Matt Shriner:

All right, I have 1:01 PM eastern time. Thank you for joining us today for our LPF webinar titled How Communities Cut Shoplifting by 40%. We would like to thank Live View Technologies for being a valued LPF partner and for sponsoring today's session. Live View Technologies has spent years developing the first remote full security solution. LVT camera units rapidly deploy whenever and wherever you need them. No need for wires, power, or internet. So whether you need surveillance in a parking lot on a lonely roadway, on a busy intersection, or a concert or sporting event, LVT has a solution for you.

My name's Matt Shriner and I'm the Senior Director of Operations for the Loss Prevention Foundation. I will be your host today. We have a great panel of professionals who participated in this community approach for addressing crime. Joining me today we have Cory Lowe, Senior Research Scientist with LPRC. Good afternoon, Cory. Next up, we have Pete Kepler, Director of Security and Investigations with Advanced Auto Parts. Good afternoon, Pete. We have Chief Shane Healey with the Opelika Police Department. Good afternoon, Chief Healy.

Chief Shane Healey:

Hello.

Matt Shriner:

And last but not least, we have Matt Kelley, head of Retail GTM with Live View Technologies. Good afternoon, Matt,

Matt Kelley:

Good afternoon, Matt.

Matt Shriner:

And I'll turn things over to you.

Matt Kelley:

All right, I appreciate it, Matt. Thanks everybody for hopping on this. We're excited to share the results of this Access Task Force with you. So I'll start it off with just level setting on what Access Task Force really is. It's really spawned out of a thought of how can we drive collaboration across the public and the private sector to impact communities from a safety and security standpoint. And the secondary result would be driving theft down. So what we did is we went to our retail partners, introduced the concept to them, and really, got alignment from them to begin with and then said, we want to create safer spaces by breaking down some of those barriers that knowing that oftentimes they operate in silos and don't necessarily communicate and share information as readily as we would like sometimes.

So we went to the local law enforcement in Paducah, Kentucky and Opelika, Alabama, got the same sort of alignment and really just wanted to understand when we went and deployed units across both of those cities that didn't have any Live View units to begin with, and created that collaborative partnership across those areas that I mentioned, how we can impact those cities to make them safer and overall a more secure place for the residents who live there, the people who come in to shop, and the people who work there on a day-to-day basis.

I really want to get into a poll first to understand how have you begun or do you currently partner with local law enforcement to collaborate in the areas that you serve? And then, you'll see the questions down there and if you'll take some time to answer those. Have you not collaborated? Are you just starting to do that, or do you have a really good relationship with local law enforcement in the areas? And as we wait for those answers, at what level, Pete and Chief Healey, do you think that we see that collaboration across? What is your experience so far?

Chief Shane Healey:

I know speaking from the law enforcement side here in Opelika, we've been doing a lot of work over the last few years to build that collaboration and this opportunity was perfect to fit into our initiative of what we call Together Opelika, where we were able to bring retailers together with us, as the police department, and make those bonds even tighter. We know that in order to be effective at fighting crime, we all have to work together and this was a great opportunity to strengthen those bonds and help us all work in one vein to lower crime in our community.

Pete Kepler:

Yeah, Matt, to that point, Advanced Auto, there's a lot of different things to engage proactively with law enforcement in our local areas and this Live View Access Task Force just gave us an opportunity to take that to the next level, really going into a market where we typically wouldn't have sought out, the advanced security and deployed it and it proved to be very successful.

Matt Kelley:

I appreciate that. And you can see the answers here where it is a mixed bag, but for the most part it's either we've got full alignment and collaboration with local law enforcement within our footprint or just starting to collaborate and just maybe there's an opportunity to lean in a little bit to those relationships. So I'm going to close this out and then go into a video that just highlights some of the partnerships with the retailers in those communities and local law enforcement.

Brian Laird:

When we first found out about Access Task Force, it was a very interesting concept. We were excited about it because it was a great opportunity. We operate under a community policing philosophy, and so we saw that as an opportunity to partner with our local retailers just to make our community better.

David Walters:

When I told the team members that we were setting up the camera units outside, there was applause, there was a lot of thank yous because, you know what, we are doing this for not only them, but we're doing it for our customers as well. They feel safe coming in, they feel safe leaving at night, and that's the most important thing for us.

