LPRC - SPECIAL NEW YEARS RE-RELEASE – CrimeScience – The Weekly Review – Episode 173

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

As we start off the new year, let’s take a look at this special Flashback from 2 years ago! LPRC Kickoff was a great success, this week our hosts discuss the amazing things the LPRC is doing! On this episode, our hosts discuss their experience at the NRF Big Show, Supply Chain disruptions that are around the corner, AI deep fakes are getting better, LPRC Integrate and Ignite are around the corner, and 2024 is starting off strong for the LPRC. The hosts also go into a recap of the recent layoffs affecting the LP/AP industry. Listen in to stay updated on hot topics in the industry and more!

Hi, everyone, and welcome to crime science. In this podcast, we explore the science of crime and the practical application of this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Welcome, my buddy, to another episode of Crime Science and podcast. This is the latest in our weekly update series, and I'm joined by Tom Meehan and our producer Diego Rodriguez. And the team is back from a wild but very productive week in New York City and Manhattan at the Javitt Center and around in thereabouts for the annual National Retail Federation or NRF Big Show.

My understanding is at least 40,000 people came into the Javitt Center in around, but we're in town for the NRF Big Show, attending sessions, meeting and greeting, visiting the hundreds of booths that range from Mammoth to pretty big. and went out socializing and beyond. But AI again seemed to be a very prevalent topic everywhere. I had the honor and privilege to work with currently Kroger Vice President of Asset Protection, Mike Lamb, but also colleagues from Nvidia and Lenovo and discuss a little bit about AI in retailing, particularly for protecting people and places and other assets, including that from coordinated or organized retail crime.

And what that can look like, what's going on as far as tests, what are upcoming tests. We actually have one with Nvidia coming up where we're going to be working in a group of stores and the retailers participating will broaden more to come on that. project. But panels were bountiful. I had the honor again and privilege of working with the vice president of Macy's Joe Cole, as well as colleagues from Avery Denison. And we talked about RFID and the use of that technology. Also the president of the University of Memphis. And so there we discussing different ways the technology can and should or will be used to understand where merchandise is throughout a retailer's enterprise physically, how that merchandise is moving through the system, understanding how it's being sold and or stolen, and then how to couple

that technology or integrate it with CCTV and other sensors to kind of make sense of who's buying, who's stealing, where are they buying or stealing from, what? what items specifically are being purchased or taken without permission, how are they leaving the location? What entry exit point are they going through? When are they being returned and to where and how? Just on and on. And then even after theft, using readers to go to fencing locations to identify, positively identify, what an item is. It's got an actual license plate, if you will, number.

So a lot of discussion there. And then another panel I was able to participate in was on mapping and leveraging mapping, particularly ARCRO, ARGIS from ESRI to understand how criminal offenders move through place and time. Where are hotspots for crime or hotspots for criminal offender residences? How are people moving? How to coordinate? What are opportunity points? What are those types of dynamics?

We talked a lot about how to leverage that with Grant Drabe from formerly a tenured professor at the University of Arkansas, now at CAP Index, Gary Sancri, who of Esri. And we went through and discussed how to leverage mapping in all its forms. And of course, the LPRC you all have heard, and many of you have seen. we have built using Azri dashboards for Gainesville, Port St. Lucie, Atlanta, Georgia, and Abercrarchy, New Mexico, as well as Portland, Oregon, all where we're mapping everything we can to understand the dynamics of crime and people movement in ecologically for better ways to affect and protect. So a lot of that going on at our organization. And we're encouraging others. We had some retailers come up who would like to get involved or more involved in mapping what's going on at their places and around their places around the country. So very exciting, very exciting to be involved with AI with RFID, radio frequency identification, and with mapping.

So good stuff. There were some great social events and a lot of meet and greets going on. I think myself, Dr. Corey Lowe, our director of research, Chad McIntosh, our C-O-O, and also the current acting vice president of Asset Protection for Rite Aid Corporation. The three of us were blurs. We were together every once while, but not very often because we were moving to meetings, going out and getting to know people, looking at new technologies and booths, talking to colleagues. So all in all, great time, little chilly. We ended up the week up there in New York with the annual LPRC kickoff.

