LPRC - Episode 24 – Using Crime Place Network Concepts for Action ft. Dr. Tamara Herold

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

The post Episode 24 – Using Crime Place Network Concepts for Action ft. Dr. Tamara Herold 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 ControlTech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. In this episode, Dr. Tamara Herold of the University of Nevada joins us to discuss place-based crime practices and prevention efforts, how to ID extreme places, and much more. We'd like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Protect high-risk items using Bosch IP cameras with built-in video analytics. Send a video snapshot to a manager when a person loiters at a display or trigger an audio message to play through a loudspeaker when an item is touched, while gaining situational awareness using video verification solutions. Alert potential offenders that are being watched and improve customer service for legitimate shoppers, all with video

analytics. Learn more about product protection in zones one and two of the LPRC's zones of influence or by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. All right, well, welcome everybody again to another episode of the LPRC's Crime Science Podcast. And today we're honored to have with us as a special guest Tamara Herold, who I've long read her work in the literature, as we call it in academia, as you know, coming out of the University of Cincinnati and working with Professor John Eck. But situational environmental criminology is the key, and our listeners know by now that that's our big emphasis here at UF and at LPRC. We believe that we can, to a certain extent, shape the environment and focus on the environment. A lot tougher to focus on genomics and relationships beyond the borders of our parking lots and so on. So what I'd like to do is introduce my co-host, of course, Tom Meehan, Chief Strategy Officer at Control Tech. Welcome, Tom.

Thank you, Reid. Thank you for joining. All right. So what we'd like to do today, Tamara, let me kind of start off, if I could, we're going to be talking about place and crime. But what are some of the practices that we should look at? How do we focus on these places? What should we think about? How do we focus on these places? What should we think about? And put yourself, if you would, a little bit in the mind of two people. One, the asset protection or loss prevention practitioner. They're trying to protect a specific store location or a group of stores maybe in a larger market.

And then, of course, their law enforcement partners. Sure. Well, obviously, when we're thinking about preventing crime at places, as you mentioned, I'm an environmental criminologist or a crime scientist, as they call us in the UK. And we like to think about that issue from really two perspectives. We think about the environment and where these crimes occur. We think about the physical design of the location as well as management practices at that location. So it's really a two-pronged approach. We're thinking about, you know, the placement of items and how they are secured physically in the physical space, but then,

again, some other things that we can put into play with regard to how we manage those locations. And, Reid, I know you're a situational crime prevention expert and, um, that particular framework is extraordinarily helpful for thinking through step-by-step different ways in which we can affect decision-making on the part of offenders, um, and really think about how to discourage people from engaging in unwanted behaviors. Thanks for that start, uh, and I think that's the situational component is important, right? We're looking at specific crime events and patterns that are affecting a certain place and trying to understand those. Make the right diagnosis

so we can have a much more focused, impactful, and less negatively effective treatment package. So, Tom, let me go over to you, if I could, and, you know, what are your first thoughts and questions for Tamara, particularly on situational and environmental criminology and crime prevention? Thanks, Reid, and thanks, Tamara, for joining the podcast. I actually have seen or heard some of your other podcasts. So it's always exciting when we have a guest that's done podcasts in the past. Excellent. Well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to speak with both of you. LP practitioners, law enforcement, some general people that just see the word crime and tune in. And when you're kind of opening intro of talking about environmental effects when it comes to crime, how would you, you know, in a retail environment, are there some kind of takeaways for someone that isn't in academia that they could really look at to help them better plan,

especially related specifically to physical items and how it relates to crime in place? Sure. I think some of the best advice that I ever received, and don't hold it against me, it did come from an academic, but it was Marcus Felsen who published an article who said you need to be able to think thief, right? And you need to be able to think like a thief and consider the ways in which we help to facilitate bad behavior. And so, you know, any kind of opportunity, whether it's for any type of behavior, really, whether it's crime or any other type of behavior, we just want to think through the steps or the process that somebody would engage in in order to carry out an offense, right? So if you can imagine, Derek Cornish calls these crime