Chief Shane Healey:

I think it's a fantastic opportunity to build on what it is that we're already trying to do in our city, within our community. It's a perfect opportunity for us to continue to build those relationships with our local business partners, an opportunity for us to continue to be able to provide them better service.

Gary Fuller:

If you have an opportunity to do something that will help your retailers, which is going to help your community, it's a two-way street. It certainly is going to help our retailers, but ultimately, it's going to help the citizens. And I would say this gives us an opportunity to deter or to be able to apprehend those criminals and put them away and take them out of circulation.

Chief Shane Healey:

It literally takes a village to make a safe environment. So that's why it's important to us to have those relationships, not just between the police department, the city, and the business, we try to help foster good relationships between the businesses so they can help each other out. By communicating that this task force is in place, that we're doing these things, the camera systems on-site that people are seeing that that will help thwart criminals, make them decide to go to some other city.

Gary Fuller:

I want the word to get out and I want the thugs and the criminals to say, you know what, let's bypass Opelika. I don't care where they go as long as they don't stop here.

Video Voiceover:

The Access Task Force increased the number of LVT units deployed across Opelika and Paducah from zero to 49. And what happened during the six months, those units were deployed? The numbers speak for themselves. See the full benefits of LVT and read the full report at LVT.COM/ACCESS.

Matt Kelley:

... that you saw, some of the results that we saw-

Brian Laird:

When we first found out about-

Matt Kelley:

... within the cities, but how did we choose these cities? We really wanted to say, let's start with a blank slate where there's no Live View units, but there is an opportunity from a criminal activity standpoint relative to the size of the city, understanding Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, LA are perceived really as unsafe cities. But you see some of the stats here in Opelika, you have a one to 28 chance of having a crime enacted against you. Relatively same statistics you see in Paducah as well, there's a one in 25%, per capita I should say, of a crime happening against you. Some high level stats, before Live View was deployed and we started this project, there was a 20% increase in activity in those cities, but the results speak for themselves. And I'm not going to drain this slide or the next slide.

I'm going to let Cory jump into the statistics from a scientific standpoint and talk about how they measured it, how they thought about it, and then some of the considerations that we had to think about as we went through. But like I said, stats speak for themselves. I'm going to give the time over to Cory now to run through some of the statistical analysis.

Cory Lowe:

So as Matt said, these cities were selected on the basis of a few different characteristics. First of all, among mid-level or mid-sized cities, they have a little bit higher than normal crime rates. That was one of the pieces. The other part was that they didn't have a bunch of Live View units already. That's important, because if we're looking at the treatment effect of adding units to the area, we don't want to work in a city that already has a bunch of it. That made things difficult because a lot of the cities that we would be interested in already have a bunch of Live View units. So we had to select cities like Opelika and Paducah, Kentucky.

When we approach this problem, the challenge of doing the analysis, we approach it in several different ways. So as I'm going through the results, I'm going to be talking about a few different ways that we approached analyzing the results. First of all, we have the results from some regression analysis that we did where we were focusing on specific offenses within the line of sight of the units in Paducah, Kentucky and Opelika, Alabama. And what we mean by that is we set up a 100-meter lines of sight, 250-meter lines of sight, and then started looking at what happened to crime specific offenses within those distances from the unit. And what we found is that in Opelika, Alabama, there was a 40.1% decrease in shoplifting, and that was the only statistically significant result for Opelika. Unfortunately, for many offense types, there just weren't enough incidents to actually detect a statistically significant effect if there was one.

And then in Paducah, Kentucky, we saw a 73.4% decline in weapons law violations. Mind you, there was only 12 incidents total during the entire period. Now, with trespass of real property, we saw a 43.6% decline and there was 231 total incidents. So when that decline occurred, it was a little bit more substantial in terms of the number of incidents involved. Next slide, Matt. Next, this Access Task Force was a very large initiative. It's actually the largest initiative that I've participated in since joining the LPRC in 2020, and I'm very thankful to Live View for putting their money where their mouth is and doing this trial. This is the type of stuff that I love to be working on. But because this was such a large trial, we've really saturated these communities with units.