Again, traditionally 40, 50 people grew to 100 of our members gathering up in the Bloomingdale's flagship stores training room. The Bloomingdale's team anticipated, I think we're going to grow outgrow this AT&T business and some other stellar solution partners sponsored us. and we were able to move the event and thank goodness because we went from 100 to 200 participants over to Hudson Yards up on the 100 and first floor. It was just a spectacular, spectacular venue. Great speakers from NYPD from FBI. We looked at some of the new logo and branding coming out for the LPRC and how it came about and what the symbology stands for and where we're going.

look at the new website, how we're going to better and better connect and with each other and between each other in the LPRC community. And we heard about real-time crime centers, how they're being leveraged. We learned about the FBI's focus on major felonies and crimes, how they're working to support us in the industry through research development, but primarily through investigation. So a lot of dialogue. It was an amazing turnout, as I mentioned, a lot of vice presidents and other key decision makers from retailers, as well as some key solution partners in there, all working together. LPRC has continued to grow. We'll announce six more new members. The LPRC added over 50 new corporations to membership in 2003, and we already have quite a few lined up for 2025. If you're an organization, you're not members of the LPRC, please bring us up, talk to us, whether it's Kim, K-I-M at L-P-Research.org, or Operations at LPRsearch.org, or go to the website to join. That's been heavily used recently. So the organization's growing. We talked a lot about the two focal points as far as we believe addressing crime and loss in the retail environment.

any environment for that matter, and that is awareness and control. And we've talked on here about awareness and control in this different formats, how we have three research tracks that overlap affecting offender choices from the time they leave their residence until they get to where their journey to harm ends as far as going kinetic. And then beyond detect, detecting or sensing, being aware of what threat is out there, what's coming our way, and how we might best affect them, and protect the people and the assets that need to be. So affect, detect, and then, of course, connect. How do we connect within a store or that location?

How do we connect stores with each other within a chain between chains, chains together, chains with their law enforcement and other critical partners? So we went through that premise. We went through that logic model, the framework of the five zones, the bow tie, the double bow tie models leveraging how do we increase awareness and control. Talk briefly about, we'll be talking a lot more about coercion theory and how we can leverage that. A lot of this comes from other disciplines, including military science, but it's what we do, right? there's a couple major branches of coercion. One is deterrence.

We're trying to get people to make decisions not to initiate, not to progress to harm a person or place or their stuff. That's somewhat more passive because we may or may not know if somebody makes that decision not to initiate or not to continue on the other side or the other part of that is compelance. What we're doing to, in the first instance, get somebody not to do something passively doesn't look like right the conditions and so on in this case with compelance we're trying to compel somebody or an offender or crew that threat

through more aggressive assertive means we take things away we shut down their capability individually or jointly so we will go much more into coercion theory deterrence and compelance and how we leverage that for control or control part of awareness and control, as we're doing with talking a lot about the awareness component, and that is through detect, and that's where we have behaviors, signals, signatures we're looking for. It could indicate an offender, a threat movement of that threat, that offender toward us, or after being there to another target, so on. what sensors do we need to pick up those behaviors, those signals and signatures, and then what

type of AI models might help us cut through the noise and find those signals even in a very cluttered busy environment. So that's a big part of what we're working on, of course, awareness and control, and that there's meaningful parts of this. It's not just understanding or leveraging these operational and strategic frameworks, but how do we make this real? How do we refine that? And how do we maintain agility or adaptability that we keep changing these things to keep up with the threat? As it morphs and changes, an individual learns a little bit through their trials and errors, what happened, what didn't happen to them, what they hear, what they're telling others, what they see online in a variety of ways. So we'll talk more about that, but that's our research and development

at the LPRC. There are these underlying concepts, human behavioral, individual, and groups, and then understanding ways to affect and create safer places instead of just running around doing stuff and not understanding how the stuff we're trying to do might actually work. What maybe isn't working, how to make it work better, how to make it work better with something else combined or integrated with it, and so on, right? So that's the LPRC long-winded part, but that's really the method to the method to the the madness here in everything we do, how we bring on team members, how they're trained and

oriented, what they lead and or work on, how they work together, how we work with individual and groups of retailers and other places, but certainly with our solution partners as well. So a lot, a lot going on here at LPRC. And one last as I go over to my colleagues, and that is, Again, LPRC has Ignite February 28th for our board of advisors. They know who they are. You know who you are. And our innovate advisory panel. We're excited about that.

