Beyond Deterrence: Turn LVT Deployments into a Force Multiplier

Cory Lowe:

Good afternoon, good morning, everyone, depending on where you are. Welcome. I'm going to give everyone a minute to jump on, then we will get started. Thank you for joining us today.

Good morning, good afternoon everyone. We're going to get started in just a moment, just giving everyone a chance to jump on.

Excellent. So my name is Cory Lowe. I'm the director of research here at the LPRC, and today I'm joined by Ben Dugan, executive director of investigations at CVS Health, Mike Ricupero from... former NYPD lieutenant detective commander and commanding officer of the Real-Time Crime Center there, and then Matt Kelley, SVP of Business and Market Development with LVT.

Gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourselves? Say a little bit about yourselves?

Ben Dugan:

Yeah, I'll [inaudible 00:01:29]-

Cory Lowe:

Yes sir.

Ben Dugan:

Absolutely. I'm Ben Dugan. I'm with CVS Health, and I'm actually coming to you live from the LPRC headquarters here in the University of Florida. It's been a great day we spent together out in the field, and now they brought me in here for this. So super excited. Appreciate the partnership with LPRC, and I appreciate the opportunity with everyone today.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you, Ben.

Matt?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, Matt Kelley here with LVT, been here around three years. Coming to you from Utah. Previously I did a stint at Home Depot, so I know I've been in the seat of many of you on the call today. Appreciate the opportunity to come spend some time with you.

Cory Lowe:

Fantastic.

And Mike?

Mike Ricupero:

Recently nine-day retired lieutenant detective commander, acting CO of the NYPD's Real-Time Crime Center. This is all new to me, but I do love just giving my expertise and what I've learned being at NYPD Crime Center for all those years now to everyone else on this call and LPRC as well. Thank you.

Cory Lowe:

Fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen, very much. That's given us a little bit of time for everyone to continue jumping on and for us to get started.

So at the LPRC, we have our six-Ds framework that we like to use to talk about issues and tactics to be using in loss-prevention programs, and that includes diversion, deterrence, detection, disruption, documentation, and data analysis. These are all objectives that we seek to accomplish whenever we're doing really anything, and that loss-prevention leaders should also be seeking to do. By diversion we mean influencing developmental risk and protective factors. This isn't necessarily diversion in any other sense, but we use diversion to mean that we are trying to divert people from a life of crime. That could be working out in the community to make sure that kids are not taking this path, or it could be working with employees through EAP programs to make sure that we're taking care of them and that they're not engaging in any kind of criminal activities.

Deterrence is just influencing the situational factors associated with crime, so increasing the risk to offenders so they don't commit crime, increasing the effort and time it's required to commit a crime, and then also reducing the benefits associated with crime. That's what we're talking about when we talk about deterrence.

Detection is just being aware and detecting all of these threats, loss events, and also crimes. Disruption is disrupting criminal networks, criminals themselves, to minimize the amount of harm done during any crime. Documentation, making sure we have a written record or an electronic record of everything that we're doing and then filing data analysis. All these are very important to any LP program.

With LVTs at the LPRC, we've done extensive research with them that we're going to talk about today. But we take a missions-focused approach. So when we put out an LVT into the community, we are trying to achieve one of these six things, generally speaking, instead of how it's often done, which is kind of setting it and forgetting it.

And these kind of fall into three categories. We talk about the six D's. We also talk about affect, detect, and connect. So affect, we're trying to affect behavior, we're trying to detect behavior and loss events, and we're trying to connect everything, connect the dots, connect people, processes, and technology, really all those connections. But under affect, you have diversion, deterrence, disruption, detect, you have that, just detection and connect is documentation and data analysis, bringing those dots together.

If you're familiar with the bow-tie model, we use this to really do problem analysis, which is if you see 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, that's the five zones of influence where offenders on their journey to crime come from the community, come to the parking lot, go into the store, and then target either a person, asset, whatever it is, and then exit through those. The reason I bring all this up is because these different tactics in terms of diversion, detection, deterrence, all of that have a place through the offender's journey.

And then also between events. So we have two bow ties here. The first bow tie is the first incident, and the second bow tie is the second incident. During that first incident, we want to do everything we can to detect, document data, do the data analysis. If we don't deter it, all that needs to happen, so the next time we can detect, disrupt, divert, and deter. So that's the way we think about things.