Now in Opelika, there were fewer units. I think there were 17 units in Opelika and 32 in Paducah, but we saw community level declines in crimes against persons, property, and society in both Opelika and Paducah. A 7.1% decline in crimes against persons in Opelika during the trial period, a 14.9% decline in property and crimes against property, and an 8.2% decline in crimes against society. With crimes against persons being things like intimidations, threats, assault, battery, all of that. Property being theft, burglary, society being drug offenses and things like that.

In Paducah, Kentucky, we had a 7.4% decline in crimes against persons, a 15.2% decline in crimes against property, and a 16.8% decline in crimes against society. Now, I called out the differences in the number of units that Opelika had, I believe, 17 and Paducah had 32, because you can see that the crimes against society there was a much greater drop there in Paducah than in Opelika, and there was a slightly greater decline in Paducah for crimes against persons and crimes against property in Paducah. I think that'll also be relevant a little later on when we review some more of the results. But next slide, Matt.

Okay, another thing that we did is we used a line of sight regression for all of these different victim types. So the first regression results that we showed were all the different NIBRS offense types, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, crime types, incident types. Here we grouped all of these different types of incidents back into those crimes against persons, property, and society. Now, in Opelika, we actually saw an increase of 36.6% in crimes against persons within line of sight of the Live View units compared to areas that were not within line of sight of the Live View units. And essentially what we did for the regression is we overlaid a, you'll see an image in a second that kind of shows it, but overlaid a hexagonal grid across the entire area, and then we based the regression on those hexagons, individual hexagons 100 meters wide as the units of analysis to see what happened before and after in all of those areas in Opelika and Paducah. Regardless, we did see a decline within line of sight of 19.9% with crimes against property and a non-significant and non-statistically significant decline in crimes against society of 5.6%.

Now in Paducah, once again where we had a larger treatment, we had nearly twice as many units. We saw a decline of crimes against persons by 0.7%, but that was not statistically significant. We saw a decline of 20.7% in crimes against property and then a 8.8% decline in crimes against society using this line of sight approach in this way. So next slide, Matt. Actually, go back to the last slide. There's a few other things I wanted to say here. One of the issues here is that there are some study limitations based on the data that we're using and a few other factors, but overall, this is one of the better designed studies that I've seen.

However, because of the size of the treatment, so there was twice as many units, and there's other things that can affect crime reporting. One of the issues in this study is that we did use official crime statistics. We had two retailers that provided their incident data, but there wasn't a ton of work that we could do there given the number of offenses with that data. So the most valid data was the official crime data. The problem with that is if there's any change in reporting over time, so maybe crime becomes a greater concern, you would see an increase in crime when it's actually just an increase in reporting and that can happen in [inaudible 00:16:44]. Another thing that we might attribute this increase in the person's offenses to is that it is possible that the Live View units are more effective on rational crimes than affective crimes. You don't know that because there was declines in other incidents, crimes against persons citywide and a slight decline in Paducah. That's all important information to consider when reviewing the results.

But next slide, Matt. Okay, another thing that we did is we did a ton of mapping. James, on our team, on the LPRC team did a ton of mapping. And in fact, James was responsible for a large portion of the analyses throughout this study. But one of the things that we always want to look at is whether there was crime displacement or diffusion of benefits. And what we mean here is a displacement occurs when you have crime that just moves around the corner. So say you put a deterrent in place, and you could deter an offender from committing a crime at that location, but instead, they just commit the offense at a nearby location. We wanted to make sure that that wasn't occurring in this study. So we looked at that, but we also looked at the diffusion of benefits, which is a lot of studies have shown that if you deter crime in one place, that you actually affect the immediate environment as well. So by stopping that one crime from happening, you're actually stopping crimes in the area from happening as well.

So what you have, and you can see on this map and in this table, is that we broke it down into 250-meter distances from the units to understand what happened to incidents before and after the units were deployed. So you can see that crimes against property went down across all of the distance bands. But then you look at crimes against persons, you actually had a slight increase when you got further out. And this was in Opelika where there was a smaller treatment, about half as many units throughout the city. And so at 501 meters to 750 meters, you see a slight increase, a 3.9% increase. And then with crimes against society at 250 to 500 meters, you see a 5.9% increase in crimes against society.

However, the red is the minority of this table. So for the most part, the rest of the offenses went down across all bands. So even an Opelika, there wasn't a serious positive effect. It was actually negative pretty much across the board in decreasing crimes of various types. Next slide.