We're going to have a full day of planning and need exercises, a great evening event the following day. February 29th is when we go through integrate, where we're integrated a lot of technologies and people to affect, detect, and connect around an. active shooter, an active killer, a mass killer, assailant in this case, event and exercise, working with all the agencies, federal, state and local, we mentioned many times now, and go through threat, detect, assessment, prioritization, you know, that management plan that goes around threats. So we're going to have people that have dealt with real live active shooters that either made it there or did not and what they have been doing and learning through

research and through experience about threat management. And then we're going to look at the journey of the offender through the ecosystem to harm if we detect that person can, who that person might be, identify them are threat assessment teams from, again, FBI behavioral analysis unit one plus three special agents based in Florida that are highly trained in this tactic through the two separate retail corporations threat assessment teams and then the University of Florida that has a threat team. All four of them will separately be looking at the personas or profiles and coming up with that. If they do, they'll put them into LPR and other detection systems, including facial feature matching, weapon detection, noises, detection, oral sensors and things like that, to see if we can detect and effect that offender on his journey to harm, to grievously harm.

So stay tuned for that. This is a special invitation-only event, both of them, due to space. But rest assured, what we're learning and what we plan in the first part of this on Ignite and then what we learn through Integrate this year's version. in 2024, we will be breaking down more active assailants, more mass attacks throughout the 2024 and 2025 years. And we will have other events online or in person around that. And that's where it's going to be open to all of our membership. So questions or comments, operations at LPRsearch.org is a place to go.

With no further ado, let me turn over to colleague and friend Tom. Well, thank you, Reed. And happy New Year once again, even though I know we're a couple weeks into the month. I feel like you can say Happy New Year all the way through to the end of January. So wanted to start off with the big show, the NRF Big Show. So Tony, myself, Reed, we're all together, which is always good to be together. And just a quick kind of overview of some of the things that I saw and some of the trends that we're seeing. Lots and lots of talk about AI.

AI was everywhere. about 40,000 attendees strong, big, big show. And there was a big buzz about artificial intelligence, RFID, and organized retail crime. There were certainly a lot more, but those were the three things that I wanted to talk to the team about here at the LPRC. So very exciting stuff. I think there was a big press on data and AI as well as computer vision and AI. So something that I was really excited about was to see that technology. touring a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff around RFID, heavily driven by the Walmart initiative,

but it was exciting to see the amount of RFID vendors and solutions there, as well as folks talking about RFID and not only the inventory visibility and asset tracking space, but also in the asset protection space. So very, very exciting. It felt like there was more asset protection people than in years past. And I caution, you know, my statement of it felt like because it's anecdotal at best, but definitely was more LP people that I spoke to, so feel like really good about that. We had a series of events between the NRF Council dinner and the loss prevention research kickoff meeting, which was fantastic. It was a packed house. FBI, NYPD, Corey and the LPRC team talking about what was going on, and really, really all around great

event. If you can sense the excitement in my voice, it's because it was just a fantastic event. Let's just talk a little bit about what's going on. I know last week we skipped an episode because of the NRF protect, but I mentioned it before. December was a stronger month than some expected with an increase of about 5.8% in sales year over year. That shows that consumer spending was there. Very, very, very exciting to hear that. Good to see that. What I would say is there's still a lot of doom and gloom in the media. I would encourage everybody here to keep your heads up and think about what is going on. There's a ton of news around layoffs and changes in retail. As anybody who's been in retail, as long as a lot of our listeners have, this is an unfortunate part of what it goes on. It doesn't mean that companies are going to go away. There's just adjustments occurring. And there are still several hundred jobs open. I saw a lot of posts on LinkedIn. where there was unfortunate layoffs, but our network is strong here in the law prevention industry. Feel free to reach out to myself.

I'm going to offer up any of our other LPRC partners here if we can help. But really, this is a community of people and we're here to help with it. I wanted to just kind of shed some light on something that we talk about all the time is civil unrest and some of the geopolitics that are occurring. I'll start with the civil unrest pieces. There's still a pretty consistent theme of civil unrest. unrest around pro-Palestine or pro-Israel, more pro-Palestine at this point civil unrest and protests around stopping the conflict in Gaza. I would say that this is a pretty regular occurrence,

and it is a global phenomenon. It is not just a U.S. challenge or a U.S. issue or a U.S. thing that's occurring. When you look at where it's occurring and when it's occurring, it is spread wide here. And I think that what I would say is we need to continuously to use resources like the FusionNet and share information openly about what that means for all of us. And why am I talking about this today is because I think there's a real need for us to understand that I don't see this going away for some time and the chatter is off the charts. Additionally, I think everybody knows that 2024 is an election year here in the United States, but there are 59 additional countries. It might be 60. I'm going to go to 59. I think it's 60 or 60 or something. I think it's