scripts. So you just start walking through every stage and it starts even with how to get to the location, right? And then once you enter the location and then once you're walking through the location, what are all the different things that that person might be experiencing? We think about cues in the environment. And are we doing things to discourage bad behavior and facilitate good behavior? So your comment about physical items and how they're placed, obviously, we're thinking about this from two perspectives. We want to encourage the legitimate user of the space to do what it is that we want them to do, which is look at our products and purchase them, while at the same time discouraging people who might have other intentions from doing something like taking

that item and removing it unlawfully from that location. So we have to think in a very strategic way because we want this to be a wonderful experience for our shopper. We don't want to make it so difficult for them to do the thing that they want to do. At the same time, we do want to discourage people from stealing items. So to your point, we could lock everything down in a shop underneath a glass case, but we know that that is really actually quite bad most of the time when we're trying to sell products. People want to handle things, touch things, look at them. So we have to be really strategic. And it really is an item by item consideration. Some items will need a different type of placement and handling to

prevent theft than others. And in addition to that, context matters. So even not only where the store maybe is located, but even within a store, the type of prevention strategy we might use will vary based on where that item is placed in the store, if that makes sense. Absolutely. I think, and this, at least from my perspective, spending 20 years in retail and switching sides, I think everything you said makes perfect sense. I think it's always a lot harder when you're sitting there trying to work it out. What are some of the scientific or studies that you've done that would really relate to and could you give a real-life example of something that you've seen in a retail environment or in any environment where a physical placement, there's some takeaway? Oh, sure. Absolutely. So if you go back through the literature, one of the most famous store placement stories that you learn when you're studying crime science is the

convenience store, right? And for a long time, we would place beer right next to the entry or exit of the location. And this was done, this was a product placement strategy in order to increase sales. But what it did do was it encouraged and it facilitated some of these grab and runs, especially by underage drinkers who would run into the store, grab the case of beer, and then run right out. So now, if you notice, best practice and evidence-based practice suggests you don't put beer anywhere near the front of a store, right? We now put them in coolers and we place them toward the back of the location in order to prevent those thefts. And it's incredible. The beer is still in the location.

It's still accessible to the person who wants. And it's incredible. The beer is still in the location. It's still accessible to the person who wants to purchase it legally. However, the number of thefts dropped dramatically just by changing that placement in the store. And so it just causes us to think strategically along those lines that, you know, is it a product placement? Could it be something about the design of the store? So one of the other takeaways that came out of those very early studies was that having windows that were covered with signage, and it could be advertisements for products, but what it was doing was it was limiting natural surveillance. So people on the outside couldn't see what was going on on the inside.

And that facilitated all sorts of bad behavior. outside couldn't see what was going on on the inside. And that facilitated all sorts of bad behavior. And once we encourage those stores to clear those windows and increase natural surveillance, robberies drop significantly. So there's from product placement to how we design our stores and how we facilitate surveillance, all of those things come together to play a role when we're talking about offender-offender motivation and blocking opportunities for crime. I know one of the things that often comes up in a retail environment is that folks are working on risk models. And over the past, I'd say, five years, what you would say was a traditional risk model or shrink indicator or shrink prediction model has changed a lot because of the introduction of unified commerce or e-com sales.

So the Internet really changes the way that risk models have worked because you have product being shipped out of stores. But one thing that I've always been intrigued with, and I know that you're seen as an expert in, is what about neighborhood-based crime prevention efforts? And how would you, you know, if you were looking, working with a retailer that's creating a risk model, what are some things that they could look at from that standpoint? I know that was always a challenge for me. Absolutely. And, in fact, it's so interesting. Unlike Reed Hayes, I do not study retail theft in depth, if you will. I study all sorts of crime, and I dabble in a lot of different areas. But one of the projects that I was recruited to work on was in Cincinnati, Ohio,

and it was a violence reduction project. And we had a theory, we had a hypothesis. We said, you know, what if we know offenders are networked? What if places are networked in a similar way? And what if those network offenders were on top of those place networks? And that's really what was facilitating a lot of bad behavior in these small pockets where we found lots and lots of violence. So we came up with this theory. We came up with this hypothesis. And we brought in this really seasoned detective. And we laid it out for him. We said, in this really seasoned detective. And we said, we've

laid it out for him. We said, does this make sense to you? And he said, absolutely. And then he proceeded to give us a story about a retail location that suffered from a great deal of theft. And he was able to describe this place network associated with that retail location. It was all located nearby in that same neighborhood. So there were nearby places to that particular retail location that were helping to facilitate the crime that was occurring at the store. And so neighborhood context matters a lot. And often, especially if you're dealing with organized retail theft and you have these offender networks, they're utilizing places nearby in order to carry out these crimes. Again, thinking about that crime script, how do they go about thinking through what products they're going to steal, what they're going to do with those products after they steal them.