Matt Kelley:

So Cory, as you're talking about that, I was thinking about the comment you made about rational versus emotional crime and that kind of falls within that crimes against persons bucket, right? Those are, as I understand it to be, that's not necessarily something that any sort of treatment is going to impact because it's an emotional response in the moment rather than premeditated, I guess, is the right word that I would think about.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you, Matt. Yes, that's what I was getting at. So deterrence theory, when we talk about deterrence, what we're usually talking about is we want to increase offenders perceived risk. So do they believe that they're going to go to jail if they commit an offense? So we want to increase perceived risk of committing a crime. We want to increase the perceived effort of committing a crime, and we want to reduce the perceived benefits of crime. That assumes that people are rational. If people are not rational, if they're being driven by emotional issues or if they're not rational because of mental health issues or their substance abuse issues, then those types of offenses may not be deterred because those individuals may not respond to deterrent cues. So that's a part of that.

Another thing that we did in this study is James mapped out where the crime clusters were. And these maps just showed the difference in cluster assignment before and after or after the Live View units were deployed. And what you can see is, yes, there is some growth in some incident types in Opelika specifically, and that was, if you look at the crimes against persons, all the red there is growth in cluster assignment, meaning that there was some additional crime there, but in the rest, that is not really the case and there's a good bit of grain, meaning that those clusters changed from bad to good.

Next slide, Matt.

Matt Kelley:

Well, I want to stop for a second and ask Chief Healey how this impacted his police force. And we talked about reduction in certain areas. What was the perception with his force and how did they think about this in terms of giving them some sort of relief or allowing them to actually police the community and support the community rather than responding to retail theft?

Chief Shane Healey:

So it impacted us greatly because it helped us be able to make better decisions on, for example, where do we put our patrols, how do we concentrate where officers need to be. And so when that retail crime is decreasing, then I can take the resources of a physical police officer and move them to another area where we may be having some other type of crime. Also, when we still do have resources in that area, instead of them being tied up constantly on being responsive to something happening, we can be more proactive. The officers can be seen more and that has a deterrent effect, that becomes a way for people to see, hey, the police are here and it kind of builds on the concept of having the Live View solution in place. There's now another visual cue that the police are here, they're doing things in this area, which hopefully makes the bad guys make a different decision and not commit crimes there. So when we can be proactive in an area, it helps us as well. So it was kind of a dual benefit to us.

Matt Kelley:

Perfect.

Cory Lowe:

Thanks, Chief. All right. Now, in Paducah where I mentioned there was almost twice as many units deployed, we saw that there was a across the board decline across all crime types, across all victim types, across all of the distance bands. So whereas across the majority in Opelika you saw a decrease in crime across the distance bands. Here, it was all of the distance bands. Once again, I think some of this may be attributed to the size of the treatment, but we cannot be sure. Next slide. And here on this you also see a lot more green, meaning that the good clusters, the crime actually declined in a lot of these clusters. So they were reassigned from high crime clusters to lower crime. Next slide.

Matt Kelley:

So we talked a lot about data and what that means for a retailer to have actionable data to make business decisions on. So how confident are you in the accuracy of the reporting that you're getting from your frontline associates, your leaders out in the field, because that's going to drive business decisions. And that's where I would say, Pete, where your expertise really comes in is driving that message. Why is it so important to be engaged in projects like this? So what was your experience in terms of how engaged your leaders were out in the field in driving this project?

Pete Kepler:

Amazing, to be perfectly honest. Anytime we have an opportunity to gather actual data and help drive decisions versus just gut instinct, it's going to be an easier sell, really, to say, I think we need to put a device here versus, hey, these devices are measurably driving down criminal activity and increasing a perception of safety in our stores. So it was fully embraced. And then where we have them all over the country, we're seeing results that are typical and consistent with what we saw in these two cities as well. But to stress the importance of the data being accurate, the more accurate the data, the better decisions we can make. So definitely a critical part.

Matt Kelley:

In your experience, Cory, what do you think the answer's going to be? Not at all confident, medium, confident or highly confident?