60 or 61 total that have an election year. And in several of them, it's a very polarizing situation. It may not be exactly the same as what we are facing here in the U.S., but by and large, there is a global kind of feeling of some polarized one or the other side politics. So we need to be very mindful of what that means from a civil disturbance standpoint, but also from a geopolitical supply chain standpoint. I'm not going to get too far into that because we talk about that regularly, but what we're seeing today in the Red Sea,

where we have corporate cargo ships being bombed and is not necessarily a good thing, right? We know this, and I'm not saying that facetiously. I'm just saying we know that that creates a real strain on us, both from a cost of containers, an insurability of containers, and in some cases, route, even route avoidance. And so we are in for a challenging next couple of months

and hopefully not longer than that when it comes to supply chain disruption. I wrote an article in LP magazine a couple of months ago about geopolitical risk and supply chain was a key point of it. I actually wrote another article and published it just recently about the importance of using active intelligence monitoring. We did mention that the Red Sea piece

here on the podcast a few weeks before it hit mainstream media was going to potentially be a challenge based on chatter. So I, you know, I love that, you know, this our little podcast a lot of times is ahead of the curve with some of these things. But the real reality is for each and every one of us, if you're in a retail environment and there is a potential supply chain disruption or certainly a cost bearing that we have to be aware of, doesn't necessarily mean you are affected today doesn't mean you will be affected. It just means that you can be. And that's part of what the fusion net at the Los Rensual Research Council is all about is how do you stay engaged up to speed and ahead on really complex issues that are occurring. And the idea of the fusion net is not just

an information source, but a way that us as individuals can work together to identify ways that we can share and validate information. So I talk about that a lot, but I felt like it was really important. And then I'm going to close on another AI note. I've said that every single podcast I'm going to talk about AI is Open AI. The parent company of ChatGBT has just changed the rules around using their chat bots feature to represent a politician. So they're actually stopping that so that there's no misinformation going out. To my knowledge, there's only one elected official that was using it, but they put the kibosh on it so that it wasn't misused.

And just last week, if you follow the news, you would have heard that somebody used a deep fake of former President Trump's voice to send a message. And I'm looking at my notes here. I apologize at what state it was. but it went out and basically what was occurring was that you get a phone call from, you know, from Donald Trump, which was a deep fake. And what I would say about deep fakes, if you don't know what that means, as deep fakes are when AI is used to represent someone's voice and or it's usually video. And so I think it's funny there was some talks about, you know,

DeSanto's using it for an ad and all. all these other things, but this was really a phone call that was going out to different people. And it was a political attack against Stalin Trump. And so this is a real risk for all of us, right? What happens when you have what sounds and looks like a person talking and uses AI to represent someone's voice? There's real risk associated with this. This is one of those things that is occurring pretty regularly. So we always used to say, you know, don't believe it unless you see it or hear it.

Now we have to really question that. I talk about cybersecurity risk and the ability to, you know, always validate full of voice or be a voice for years. I've said, you call someone. Don't wait for them to call you. We really do now to take a second look and listen to something we see. I would argue that most deep fake videos, even the really good ones, a trained eye can identify some. tell signs of lip movement and awkward head gestures and sometimes out of sync voice. But what I will say is that really good voice generated deep fakes are almost perfect.

And if you have the resources, you can get a voice deepfake that is nearly perfect. It will even pass some of the voice authentication things that were once thought to be full-proof. So we are in the age of AI. age of generative AI. We're in the age of an evolution for AI. With all that being said, I think it's important to remember that AI dates back to the 40s. This is not a new thing. I think what I would say is it's very similar to the industrial revolutions. We are in the fourth iteration of AI. I feel like digitization is here. And I'd encourage each and every one of the listeners to embrace it, to learn how to use it, embrace it, because when you use it correctly,

it is a fantastic tool in everything that you do. With that, again, happy New Year. If I saw you at NRF Protect, which I saw several hundred, folks, it's great. It was great to see you, and I'm looking forward to seeing you. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention, if you're going to be at Ignite at the end of the month in February, I will see you there. Everybody, please stay safe. Back to you, Reed.

Awesome. Again, Tom, I appreciate all that great information. And Diego, I want to thank you for your production and posting. Look for our new website, LPRCECECTORG. Hit it, come in there, see what we've got. It's still being developed, but huge, huge part of it is up and functioning. It looks amazing. So reach out to us, let us know what you think, what we can do, do better, and stay safe and stay in touch.

Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcasts presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more crime science episodes and valuable information at LP. research.org. The content provided in the crime science podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the crime science podcast are those of the authors

and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the loss prevention research council.