This really interesting concept of place networks and how nearby locations can help to facilitate that helped us to reduce gun violence. But the example that was used to help us verify or validate that, that, yeah, actually these place networks, they exist, came out of a fantastic story about retail theft. So absolutely, the environment around our stores matters and how offenders are using that environment. This is something obviously that, you know, as a retailer, be really hard to investigate on your own. But this is where our law enforcement partnerships come in handy. Right. And as we start to work on these issues together, we can start to uncover some of these place networks and really make an impact on crime at our retail locations. really make an impact on crime at our retail locations. And so Tamara, I thought if I could, I would, based on that excellent input, kind of describe what we're doing and working with retailers and law enforcement. And we have these five zones. Now the five zones we articulated

about 20 years ago, but they've just in the last five years probably become popular to look at things three-dimensionally. So zone one, we call it, is they're all opportunities to influence an offender's perception and resulting behavior. So we call them zones of influence. So zone one is actually the asset. It's that person. It's that money. It could be that piece of merchandise, an iPhone or a Mach 3 razor blade replacement cartridge pack. Zone 2 is the immediate or proximate area around that. And so you might do something with the packaging to protect the asset itself. Then we might have a small enhanced public view monitor right there, proximate, that would be rather than a point protection treatment, it would be sort of an area protection. It might protect that item, but also maybe some other items in that category or

that area. And it might be primed with some kind of signage. And then zone three is the entire, let's say, interior space. What do we do as people come into the space to get their attention, do we do as people come into the space to get their attention, establish some reasonable perception of control here and things like that? Four, zone four is from the building wall out to the parking lot. What can we do as they're looking at our place compared to others, walking, riding a bike, driving, whatever they're doing by that curb appeal. How do we catch their attention and not here, not now, again, message to them, this isn't the place or time. And then five is beyond the parking lot. It's everything out there. And to us, what you tend to focus on, particularly with looking at this cluster of interrelated places, what we'll talk about in a minute, that's zone five stuff we call it. And that's where, and you just called it out loudly and clearly,

That's zone five stuff we call it. And that's where, and you just called it out loudly and clearly, no retailer or even a group of retailers can affect that on their own. They need law enforcement and others in the community to partner in a very focused way. So I thought I'd lay out our five zones and you might hear Tom or myself refer to a specific zone. Of course, we tell you what it is, but that's really, I think, is helping the retail asset protection professional think more three-dimensionally. Hey, I have the opportunity to know more about what's coming my way before they leave wherever they hold up or reside. Is there moving to the community, coming into my parking lot, into my space, and then up to including the asset I'm trying to protect here,

rather than I'm just doing this one thing. I'm just locking this thing down or whatever. So going back to that, I thought, could you give us that scenario? I know you label the places and how they interrelate based on you and John X work, if you would. So these place networks, we've divided them up based on recent research and theoretical developments into four types of places. So to match your five zones, we should really get one more place in play, I think, so that we'd have our five types of places. But we definitely have four at this point. And one is the crime site. And so this would basically be zones one through zone four. Right. So it's everything. It's the actual location where the incident would take place.

The crime incident would take place. But then if we think thief again, if we think like an offender, there are at least three other types of places that offenders use. And one would be called a comfort space, right? This would be a private location controlled by the offender, maybe where they stash the goods after they steal them, maybe where they plan their crimes. We also have convergent settings. A convergent setting could actually be part of the crime site too. So it could even be your zone four, you know, the parking lot area just outside. Maybe that's where they convene before they go in and they sort of discuss.