And we've done this quite a bit. These are just some of the missions that we've done with LVTs, with Gainesville Police Department, University of Florida Police Department. This includes problem warden policing projects, but also deterrence missions where, for example, in Fraternity Row, there's a lot of anti-Semitic activity, so we deployed a unit to the Jewish fraternity out there to deter activity in that area.

We've also done work with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, and then also around the UF Innovate Hub, we've deployed them and done some testing. We've also worked in other places like with Walmart down in Port St. Lucie, and then also as part of the Access 1.0 and 2.0 trials in Opelika, Alabama, Paducah, Kentucky, and then Detroit, Michigan most recently, where we had a lot of research in those.

So where we're going to go through it today is we're going to talk about these different objectives, starting with deterrence. We've done a lot of research on the units and their deterrent effect. This is just one example where we had a problem warden policing initiative in Gainesville, and what this chart really shows is that we were able to reduce incidents within 100 meters of the unit, and that was a persistent effect that we found when we deployed the unit in an area in Gainesville, Florida.

But we've done a lot of this work elsewhere. Port St. Lucie, multiple store trials, and then also just doing a lot of continuous improvement in innovation. In Opelika and Paducah, we saw crimes against persons, property, and society all decline. Paducah, we saw a little bit of a greater effect because we had more units. But the reason I bring all this up is because we have some really great panelists on today, including Ben Dugan. So Ben, what has your experience with LVTs been in terms of deterrence?

Ben Dugan:

Yeah. Thanks, Cory. Those examples are actually really good and impactful, and I think that most retailers are having the same experience across the country with LVT. The great news is that retail violence, reported violent events of retail is down significantly, and it's because of technologies like LiveView and retailers sharing information with each other and sharing it with law enforcement that's really driving down those numbers. So we all know that deterrence is about perception, and the first thing an offender might see when they get on our property is that LiveView unit. That creates an environment of control, and it lets the offender know that potentially, it is a greater risk at that store with that unit there. There are going to be consequences if they commit a crime or a violent act against someone, and I think that's playing out, and I think we're seeing more and more usage for LiveView, as it drives down not only violent crime, but theft at all different levels.

Cory Lowe:

Excellent. Thank you very much. How about you, Mike? What has your experience been with deterrence with the LVT units?

Mike Ricupero:

I definitely agree with Ben. Seeing that unit outside is going to make a criminal think twice about doing what they thought they were going to do before they saw that. And studies have shown that cameras do deter crime and violence. And when they started going up in the city on top of those CVSs, there was a lot of people that were interested what those were, so it brought a lot of attention to people, but CVS, I believe they came out with something saying that, "Hey, listen, this is LVT units. That's for crime purposes in retail stores." And it's a big part of what else is on the street too. Those cameras do help tremendously.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you very much. Yeah, there have been a lot of studies done on the effect of CCTV, including in public spaces. There's been so much research done that there's actually systematic reviews of the research, which is some of the highest forms of evidence about a solution that exists. One thing that Ben mentioned is that there's different offender groups that the LVTs are having a greater effect on, particularly around violent crime and the more sophisticated ORC actors. That's because these are very visible deterrents, right, that collect additional information that can be used as evidence during further investigation and prosecution. So you would expect to see some of your more sophisticated ORC offenders to be more sensitive to the effect.

I want to back up and talk about that risk and effort modification we try to do. What we mean by that is if we can increase the risk that negative consequences will happen to offenders. If they commit a crime somewhere, that means that we're trying to make them realize that they are going to have probation or incarceration or some kind of negative consequence. Effort just means we're going... the classic example is hardening the target to make it more difficult to commit crime in a specific place. Just want to make sure I backed up to that.

Okay. The first part is deterrence. And not every case are you going to deter everything that happens. But the next best thing you can do detect the crime so that you can begin mitigating harm. There's a lot of different signals that we're trying to detect at the LPRC, and LVTs have been a key part of all of these. We're always trying to detect aural, visual, and digital signals. Aural signals being sound, right? Very useful. Anything that goes boom is typically a bad thing, but there's some limits there, right? There's limits to how far sound will travel. If there's materials blocking the transmission of sound, that's going to be a problem.

So we also have video, which is extremely rich. Sometimes it's so rich that it can be difficult to use. I know video review is one of the most burdensome things that a lot of investigators do, but it's very difficult. There's also limits with video in terms of the field of view and what you can actually detect. Finally, there's digital signals detection, which you can pick up cell signals and things like that, and this complements all the others because you can... the information's not quite as rich, but it can be very important in terms of detecting threats. We've used LVTs for all those purposes, but this is just one example where we used LVTs at the labs here. The video's playing now, but it might be a bit choppy.

