Left of Bang: Building the Business Case for Retail Crime Prevention

Ask most asset protection leaders how they measure success, and you'll hear about cases made, dollars recovered, and offenders prosecuted. Those numbers are important, but they don’t tell you what didn't happen because a would-be thief looked at your store and decided to walk away.

Security professionals use the terms left of bang and right of bang to describe when security activity occurs in relation to an incident. The “bang” is the crime itself. Left of bang covers the efforts made beforehand to deter or interrupt it—cameras, signage, staffing, technology, and the dozens of small frictions that persuade a bad actor to choose another target. Right of bang covers the response after it occurs—detection, evidence collection, investigation, recovery, and prosecution. 

Retail asset protection experts have spent years building strong right-of-bang programs, in part because they're easy to measure. A case closed is a number on a report. A theft that never happened doesn't show up anywhere, so it rarely gets funded, staffed, or celebrated.

The challenge and value of measuring prevention was the focus of a recent webinar hosted by the Loss Prevention Foundation. Below is a recap of the key takeaways from that conversation. 

→ Prefer to watch? Access the full webinar here. 

Deterrence Has Gotten Smarter

Mike Combs, a 30-year asset protection veteran and former Director of Investigations and Organized Retail Crime (ORC) at The Home Depot, has watched deterrence evolve past the days of one-size-fits-all friction.

"Gone are the days where we're applying something that just affects every single customer that walks in the door," Combs said. Today's deterrence is surgical—technology helps target the person actually planning to steal, not the customer just trying to check out.

Matt Kelley, Senior Vice President of Business and Market Development at LVT (LiveView Technologies), pointed to a similar shift in sophistication, from basic signage and staffing to product-level tools like activation locks that render an item useless until it's paid for.

Focus on the 10%

Across big-box retailers, roughly 10% of identified offenders cause 90% of the losses. That's a small group doing an outsized amount of damage, and it means the highest-value move isn't chasing every incident. Instead, the goal should be identifying and stopping the habitual offenders driving the bulk of shrink.

Doing that well requires both prevention to stop opportunistic theft and investigation and prosecution to address the habitual offenders driving the most loss.

Why Prevention Has Been Hard to Fund

Prevention is hard to measure because success looks like nothing happening. That makes it difficult to demonstrate the value of security investments. 

Kelley explained, “You don't necessarily have those data points that you need to be armed with walking into a strategic planning session.” Security leaders can point to a case file as evidence of a crime that occurred, but they can’t produce equally tangible proof of a crime their security measures prevented.

That's starting to change. Video data at scale means retailers can now attach real numbers to prevention instead of treating it as a soft benefit. Broken windows, broken door contacts, vendor repair visits, leader time pulled off the floor to manage those repairs—all of it has a cost, and much of it is avoidable.

A Deterrent That Surprised Even the Skeptics

Combs shared an example that changed his own thinking. He advises Good2Go, a QR-code access control system used to secure bathrooms, fitting rooms, and locked merchandise. Customers scan a code with their phone to get in, and the mere fact that they're identified is enough to change behavior.

"I would've bet my paycheck that wasn't the case," Combs said, describing how long the deterrent value held up without needing a second layer of consequences. A year in, they still haven't had to turn on the backup lockout feature.

The key takeaway here is that some low-friction, high-visibility tools carry more weight than experienced practitioners expect, and retailers should test before assuming they know the answer.

Balancing Both Sides of the Ledger

None of this argues for abandoning investigation and prosecution. Strong consequences are still a necessity, and courts and law enforcement resources are often out of a retailer's control. The point is balance—measuring prevention with the same rigor retailers already apply to case counts and recovery rates.

That's the idea behind a new ROI calculator LVT built with input from practitioners like Combs and Kelley, which puts a dollar figure on what even a one percent shift toward deterrence can save. Try the calculator to see for yourself.