Cory Lowe:

At best, moderately confident. This is an area where a lot of retailers still struggle with actually recording. So moderately confident. So a lot of retailers struggle with this, which ends up, there's a widely used motto, which is right people, right place, right protection. That's very difficult to do if you do not have good data on what products you're losing during any period of time or where your incidents are actually occurring. Now, some retailers do an excellent job and record everything up to near misses where you have someone escalating their voice. You have escalated incidents, but not necessarily anything that goes kinetic. But a lot of retailers are not there. Another issue which I'll talk about is that oftentimes they're not reporting incidents to police either, which also creates other problems, but we'll come back to that.

All right, so one of the things I love about Live View is that some of the results from this are surprising, but for the most part, the vast majority of the findings we saw declines in crime. With any study there are limitations, even the best studies. There's a ton of limitations with a lot of the trials that retailers do. This is one of the better designed trials that I've been part of, especially given the limitations in terms of what cities we could actually work in. But just as a rule of thumb, if you are watching a presentation or reading a report and there's no limitations discussed in the report, you are not actually reading a study. You are reading marketing materials. So I love the fact that I can get on here and we have great partners at Live View where I can be open and honest about everything we found, which is great.

Now, what are some of the key limitations of this study? The official statistics, that's a part of it. So we rely on official statistics. We know that nationally only about 50% of all known incidents are reported to police, and this varies from state to state. We found that in our ORC Across the State Study last year where a lot of states had much lower reporting rates among the retailers than others. Therefore, if any of the reporting practices change, the statistics will change. That can lead to crime seeming to go down or seeming to go up. Another issue with the study is that there were the comparison sites. So we focused on these two cities and we had data for these two cities, but we did not have comparable sites. The study involved putting units at every location involved. We did not vary that, so we couldn't compare, say, one retail location to another that did not have the unit. So compare one that had a unit with one that did not. We couldn't do that. In a lot of cases, there was only one location anyways, but even in the case where there were two locations, we put units at every location.

Next slide, Matt.

Matt Kelley:

I think the important thing is we'll come back to this from a seasonal standpoint and measure the same period post-incidence, so November to May of this coming year, and measure what the impact is year-over-year during the same time period.

Cory Lowe:

Yes, and that's a good call out, Matt. There's a lot more analysis that we can do. And by the way, the report is 64-pages long. It is packed full of analysis with the official crime data, but also the results from the survey, which I'll talk about in just a moment. But yeah, there's still more analysis that we can do and once the crime data for other jurisdictions in the area is published, or once they publish it, we will be able to look at that too, to compare how that decline's related to other areas.

The line of site regression results, there's a question in the Q&A that I'm going to discuss in just a little bit. But all of the line of site regression results are near the unit, so these are results near the actual units. We saw, and this is a typo, but there's a crimes against persons increase in Opelika. Was that due to the greater number of units in Paducah relative to Opelika? Was there changes in awareness? So another issue with doing any kind of research on tools that enhance your awareness is that the treatment affects the outcome in ways that you wouldn't want them to. So for example, if I put a Live View unit out in the parking lot, I'm going to be immediately aware of more incidents than I was before I had that unit. So I have greater awareness of what's going on, which gives me greater opportunities to report incidents that I otherwise wouldn't, I may not even know about. So essentially, with some technologies in loss prevention, you're doing things where you might expect an increase.

Well, in this study for almost all of the incident types, we didn't see an increase at all. We saw a decline. So even though there was this counter effect where you would expect awareness to go up and potentially see the incidents go up because of reporting, the incidents went down still. So that's good stuff. Finally, we talk about generalizability. Can we take these findings and apply them to other cities. Because of the fact that Live View units are used so widely throughout the United States, we had to select these cities. We also selected these cities for a few other reasons. But will these results apply to other cities? There's no reason to not to think so, but we can't be sure until we do those studies. And that's that. Next slide, Matt.

We also did a survey, a community survey in Opelika and Paducah. We surveyed four different groups of stakeholders including community members in these cities, retail store employees in Opelika and Paducah, retail managers and loss prevention leaders, and then law enforcement. As you can see, we had 300 community members, 49 retail store employees, 26 retail managers and loss prevention leaders, and 32 law enforcement officers in these cities. So a pretty decent sample size from these cities. Next slide.

