all offenders have to take part voluntarily. We interviewed both community-based and incarcerated offenders. So the offenders that we interviewed were either in jail and in jail rather than prison because some limitations that we had or then those that were on probation but yeah they had to of course agree to that we had better a better response rate so to speak in jails because they're there they you know they've got nothing else to do, and also they are there, like the ones in probation,

we'll have to make an appointment to give them time to look at the information and make a decision as to whether they had to participate. And many of them, they're offenders, they're unreliable, then they kind of forget, and then they didn't turn up for the appointment. So some of them, they agreed to begin with, and then they didn't but we had to

be really careful that no one felt coerced into being interviewed. So of course that's going to affect the type of offender that you have. So someone who was maybe you know more distressful and weren't sure that we were really from a university rather than the police, so that we'll keep the information confidential, they're probably less likely to speak to us. So that's going to translate into, well, if we had also got responses from those people, then maybe we're going to have this separate group of offenders who are very risk-averse, who are going to maybe be more affected by these measures,

or they're going to be more careful when trying to circumvent those. So there's always going to be a bias, and I guess what you need to do as a researcher is try to understand which ones you're missing and how that's going to to inform you know how that's going to influence the the data that you're collecting um some people get concerned because they say well if if you're only interviewing those that have been apprehended, you know, that's going to be different from someone, an offender who's never been caught, for example. Right. And I would say, well, you know, for the type of offender that we were interested in, the prolific offender, I would say that's still quite a successful offender because,

you know, they might only be caught for like one in a hundred of offences that they make. So, you know, I would say that's a more successful offender than someone who has never been caught, but they've only committed, you know, a handful of offences. So, again, you know, those are their considerations in relation to that as well. And, you know, those are their considerations in relation to that as well. And, you know, there's going to be, like I was saying, you know, they're really heterogeneous group. There's going to be lots of differences. The type of information that we were looking at, it was almost more about the process and you know more about the how or the why so in a sense you know you will say well in general how many responded to this and how many responded to that and I would say for that type of finding you

have to be more careful because like you say you know that the finding is going to be biased but by the the actual sample that we use. But when it comes to how, how they'll get around a particular measure or why something will be more fatiguer than others, then that's kind of information that is still going to be useful regardless of whoever it's coming from. Yeah, I know that when we interviewed offenders in store for organized retail crime, clearly very different. We don't have a review, a peer reviewer, people looking at it. But I found a lot of offenders that wanted to talk about it were boasting. And you could almost, through an interview, identify that they were embellishing quite a bit.

They were proud of what they did. So I always am curious when you're talking to a group of offenders, how you handle that self-selection, like I want to talk to you. So what's the benefit? So I think that that was very helpful. And then I had one other question, which is really related to research methods. And I know that you've done some research in the U.S. and outside the U.S. Is the methodology the same? Does it differ when you go to the U.K. and the U.S.? Or, you know, what changes, if anything?

I think the methods are kind of largely universal. What's going to change is in terms of, for for example access to the data and to your participants. So those processes are going to be quite different from one country to the next. So for example in the UK we did some offender interviews as well, not specific to retail crime, but there were some procedures that you have to follow depending on where the persons were, if there was more than one region and so on. You also have an ethics committee at the university and those rules are kind of similar, the kind of principles that they'll go with. But in terms of research methods, I will say that they're very, very similar in terms of

the techniques that you will use, you know, when you're interviewing or when you're analyzing data and so on. It's the data access that will be different. What changes I think is how likely it is that you're going to get for example practitioners and academics working together and how likely that is. So I can tell you for example in Spain where I'm from originally you know research is not given the the resources that that you have here or or in the UK it's not going to be as likely to to see that type of collaboration whereas for example in the UK and and you know they're trying to do a little bit of

work that way for example Gildando Institute where I used to work at UCL they do some work more kind of pragmatic with with retailers I'm not aware of anything like LPRC in the UK or anywhere else in Europe and and that's something that maybe we can you guys can set up a satellite with some university there because it's really helpful to have that framework that you have where you're all working together, because academics don't know what questions to ask that are going to be relevant. You know, they don't have access to the data. You know, maybe practitioners can benefit from, you know, all the knowledge that academics have. And it's just, you know, when you're doing that work together is when you're really going to come up with something that is going to be useful,

that is going to be, you know, well-conducted and so on. And by the way, Lucia, we had a detective chief inspector over here from the Met and she is heading up or now, I guess, her colleague, the National Business Crime Center, that's, I guess, a UK-wide entity through the home office. And I guess they are expressing strong interest in what you suggested. So stay tuned. We'll see. And we are working with our Australian and New Zealand colleagues as we speak, and of course, quite a bit in Canada. So I wanted to ask you, you know, what are, you know, you've, you've been here, you've worked with us a little bit at the LPRC and with some of the practitioners and the solution

partners out there. In addition to all your extensive research and experience, you know, what, is there anything that comes to mind or some things that come to mind? I know before the podcast, we talked a little bit and you mentioned, of course, a phenomenon that we are very interested in and using for anti-violence like robbery, particularly in the Baltimore area as we do research on repeats and so forth. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that and help the practitioner understand some of those phenomena? So the repeat victimization and repeat offending, it all relates to the idea of familiarity to the offender and how offenders are going to be targeting their assets or the places that they're going to be victimizing. And the idea is that you have that concentration.