But it's a public location. It's a place not controlled by the offender. But those convergent settings end up being very important to the crime process as well. And then finally, we have something called a corrupting spot. Now, corrupting spot would be a business that generates crime elsewhere. So imagine that you have a major retail chain and you have theft occurring at one of those locations. Well, maybe you have a small mom and pop store just up the street that's part of an offender network that's acting as a corrupting spot. And what that place will do is pay offenders to go in,

steal product from the retail store, bring it back to that corrupting spot where they can put it on their shelves and sell it for a dollar less. So that would be an example of how those four places might play together to help facilitate retail crime. retail crime. No, that's fantastic. And it's interesting, by the way, you referred to Marcus Felsen, probably one of our heroes, if you will, in environmental criminology. But when the article came out in Security Journal many decades ago, sort of defining these five zones of influence, but Marcus was the first one to reach out. I think he was still at USC then and talked me through, okay, here's this. You might think about this and think about that. But it is one of those things where you think about it a little bit, you put it out, but then it's through, as you know, this collaborative network, in this case, of fellow academics. And you described earlier that very seasoned detective and practitioners and others that can help us paint a more complete picture

and then be much more precise. So that's great input. But I thought we'd kind of circle back on the Marcus Felson now at Texas State University, as you mentioned. So another question, if I may, Tamara, this is good discussion. We have organized retail crime, used to be called organized retail theft, but realizing several years ago that these groups are coming in, and you mentioned they could be street level, and this is kind of part of what they do in their stealing product. Their networks, their crews, they could be very loosely tied together or it could be somewhat of a actually very organized group. But they go in and they steal and they commit fraud and they do all kinds of things that we don't have time today to go into. But I really felt like

your crime place network concepts are particularly useful to our ORC investigators. And I'm going to go to Tom in a second to have him address it as well, but to not focus on just the individuals, the network, the leadership, how they get, store, move, and spend money, but these places that collectively come together in place and time and help facilitate what they're doing. And they're stripping sometimes millions out of the stores and theft as well as other things we do with fraud. So any other thoughts on how, based on what you've done with law enforcement, how they are using the Crime Place Network tool, theory tool, and how our ORC investigators might do the same in conjunction with law enforcement. Absolutely. I think it's an exciting new area that we've yet to move into, but I think that

there's a lot of application for the reasons I described. Again, when we first presented this idea, it was an organized retail theft ring, it was a theft, that they described. So I think that there's a lot of overlap between these ideas and probably much to be learned still about how organized retail crime offenders use spaces and places. And I know, Reed, you and I have talked before about the online space. Certainly, that's part of the Crime Place Network as well. So this extends beyond just physical locations to virtual locations. we can uncover the infrastructure that they're using to move product, to plan crimes, to stash their various tools, and so on and so forth, the more we understand that process

and those dynamics, the better we're going to be at disrupting these rings. So we've learned a long time ago that targeted arrests can have a huge impact on crime in places, but there seems to be an unlimited supply of people who are willing to engage in these types of crimes. And so the question is, okay, if we can always assume that there's always going to be motivated offenders, how do we just make it a little bit more difficult for them to engage in these types of offenses? And I think one way to do that is to make their infrastructures that they're using to facilitate these crimes or to carry out these crimes, to take that infrastructure away from them, or at least make it a less attractive place to be and make it a little

bit more difficult for them. So, you know, at best we can eliminate the problem, but at the very least we can slow down their activities. I love it. And you mentioned crime scripts, and they're powerful. We are spending a lot of time trying to understand how offenders do ideate, most not ever launching, but they're ideating. And then what can we do to affect that? And then, all right, what's the difference between ideation and now actual initiation, scouting, recruiting, acquiring tools, whatever it might be, or actually moving in, and then the progression through the balance of that crime script

and giving us aiming points. So it's powerful, and personally, I think it's validating, Tamara, what you're talking about on some of the work that we're doing with these retailers day in and day out. Tom, if I could go over to you, and if you could look at this crime place network and how we might leverage that in the same way that Tamara's discussing with ORC groups, what are your thoughts on that? So I think it's very interesting. And I often think we, at least I do this all the time, I separate retail crime from other crime. And then I go back to, you know, I would be lying if I could remember the specifics. I read something