Do this. There we go. And as you can see, there's been a football game at the University of Florida, and there's some inebriated fellows jumping and dancing across the parking lot, and one of them thinks it's a great idea to take that barrier and walk off with it. So undeterred, they're drunk, disorderly, and they're removing that barrier. Fortunately, we detected it and we were able to go and recover that the next morning. And that's just a funny example in the midst of a much broader presentation. But that is for detection.

At the LPRC, we deploy them in different ways. So LVT sometimes, if we're trying to do a deterrence mission, we'll outfit them with signage, police and law enforcement signage so that people take them seriously. We have a see-get-fear model of the LPRC where we want people to see the deterrent, we want them to understand what it is and what it does, and then we want them to fear the negative consequences because it's there. If that LVT has that signage on it, the approach is that they will connect that with law enforcement and say, "Oh, if I offend in front of this, there's going to be a greater chance that I will be investigated and prosecuted." But that's not always the mission. Sometimes we just want to detect what's going on so that we can then do something about it, which is often the case with, say, blitzes and things like that that I'll come back to in a little bit.

But Mike, I want to ask you about real-time crime centers. You have extensive history in that area, but how can these units be used to detect offenses and then act upon them?

Mike Ricupero:

I think it goes back to the importance of video. Having the ability to live-stream video in real time is tremendous. It's tremendous to the officers responding to an incident. It's also tremendous post-event. In that post-event, we can gather everything that we see, getting all from the live stream and then put it into the case management system to probably hopefully catch someone or identify a witness that was there. I think in the last five years, what we're seeing post-COVID is a lot of companies like LVT are doing direct integrations into real-time crime centers, and we're taking in that video and we're doing great things with it.

Pre-COVID, we didn't see any of that, and a lot has to do with the National Real-time Crime Center Association. I give them a lot of kudos and respect, everyone that's involved in that, really sending the message out there that real-time crime centers are important. They do play a key role in the process. And when you have a company like LVT and CVS willing to come together to help us, it's just a great partnership. We didn't have this communication. Now that we have it, I know Ben, I know Matt, everyone knows each other by first name, and if we need something, you know who to call.

‍Cory Lowe:

Yes, sir. Another thing that we've talked about pretty extensively at this point is how law enforcement agencies choose to respond. If I've got two incidents and they're exact same incident, but one involves a weapon or has some other characteristics, maybe law enforcement will respond to that more quickly. How does understanding that context affect law enforcement decision-making and response?

Mike Ricupero:

Well, sometimes the 911 caller or multiple callers to an incident will get it wrong. The ability to see exactly what's going on I think is tremendous. Sometimes, my patrol experience, we've had a security holding one, let's say at a CVS, and we thought it was just not a priority, but then if we get video and a second call comes in saying that it's a violent crime going on, it's getting violent, we know to send our officers there, with a swift response. This could help get those officers out there, eliminate... not eliminate the threat, but control the threat and make sure everyone is safe. I mean, it's huge. CAD plays an important role in all this as well, reading what's going on, just the job as it comes over. But actually seeing it is a totally different thing.

Cory Lowe:

Excellent. Thank you very much for that. And just to give everyone on the call some background, at the LPRC we're doing a lot of work with Fusion platforms. Axon's Fusus is one of those, [inaudible 00:18:06] CommandCentral Aware's another one. There's several out there. But this is one we've been doing a good bit of work with, and what it allows us to do is have a lot of different sensors in a single pane of glass, and this is a similar situation as what many real-time crime centers are using where they can have all these different sensors in a single platform at one time,. LVT has an integration where it directly goes into FUSUS, so instead of me having to open multiple different windows or tabs or anything, I can view the live feed from this platform. And so it's pretty exciting stuff. Matt, I'm going to put you on the spot. We didn't talk about this earlier, but do you have anything you want to say about this integration and others like it?

Matt Kelley:

No, I think just in conversations with our customers, recognizing the value of seconds matter, and our ability to connect disparate systems together to give context to what's happening in real-time really could be a sense of comfort for the responding officer, knowing what their situation they're walking into, but then also if you're going to do a post-review of what happened, being able to have all that information and all that data available to you and not having to go hunt and peck across multiple different systems to do that post-mortem on the event is really helpful.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you, Matt.