It's kind of this Pareto law. It's like 80 and 20. So you've got 20% of the offenders that are committing 80% of the crime. 20% of the stores or the assets are the ones that are stolen 80% of the time and so on. And if you try to predict victimization, prior victimization is going to be the most reliable predictor. So you can have the same store being victimized again for a number of reasons because like I was saying one the offender is familiar with it so they know what to expect and know how to get around different measures and so on or it could be because you know they there's something that they didn't get

around to do well they were there they became aware of other opportunities and so on and then they're coming back to finish the job so to speak. But you also get near repeats which is the not targeting exactly the same place or the same item but they're targeting an item or a place that is nearby and again this is because of this familiarity while victimizing the first target they gain familiarity with nearby ones. Sometimes you get a spatial temporal cluster so you get this near repeat phenomenon where you have a number of crimes happening nearby and close together as in you know kind of like a cluster or that kind of spirit of activity sometimes they're going to be more spread out in time and the other one that

we observe in crime in general but it's very relevant to retail crime is virtual repeats and that's when you're going to see a particular place targeted not because it's nearby not because it's been targeted before but because it's very similar to the one that was original victimized even if it's further away so if you have a chain and they have a similar layout they have the same procedures and so on you know an offender might be more likely to choose that even if they've never been to that particular store just because they've you know kind of they've been active in stores from from the same chain so so that's going to be something that or because they offer a particular item you know sometimes if if some offenders they were they were selling an item

on order and then they knew that that particular, it was only stocked by this retailer and that retailer. It's like, well, they're limited. They have to engage in that virtual repeat. But having similar layouts, having similar procedures, and so on, is going to be something that's going to help them because it's going to give them that virtual familiarity, so to speak. No, it's excellent. And as you know, we're trying to always understand why and why not or why here and not there. And, you know, Dr. Weisberg talks about not just whodunits, but wheredunits. And of course, we're mostly interested in why and where and when.

So good advice. So what I like to do is anything else, Lucia, from your end that we need to know, or most importantly, our listeners, is they are working in law enforcement, they're working in loss of insurance or asset protection, they're trying to protect a place or multiple places. Any other relevant research or theory out there that they might harness to their best use? I would say in terms of theories, those ones are going to be, like we said, routine activity theory and rational choice. They're going to be the most helpful frameworks. to be the most helpful frameworks. In terms of findings, a couple of things that haven't come up and that I thought were interesting. Quite a few of the offenders in our study

mentioned about the same type of store from the same chain but whether it was in one neighborhood or another and they specifically talked about avoiding for example a store that was in a in a you know kind of more high crime area because they said they have all these measures in place so they said it was harder to get away with it or to actually you you know, steal whatever they were after because of all these different measures in place. So they might target one that wasn't too far away but where the security wasn't as high because the neighbourhood perhaps wasn't as high crime as that one. Not everyone is going to be doing that.

Remember the offenders that we talked about, they're kind of like more experienced, so to speak. That was the specialist type of offense and so on. The other one, and I'll say actually not two more, the other one is when you put in something into place, maybe try to anticipate displacement. that was the main topic of our big research project and it's about well when they're responding to these measures these crime prevention measures it's not a matter of do I commit the crime yes or no it's a matter of like okay if I'm not offending in this particular situation context you know what are my

alternative choices and you see quite often that they're going to be targeting maybe a different asset within the store or they're going to go to another store that might be a different chain or the same chain they might come back later there will be a temporal displacement we're talking about temporal patterns or they might adapt what they're doing, like the tactical displacement to get around those. And I think with the technology, we think more about, you know, this tactical displacement, but there's the other types of displacement that might be relevant in some circumstances that, you know, it's worth going through that checklist and trying to to think about those and you know the last thing it's just like you know always prevention is is better than

than cure so you know we all know as you know retailers it's like you know you can apprehend shoplifters but that's so time consuming because then you're waiting for the police to arrive. You have to collect the data. You, I mean, we seen some success with trespass orders. Even some of the offenders mentioned those, that those seem to affect them because then as soon as they step, you know, step foot in the store, then they were automatically they could do something with them.

They didn't have to catch them in the act. But in general, you know, if you can stop something from happening, it's going to be much more effective than having to deal with it or catching them. Fantastic. And I guess maybe if you could carve out one minute to discuss the idea, one minute to discuss the idea we are looking at with sort of risk terrain modeling with the Rutgers crew. We know that the closer a mass transit stop or a convenience store or a cash out spot and things like that might drive more risk to your location for certain reasons. I know that you've looked at street networks, where they are, the type of road networks near a place and how that might actually also drive risk to a given location. Can you take a minute or two to kind of illuminate that, if you would, Lucia? Yeah, absolutely. So accessibility is going to be really important because,

you know, again, minimal effort, they have to get in and they have to get out. But also accessibility is going to inform their mobility on days when they're not shoplifting or times when they're not shoplifting. So, again, you know, you're going to have that indirect effect through familiarity. familiarity. So anything that is going to be near, you know, main notes of activity and, you know, transport notes, they're going to be important, more important in some areas that others, if offenders are relying on public transport, they're going to be one, you know, one type of activity note that is always going to give you that increased risk. So absolutely, yes. Fantastic. Fantastic.

I appreciate that. And Lucia, I really want to thank you. And on behalf of Tom Ian and our listeners and all of the LPRC and, of course, our University of Florida research team here in Gainesville, we want to thank you for your time. And please keep up the good work. And we look forward to working with you a lot more and sitting down with you on some of the latest research that we've got underway and that you've got underway. So thank you very much, Lucia. Thank you for including me.

And yeah, just thank you for all the great work that you're doing. And I'm a great supporter of you guys. So yeah, anything, thank you again for having me here. High praise indeed. Thank you. And thanks everybody for listening to Crime Science Podcast. Have a good one. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security.

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