So throughout this survey, we varied our questions quite a bit. We asked them in several different ways about whether people felt more comfortable shopping during the daytime in the presence or absence of Live View units. But we also asked some other questions that I'll get to in a moment for good reasons. In this, I'm just focused on the at night questions, but one of the first questions we asked was, do you agree or disagree with the following statement. At night, I would feel safer shopping at stores that have LVT units than stores that do not. As you can see, vast majorities of all of the respondent groups said that they somewhat agreed or strongly agreed to that statement, meaning that they felt safer shopping at those stores with LVT units than those that do not.

This is of great importance. I know that for a lot of the retailers on the call, guard services take up a huge chunk of the budget. And in a lot of cases, there's no justifiable reason in terms of escalated risk to have them there. Oftentimes, they are a measure to provide greater comfort and sense of security to customers and employees. Is it possible that an LVT unit might accomplish that same goal? Who knows? The survey suggested it might. Next slide.

We also varied the way that we ask questions. So prior research shows that men oftentimes are not forthcoming about their true perceptions of safety or their fear of crime or their comfort around issues of crime. So in addition to the other questions we asked, we also asked all the respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement. At night, I would feel more comfortable if a loved one shopped at a store with an LVT unit than a store without one. So by focusing on the loved one piece, we can kind of get a more accurate estimate of how the LVT units make people feel. And once again, you see that over 80% of all of the respondent groups said that they somewhat agreed or strongly agreed, meaning they believed that they would be more or much more comfortable. Next slide.

We also asked employees, retail employees, whether they would feel more or less safe at work at night if LVT units are removed. Now the colors switch around here in terms of what's relevant. Red still means bad and green still means good. But here, red is people saying that they would feel less safe. So with the retail managers and LP leaders, just about 35% said that they would feel much less safe or somewhat less safe. But that's about the same number of retail managers and LP leaders who said the opposite, that they would feel somewhat safe or are much safer. With the retail employees, nearly 60% said they would feel much less safe or somewhat less safe.

Matt Kelley:

Pete, I want to get your feedback here. What did you hear from your frontline associates and the leaders in these areas in terms of how they perceived the Live View units, how they perceived the partnership, and overall, what was the general sense of how they felt?

Pete Kepler:

Well, if I could gauge the reaction when we pulled them out, I think it was positive. They didn't like to see them go. They valued the sense of security that they had just knowing that there was somebody else there watching. Customers felt the same way, too. All the feedback we received at the store level was always positive, and they really appreciated and valued what Advanced Auto Parts was doing to enhance their shopping experience, increase their safety. And the team members liked it, too. It's just an easy way for us to show that we truly do care as the retailers.

Cory Lowe:

And to build on that, Pete, it's something that's been pretty interesting over the last three years as retail crime has become a greater concern. We bring in customers and offenders into our labs to do interviews, and we also do interviews in stores. And one of the things that we found is how receptive a lot of the public is to deterrent strategies and how thankful they are in a lot of cases. And some of these solutions are much, much more intrusive than the live units, right? Live units just sit out in their parking lot. They're not locking cases or anything like that. So interviewing customers, it's been kind of amazing how many are like, this is great. Thank you for actually doing something about theft. Next slide.

We also asked law enforcement officers and retail managers and employees whether they believe that law enforcement retailer collaboration has worsened or improved during the study period. In all cases, except for with law enforcement, the majority said that it was somewhat better or much better. And with this, part of the problem with law enforcement here, and it wasn't actually with law enforcement, but in the open-ended responses in the survey, one of the things we found was that some of the retailers who participated were not using their access to the command center. So because of that, they weren't providing law enforcement with the video from the Live View units, which kind of skewed their perceptions of the units when it was actually just the failure to pull the video from the units. So that's something that can be easily addressed. But when it came to retail managers and LP leaders and retail employees, you had a majority of those responded saying that it was somewhat better or much better.

Matt Kelley:

So Chief Healey, as the leader of the police department in Opelika, how did this type of collaboration change the way that you work with retailers? Or how did it enhance that?

Chief Shane Healey:

It definitely enhanced it because it gave us a great opportunity to expand the conversations that we were having with our local retailers, and it also gave us the opportunity to talk to multiple retailers about using this technology as a force enhancement kind of across the board, that mentality of having the community come together to help each other out to be safer. So it drove a lot of conversations in, we have some different business organizations, retailer groups that meet quarterly or monthly to talk about their shopping center or this type of retail establishment, how they can do things better. So it gave us an opportunity in those meetings to talk about this technology, talk about this solution and how they can help each other. So not only did it improve, I think, the conversation between us as the police and the retailers, I think it helped improve the conversation between those competing retailers as well.