Also, there's a huge opportunity for high-tech AI analytics and other systems that can help better detect in real-time. Matt, I'm going to turn this back over to you, but can you talk more about what LVT is doing to innovate and continuously innovate? It's pretty amazing what y'all are doing, but can you tell us a little bit about some of that?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah. We really recognize that as technologies continue to evolve, historically we've relied on humans to be in the loop to triage these events, and that can end up over-alerting or white noise, a lot of the information coming from these devices, or white noise. So leveraging AI to be able to filter out the noise, make that haystack smaller when you're looking for the needle, or remove the haystack altogether, is really important so that you can go focus on the events that matter to our customers, to the local communities, and to the people that are on the ground. And that's really where we're leveraging AI to filter out, hey, you might have different tiers of threats or responses. AI can really respond in an automated fashion for those lower-risk threats and not have that over-alerting or that information overload for your frontline associates that oftentimes have multiple different things going on that they're trying to respond to, and then it helps them prioritize what they're working on on a minute-by-minute, day-by-day, an hour-by-hour basis.

But then also we talked a little bit about how the contextual aspect of that really matters of as you're trying to respond to something, what is really happening. I mean, Mike alluded to it a little bit of the people that are calling 911 aren't necessarily trained to notice everything that's happening and giving the impactful information to the 911 person that's on the phone who can then relay that to the responding officer or the people, an AP associate that's in the back of the building that might need to go respond in one form or another. So being able to give that context and really say, "This is who's perpetrating the event, this is what's happening in real time" is something we're really excited to be able to go to through the use of agentic AI and some other new technologies that we're deploying.

‍Cory Lowe:

Excellent. Thank you very much for that, Matt. And you've set me up pretty perfectly, because we've gone through deterrence, and we've gone through detection now. The next one up is disruption. So if you can detect those people, you can't deter everything, but you can detect them. If you detect them, then you can also disrupt them. And what we're talking about here is either disrupting individual offenses or patterns of offenses being committed by organized retail offenders, habitual offenders. Whatever that might be, you can disrupt once you have that.

Ben, I'm going to turn it over to you just real quick. Can you tell us about times that you've leveraged this to disrupt criminal networks?

Ben Dugan:

Yeah. Thanks, Cory. I appreciate you putting these headlines up there for us. But looking at this case here, it's actually a great example. And first, what our strategy is at CVS using LVT is not a plug-and-play scenario where we plug it in, leave it alone, and let it deter crime, and although it does do that. We actively use those systems, try to disrupt criminal activity that we know is existing, right? If it's anyone's job, whether you're a retailer or law enforcement, if it's your job to disrupt serial crime of any kind, violence or theft, disruption should be your first and major goal, it is for us at CVS. When we gather intelligence on a pattern of criminal activity, we use systems like LiveView to disrupt it.

And in this particular circumstance, it's a truly remarkable case because these young individuals would commit 10 felonies before they would come to CVS. They would carjack people, steal cars, rob people at gunpoint, do all these serious felony charges just to steal cars and drive to a CVS in Washington DC and steal liquid tide. Sounds kind of silly, but this is the thought process of some of these youthful offenders. But they were extremely violent and they were causing chaos in our stores, and we were able to identify using intelligence that we had on the organization, leverage our LiveView technology and our relationship with the Metro Police Department to set up essentially a net around DC and the stores that were being targeted, and we were able to catch these guys live in the act.

And there was actually 13 arrested. It said three here, but ultimately arrested 13 people, but it was a tragic case involving a lot of property, car damage, a lot of injuries. People got hurt when they were stealing these cars, and involved in this activity. But in a couple of occasions, we were set up at the store, the bad guys came to the store, saw the LiveView unit, we saw them discussing it, and they went on to a different store that wasn't equipped with the same technology, maybe not a CVS. It's just been a really invaluable tool for us to disrupt crimp on a lot of different levels if you use it proactively.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you very much, Ben.

Mike, can you tell us a little bit about how you've seen these be used to disrupt crimes out in the community? Maybe not at the store itself, but in front of the store or around the store?

Mike Ricupero:

Well, CVS having those cameras, for one, this video is a great training tool for all retailers out there when you capture these incidents. What could we have done differently next time or maybe how we could avoid it all together? But what we're seeing with the LVT cameras and with the partnership with CVS and other retailers that were in the program with the New York City Police Department is that other crimes do happen outside of CVS's and other stores that we have access to video.