you wrote about violent crime at one point and thought, although it doesn't, it isn't referencing retail, it's directly related to the same kind of concept of why it occurs. And we do have a serious violence issue in retail today. And I would, you know, I'm cautious to say it's worse than it was before. I think it's more evident because data is readily available and we can see it, hear it and feel it more. But I think from an organized retail crime standpoint, there are two things that really step out for me there are two things that really step out for me is kind of going back to what I said before is how do we get to the next step on neighborhood-based crime prevention and what's the role there? I think we have great partnerships with law enforcement, but how do we apply the science to

it? When Reid talks about the zones, I can remember it might've been 10 years ago sitting down with Reid and we would do a risk model. And I would kind of laugh and say, well, yeah, it goes back to the environment that the store is in. Obviously, that store has an issue. You know, it's two miles from a train station. There's this, this, and this. But I think that neighborhood methodology, being able to apply that to an ORC environment or, you know, taking the approach of where we have an opioid problem in

drugstores and we have violent crime, how can a retailer do this? And I guess, you know, how can a retailer do that? My question probably sings back to, you said, you know, partnering with law enforcement. Is there anything else that we should be doing? And we're probably doing more of it than I even realized today from that neighborhood standpoint. I always say environmental. I like the word neighborhood better because environmental is very broad and somewhat becomes subjective. And environmental, the lighting becomes a role and the parking lot setting becomes a role. Where a neighborhood really goes back to what I'm always thinking about is this is an area of focus and why. So what should a retailer, where should they start?

That's a great question. And it actually inspired a thought in me just now that relates to law enforcement, but I think it is applicable to our retail environments as well. And that would be when we're investigating these neighborhood networks, one of our best sources of information are frontline police officers.

So we have these intel sessions where we will sit down with them, and it's fascinating. They know so much about the dynamics of what's going on because they're out there talking to these offenders on a day-to-day basis, yet we have no mechanism to extract that information from them, right, per se. So imagine your loss prevention officers, your frontline defense. They spend a lot of time probably sitting in offices and talking to these offenders and are probably learning a lot and are extracting a lot of information that never gets recorded. And I know we're always talking about wanting better data and better reports, and we're always doing things to try and improve our practices in that area. But there is probably a lot of information that your frontline loss

prevention specialists are gathering informally that could really help us to better understand these dynamics, both within the store, so how offenders are thinking about the process of committing these crimes, but then even beyond. So from a loss prevention perspective, how you would begin to uncover where some of those neighborhood networks might be, might simply be from one-on-one conversations with the people, you know, that your loss prevention officers identify in the stores. And again, they might already be having those conversations, depending on policies, procedures, and practices, but starting to think about how we might capture more of that information could be really, really useful. And then sharing that information, again,

bringing it back to your earlier comment, sharing that with our law enforcement partners helps them to better understand those neighborhood dynamics and help to disrupt those markets. You know, there's a lot of learnings there and good information, Tamara. And I know that, you know, if you look even going back probably before World War II, but you look at the movies until now, every time a fighter pilot or bomber pilot and crew come back from a mission, an intelligence officer sits down with them and tries to debrief them in the moment so that before everybody forgets. And now that helps them understand what are the anti-aircraft, all the issues you've got to go through to get to and from your target, what are other targets, and all kinds of issues that they can learn. And we probably in law enforcement and law suspension really don't do, I wouldn't say not only not do a good job, there may not be any job, any effort in that area systematically say, wait, let's get all this down. And what you have just related, you may not

realize, but adds another piece of the puzzle and things like that. And I'm thinking too, the other part of this is we have companies that are members of the LPRC community like Aura out of New Zealand and Australia that have just come to the United States and Verisk and others that are reporting systems that you report all your incidents or events into. I think I know Aura. I don't want to say that they, to the exclusion of others, do this, but they do try and network. I think another one out of Chile, out of South America, Alto. But I think Tamara and Tom, that's a platform that would allow each detention or apprehension or event recording has places to record that intelligence and things that are going on. And I think that's even further plotted into mapping. And that is shared within whatever retail community as well as with law enforcement.