Matt Kelley:

And Pete, the same question to you. You lead a team that does investigations across the entire country. How would you take this type of model and build upon it for your investigations team to have that force multiplier that Chief Healey mentioned?

Pete Kepler:

Yeah, so the Chief nailed it. And let's be honest, we're chasing the same bad guys. And the ideal would be to not just kick the can and push the criminal element to a competitor to another retailer. The idea is to drive the criminal element away. Let's work together, collaborate, share information, and eliminate our exposure, not just individually, but collectively. And through task forces like this and the willingness and the trust to share that information, that's critical. And Advance has always had a great relationship with PDs. They are tremendous asset for us, and we like to help them anytime we can. And as far as retailers go, like I said, we're chasing the same bad guy. So we, within reason, play very, very well together, and I think this just helps.

Cory Lowe:

Sure. So finally, we asked all the community members whether they agree or disagree that they would prefer for retailers to continue to use LVT units in their city. As you can see, over 80% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement suggesting that there was widespread support for the Live View units. A very, very small group of people had negative responses. We did ask some follow-up questions to get some better understanding of people's concerns. And some of these responses are not exactly valid. You had some people who seemed like they would be against pretty much any technology in use, and then there were others who seemed to be confused about some things about the units in general and about the task force. So when you look at even that minority of people who responded that way, some people are not going to like anything that's done, to be honest.

The only other issues, and this is something that retailers should think about, is it's more of practical issues of unit placement. So there were some comments, some valid comments in addition to the naysayers who are going to be naysayers about anything were the flashing lights. So LVT, through collaborative research in the past, added the strobe lights, the strobing blue lights to bring greater attention to it because at the LPRC, we talk about the See-Get-Fear model for a deterrent to have an effect. Offenders have to see it, they have to understand it, and they have to fear the consequences of its use.

Well, the first step to actually deterring someone is making sure that they see the deterrent. So that's what that strobe does. Now, we did have a few comments about the blinking light and being distracting in certain areas at night, and then we also had comments about where the unit was placed relative to the street and it blocking the field of view or the line of sight right there as they were turning. So those were some practical things. All of the concerns are addressed, so that was a good one. And that's that.

Matt Kelley:

So these are just again, high-level stats, project overview at the top. I think that we're kind of to the Q&A portion, Matt, if you will, so I see.

Matt Shriner:

Yeah. Matt, we have several questions coming in the queue, so thank you so much to our audience. If you have further questions, please enter them into the Q&A box. So first question, were there any impacts on the units themselves from vagrancy-related vandalism or retaliatory effects from the criminal community after deployed? And if so, who absorbs the cost of those related vandalisms?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, in this particular instance, we didn't see any. That's not to say that across the country we don't see those types of activities, just because Cory mentioned the See it-Get it-Fear it model. They see it, they understand what it is, and they're not happy about it. When it comes to the red actor, as LPRC likes to frame up the green versus red actor. And then in instances with those do happen, we are predominantly a subscription model where you lease the units themselves. So that means it really is a turnkey solution, and if something happens, you report it to us, we'll send somebody out to fix the unit because that's embedded in the subscription cost of the unit.

Matt Shriner:

Awesome. Next question is for Chief Healey. So Chief Healey, how have the results of this task force influenced your conversations with other law enforcement departments and elected officials in adopting these to help promote safer communities and maximize the police ability to protect and serve the respective areas?

‍Chief Shane Healey:

It's definitely changed those conversations for me because every conversation I have, I bring up LVT, I bring up this solution. I talk about the impact of this study for us personally as a police department and how it has helped us. And I talk to them about how, if they bring this solution online in their respective jurisdictions, or if it's a private entity or business in the city, how that can help us help them. For example, our hospital in our community has a very large footprint throughout our community. They have a large campus, but it's also spread out throughout the city in different locations. So they're looking to deploy this solution across their different campuses so that they can tie those things together. And that, again, is going to benefit us as a police force in how we help protect them. Our emergency management agency is looking at it. Auburn University, in our sister city, they've talked to us. We've talked to the Auburn Police Department who had some big businesses come online over the course of this who were interested in what we were doing and what it was. So it's really driven a lot of conversations in our community.