Now, the detective doesn't have to go in, and ask Ben or one of his colleagues, "Hey, listen, we need video for this case." They could just go into a platform like Fusus and download it directly and bring it into their case management system. Right there you're saving hours time, and you're also saving the department's money on hours that detectives would go and do a canvas from store to store. Now they would just bring up an LVT camera, go back about a day or two whenever the incident happened, and then they would see the evidence right there. It makes the investigators' and the officers' job a lot easier because we know that lately they've been under attack, watching the news, and they've been overworked. So something like this does help tremendously.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you very much for that. And I think you hit the nail on the head. One of the things I failed to mention earlier, because some retailers might be like, "Oh, one second," they can just download video whenever you want. The really cool thing about some of these fusion platforms is that it's really up to retailers on how they share and when they share and under what circumstances they share. So if you're a retailer and you want to share it all, you can do that, if your cameras are in public space. Or if you want to only share under certain circumstances, you can also do that. So some really, really cool opportunities there.

Matt, did you have anything else that you want to say about any of that?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah. I think Mike mentioned a little bit of it of being able to go back and look at data or look at video to do some things from a reactive standpoint, get better information. We're doing a lot in the realm of forensic search and be able to go look at large amounts of data based on unique identifiers. So if you have, hey, this person showed up at this time, let me go look, they were wearing a certain brand or a certain type of outfit, let me go do a forensic search across my entire network of all the platform so that I can be able to, like I mentioned, make that haystack much smaller or remove it all together. But then, also, as you're giving that information to local law enforcement, being able to package it together, gather all that information very quickly, because Ben, you could probably speak to that, the amount of time, currently, that investigators have to dig through information is astronomical. That's really what our goal is to make jobs of our customers much easier when they're doing their job and drive a ton of efficiencies into the business.

Cory Lowe:

Yeah. We did a study a few years back, it's probably been two years now, but we interviewed the leadership for several different investigations teams, and we did find that video review was the most burdensome aspect. It's the most time-consuming and inefficient part of a lot of investigations. So, very, very helpful. And you once again set me up perfectly to talk about documentation. One of the really cool things that you just mentioned is that if you can do smart search, so if I can do natural language queries saying find a person in a red shirt, well, the really cool thing is we can do that backwards as well, so we can actually document based on what a camera is seeing today, and that's opening up some really, really cool opportunities.

But to go back to this series, if we can't deter in some situations, then we can detect, and then we can potentially disrupt. Regardless of whether we disrupt, we can also document, and that's some of what you were just talking about. So in some cases, you're going to have a lot of people congregating in one area. That's going to create conditions for things to go sideways. And in some cases you may want to put a unit there to deter as much as you can, but also disrupt and then document as much as you can as well. This is just one incident where we had this happen. There was a event that was going to happen in Gainesville, and we knew that there had historically been problems at these events. So we worked with PD and we deployed one of these units out there. The aim was to deter, and the thing about deterrence is you can never be sure exactly what you deterred, but we were also able to capture some very important information as part of this when things did occur.

I'm going to go back to the plain-clothes LVTs that I mentioned earlier. Recently, we had Gainesville PD and Alachua County Sheriff's Office along with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement all work together during the National Blitz Week. And we deployed these units, but we deployed them in plain clothes. So we put them out there without all the law enforcement signage on there because we didn't want it to be super overt. The point of the mission was to apprehend repeat offenders, so we didn't want to deter them necessarily. We wanted them to be arrested and be able to prosecute them for their repeat offending and organized retail crime. So we deployed these units out to several different places. Kudos to Josh on our team for getting all these out there, but he put them at these several different locations so that we could document them, the takedowns as they occurred.

So we put the LVTs out there, we trained the cameras on the entrances and exits to these different stores. So if a takedown happened, we'd have it in a video right there as it happened. And that's just a few of the locations. We had a few more. It was across two exits on I-75 down here in Florida. One was on the north exit, one was on south exit, and we had two more stores on the north exit where we had two more units situated there, in addition to several other sensors that we deployed specifically for the Blitz.

And I think this really highlights that mission orientation. Blitz is probably that classic example of here's an operation we're working, we have a specific mission for these units, and we have specific objectives that we're trying to achieve, and that's what we did here. This is just another clip or another screenshot. This is from CommandCenter Aware, which we also used during that Blitz.