But I don't know that it's systematic there even, and I know it's not necessarily here in the U.S. So that's a good, a big breakthrough for us. I would say this, I was going to ask you also, Tamara, about, you know, more on the personal side. How'd you get interested in criminology and environmental and situational crime prevention and criminology to be more specific? What's that look like? I'm sure just like your story, it's a very long story and you didn't end up exactly where you expected to end up. And I certainly did not expect to be doing this at this point in my life. Once upon a time, I was a musician, and I very much enjoyed that. But I took a criminal justice class as an elective in college,

and I absolutely loved it. I was inspired by, it was a female professor that I had had, and she was one of the very first cohort of women to ever serve in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And she had these fascinating stories. And I thought, I would love to dedicate my life to this. And I meant to go into the field and work as a practitioner. That was my original intention. And I just was sucked up into the academic life and had scholarships. And finally, I said, okay, well, if I'm going to go all the way and get my PhD, get my doctorate, I'd like to do work like you do, Reid, and really do the type of work that helps to influence policy and practice. And so when I was looking for the right PhD program, I found John Eck, who had helped to develop the SARA model

for police problem solving. And I thought, here's a guy whose work is actually being used in the field. And so I went to study with him. And obviously, one of his areas of expertise is crime science or environmental criminology. And it was that very year that the University of Cincinnati started up a crime prevention track. And so I was their very first student. I was the only one. Very first year of this crime prevention track. I was a bit of a guinea pig, but it ended up being a tremendous, tremendous success. And I've, you know, I think this just has been fantastic. So I sort of fell into all of this. But I'll tell you, it's very

rewarding and being able to work hand in hand with the people who are out there every day trying to better understand and prevent some of these issues. It's just been a fantastic experience for me. Yeah, no, that's good. That's good insight. Not a whole lot as linear as we all know. We all end up where we least expect it, it seems like. But that's a good story, good insight. And our listeners would probably be the first to tell you, too, that the SARA model is something that our team at LPRC and the UF team use weekly and that we talk about a lot with our retailers. And many of the retailers have adopted that. and many of the retailers have adopted that. Sometimes it's obviously a diagnosis and treatment tool that helps you be more focused and hopefully more impactful

and then readjust how do we do and how do we do in trying to do it. But also is a great way that when the store managers are banging on some of the practitioners, I want guards, I want this, I want more cameras, they can say, well, let's do a Sarah. And it may help satisfy them or at least placate them, but at the same time help them do a better job of affecting what their issues are. Yeah.

So another kudos. And I think, too, the crime-solving handbooks and all those kinds of things that Dr. Eck and others have generated, we're using them. I wanted to go a little more abstract, and we may want to move this forward here, but I know that people like Ralph Taylor have helped us look at, and I want to get your take on this, you know, hotspots are a construct, and whether it's real world or not, it's a cluster of events that may actually not be related or may be pretty different. And

you heard Tom mentioned a little while ago, risk scoring and risk. Everybody's trying to understand if I put a store, new location there, an office or a distribution center, what am I likely to be up against, you know, and compared to others, other places or options. And then why am I having more problems here and things like that? But I think the idea that Dr. Taylor has on that you really need to dig a little deeper and understand what are your thoughts about his argument that hotspots are in the data world, not necessarily the real world. It's an interesting argument. I haven't spoken with him directly about that concept. But really, you know, you know, the way we use statistics, we can we can pretty much prove or disprove anything with numbers.

And so it's yes and no. I mean, certainly we know that hotspots exist, that particular types of behaviors tend to cluster in particular types of settings. And there's a reason for that. It's because there's an opportunity structure in that location that's helping to facilitate that type of behavior. Now, whether you have a violent hotspot or, you know, property crime hotspot, that all just depends on the dynamics of that location. But there is certainly, we can definitely say with, I would say some degree of certainty here, that there are some places that are more affected by crime than others, right?

And it could be that we're making a distinction between types of crime. So, for example, you're much more likely to find street-level crime in disadvantaged places, right? Just in general, if we're just talking in generalities, than we do maybe in a very well-to-do suburban neighborhood, right? We know particular types of behavior tend to cluster in particular types of places, but that's not to say that there aren't crimes being committed in these other neighborhoods. They're just not coming to the attention of law enforcement per se. Maybe that was part of the argument.