Matt Shriner:

That's awesome. And I'm sure that the retailers, too, will be running with that baton to speak to their respective partnerships as well, especially in areas where we're struggling as an industry and as a society to control those criminal activities as well as keeping people safe. So thank you so much for your efforts and your ability to share your experience.

So Pete, the next question that I have is for you. Have your peers at the other auto parts stores near this study area reported an increase in crime at their facilities due to the towers being used on your properties? Because we know theft migration is very real.

Pete Kepler:

No, they haven't, and I think they would. We do maintain good relationships, and if I was responsible or the Live View was responsible for driving the criminal element to a competitor, I think I would receive a call more asking how they can get involved with Live View versus pointing a finger and say, you're pushing bad guys towards our locations. But no, not at all.

Matt Shriner:

Okay. That's very interesting because oftentimes when one retailer in a specific vertical of retail institute something, they tend to go to the neighbor that has a similar product offering and start committing those crimes. So the fact that we're not hearing about that theft migration leads one to believe that we have reduced crime holistically, impacting not just your stores, but also the area. Cory.

Cory Lowe:

Yeah. So I wanted to speak on that. Now, typically when you don't have a displacement effect, it means that a lot of the crimes that were deterred may have been opportunistic crimes. So crimes where someone goes in, sees the opportunity and seizes it, not someone who is going out and attempting to. That's one potential explanation. But in this trial, it was a city wide trial. So even from the ORC perspective, if I'm an ORC offender and I'm traveling from city to city and I know that there's a whole bunch of cameras in a whole bunch of parking lots, if I put on my criminal hat, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm probably not going to mess with a lot of those stores, just too much friction. When we talk about friction, you often talk about shopper's friction, but it's the same way with offenders. This is just additional friction for them to deal with. So it may actually have happened if there was displacement, from the ORC's perspective, it might've happened at the city level where they just didn't even address that. So there's something to think about when I think about these displacement and diffusion issues.

Matt Shriner:

Oh, definitely good points because they could have very well traveled outside of that jurisdiction, outside of that city limit. Chief Healey, you had something to add?

Chief Shane Healey:

Yeah, if I can, I just want to add an old cop's perspective that I don't know if I can scientifically prove this, maybe Cory can, but in our city, for example, most competing businesses of similar types are really within line of sight of each other. And I don't want to talk about any specific companies, but if one has the solution and they got LVT in their parking lot, that is potentially helping that competitor whose parking lot may not necessarily have LVT, but it does have kind of coverage. Again, that deterrent factor. They're like, well, if I can see that camera across the street, why would I victimize this business over here? And again, it's taking them someplace else or making that decision not to victimize anybody. And to me, that's how can one retailer help the next retailer next door be a little bit safer, even though they're competitors. I think there's something to be said about that. But again, that's just an old cop's perspective, and I don't know if Cory can talk more about that or not.

Cory Lowe:

So at the LPRC, some of the people on the call have been to our facility before, but we've got the UF Innovate Hub, and then we've got four square blocks, and we actually have five Live View units in our area around the building we're in. And yes, we have high quality footage that spans several blocks. We've been able to participate in a few incidents where we have, it's not student housing, it's an apartment complex, it's private, but it's where a lot of students live. And we've had multiple incidents that happened far away, but we were actually able to provide video evidence to local law enforcement for those cases. So if I'm an offender and I see these blinking lights with these surveillance towers, it's very difficult to miss. So I would agree with that assessment. Let's leave it at that.

Matt Shriner:

Sure. And we're running a little low on time, so we are going to make a couple of quick announcements. First and foremost, for participating with our webinar today, Live View Technologies is sponsoring a 20% discount code off of our certification courses as well as our memberships at the Loss Prevention Foundation. If you did indicate that you are interested in an LP certification course scholarship, you may be one of the lucky five winners. So be on the lookout for that post webinar email blast that you'll receive tomorrow as you might see your name there indicating that you won an LPQ or an LPC certification course scholarship valued between 495 and $795. As always, thank you for joining us today. If you're going to LPRC Impact, make sure you stop by and see Live View Technologies for more information and to see their units live. So thank you all so much for participating. Thank you to our panel, and we'll see you all real soon.

Take care.