And certainly numbers are skewed, and a lot of that has to do with reporting practices. So, you know, just because we have a hot spot in one location, not another, it could be that the same behavior is happening in both locations. Only one place is reporting, another place does not. And I'm sure you see this in the retail realm, where you might have a store that likes to report every incident, and then you might have another type of store that doesn't like to report every single incident. So it looks like there's more crime at one store than another, when really they're suffering from similar problems and have the exact same issues. So I'm not really sure in terms of risk, though, and thinking about it from a risk perspective for somebody who's managing retail

locations, I would want to have that data, whether they were skewed or not, because certainly it could help me start to think about if I am going to put a store or a location in a place that has historically suffered a bit more, has a disproportionate amount of crime or certain types of crime happening in that space, I would want to know that so that I could better prepare, you know, and think about how I want to design the place, how I want to manage the place, because those things would likely be different in a high crime location than they might be in a low crime location, if that makes sense. I think it does. And the way I read it and have taken that is that, I'll give you a quick example in retail where we're doing a lot with robbery in the parking lot and then, of course, armed robbery in the stores. And that's kind of clustered in three types. It could be front end or cash and dash robbery that everybody has. And it's the most frequent. It could be a pharmacy robbery where the person's brain is saying, I'm dying.

And so they are determined they're going to get what they need or they think they need to get past that paying. And then the third might be a takedown robbery. You might take down the pharmacy or the cash office a little more organized and aggressive in that way. So they're a little different. But we'll also, when we get data sets from retailers and others, we might see this confounding in there in the data set because somebody, a shoplifter ran and so somebody coded that as a robbery and so on. And so we see all this mixing. And so I'm thinking maybe he's talking about, you know, dig a little deeper. Like you say, we're grateful and we want any and everything we can get, first of all. But then we got to dig a little deeper, clean the data, make sure, you know, is it a robbery or is it something that got a little physical, but it's not what we're trying to understand?

No, absolutely. And data quality is always an issue for anybody, whether we're talking about on the retail side or the law enforcement side, being able, you know, numbers suggest, hey, it's the red flag that says look over here. But absolutely, I would agree with Dr. Taylor that you've got to take that next step and dig deeper to figure out what's going on there for sure. Yeah, and that's just the takeaway for our listeners that we, you know, let's see, what are we dealing with? And as you were saying that, you know, we always look at, right, especially sampling error, measurement error. Are we measuring body temperature or air temperature with that thermometer, the way you're holding it? And then, of course, you know, some of the analytical errors that we might make.

So, and I guess one other thing I thought I'd throw your way, you know, the law enforcement trying to build algorithms that will help them better understand what might happen, where it might happen, when it might happen, who might be causing it. And I think they're struggling with what is actually very helpful and predictive so that we can actually do something here to prevent and disrupt in a positive way to maintain safety and security for the people in that area that are being victimized versus privacy and so on. Any thoughts that might be helpful? I don't want to put you too much on the spot on that, on evidence-based practice and this nexus with using predictive models of some sort. Well, I think you know I'm a big evidence-based fan, and certainly as an environmental criminologist, without looking for patterns, we could never

figure out, you know, what the best strategy might be. So certainly, you know, there is this very hyper-focus now on things like predictive policing models. And as you're pointing out, the utility of those models or the effectiveness could really vary depending on, again, the quality of the data that we're using and whether or not we're even capturing the right types of data. But I would just say anything that we can do to improve the quality of the data that we're capturing and to dig a little deeper, ask a couple more questions when you apprehend an offender, do anything that we can to uncover more information. I think from there, we can start to look and say, okay, here are the patterns that help us to best understand our problem.

It might help us to best disrupt these incidents in the future. So, again, these models are not the panacea either because, you know, just as you were noting, we really have to dig down deep into the data in order to better understand the problem. So using data to predict things doesn't always work out for us. But nonetheless, the more we have, the better. And the better the quality of that data, the better off we are. Excellent. I appreciate that insight and input. Well, what I'd like to do is thank you again, Tamara, for joining Crime Science and working with Tom and myself. I know the practitioners on the both public and private, if you will, side really do appreciate what you and many, many other scientists, scholars are working on to help us just get better and better at what we're all trying to do, make people and places safer.

So thank you so much and good luck in the future. We appreciate it. Thank you. Same to you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. All right, everybody. Thank you again, everybody, for joining us on another episode of Crime Science. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org.

The content provided in the Crime Science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Office of Prevention Research Council.