Mike, Ben, did y'all have anything else that y'all wanted to say about documentation that we haven't already said?

Ben Dugan:

No, I think you covered it pretty well. I'm sorry, Mike, go ahead.

Mike Ricupero:

I bet I was about to give one of your guys, Sal, a lot of credit for that, those blitzes. Sal does a great job doing those and... That intelligence, that's where it happens. You know where they're going to strike most likely. You gather all that. And the blitzes have been very effective, even for Rite Aid with Doug. Doug moved on. Now he doesn't work for Rite Aid anymore, but Doug would do these blitzes, and they would show me these images and stuff like that, and they did very good intel on these things, and I give them a lot of credit for what they did out there.

Ben Dugan:

I think Matt touched on it a minute ago, really well. We talked about efficiency, saving investigative time and helping us document. Certainly that comes into play for us. Anything that can save us and accelerate enforcement actions by law enforcement, where we're able to move quicker using our LV units. Now, one example, I hate to be the war story guy, but one case comes to mind immediately is we were getting really victimized in Las Vegas on thefts that were occurring between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and come to find out, and through interviewing some of the offenders that they meet in public places, by the way, and by the way, it's pretty common. A lot of fences don't like their [inaudible 00:33:57] coming to their business, so they like to meet in big public places. And what are they normally? Shopping centers, right?

So believe it or not, we gathered more intelligence by partnering with the retailer that was not a victim, but their parking lot was being used to facilitate the theft and sale of all these products. So essentially, we reverse-engineered, we got cooperation from one of the home-improvement retailers that shared their LiveView with us, and every booster that we were looking for, every car that we were looking for, showed up under the LiveView. We were able to document and get out there and get law enforcement to accelerate their enforcement action and save us a bunch of time and money. So it's a matter of intel sharing and documentation. Again, at a lot of different levels, not just, like, homeless people and violence, local violence. It can be used at a much, much higher level.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you. That's a great story there, Ben. Pretty unique.

Ben Dugan:

My last one. Won't [inaudible 00:34:54].

Cory Lowe:

No, please give us more. So documentation is great, but documentation sets you up for this final D in this series. We're going to come back to diversion and talk about that a little bit more. But data analysis,. Once you've documented these incidents or used the units to document incidents, you can actually begin to do some data analysis, using the platform itself and the software that they offer over there. So at the LPRC, we have many different units that we have deployed around our labs and then also out in the community. And what we can do is we can actually begin to understand where some of our problems are happening by looking at the detections and how frequent they are. We don't use some of the functionality as much like understanding security response, but we can also see how long it took to close out a security alert and things like that.

So not only do you get an idea of where is stuff happening, where do I need to put my resources, but I can also begin to understand how these are being responded to as well. So all very, very helpful. And Matt actually touched on some of this earlier with doing some of the data analysis, but all of this can really, really help improve programs overall when you can do those retrospectives and incident reviews and things like that to understand where you can improve upon things. Matt, you covered a lot of that earlier, but is there anything else that you want to say about the data analysis aspect here?

‍Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, all this video or data points that you can leverage to teach, coach, and train your frontline associates, reinforce processes and show them what good looks like versus not-so-good looks like, and then take what you learned in the good, apply it to the bad, and raise the average ball. So if you think about standardization of processes, understanding why you're doing what you're doing, and reinforcing that with your frontline associates, all of these things can be a great tool to use.

Cory Lowe:

Excellent, thank you very much. The last D that we are coming back to, right? We can think sequentially about all of these. In the first case, we want to affect the risk and protective factors for individuals to commit crime. That's the first thing that we can do. But barring our ability to affect an individual's propensity to commit crime, then we get into deterring, detecting, disrupting, document, and doing data analysis.

We wanted to come back to diversion at the end because this is one that's a little bit trickier to understand in retail settings, but I think Ben has some really good examples. But when we talk about diversion, we're talking about diverting people from a life of crime or from crime itself, from that propensity to commit crime. One of the things that we know is a risk factor for youths particularly, but also communities as a whole, is when a community is disorganized, when the community lacks bonds among its community members and also trust among its community members as well as stakeholders, you're going to have a lot more problems because they can't work together effectively. That's what we call collective efficacy in criminology.

One of the things that we've been exploring a lot across many different cities, including Gainesville, but also Port St. Lucie and Detroit and Paducah and Opelika and all these different places, is how do we use these platforms to bring different stakeholders together so they can establish or reestablish social order and control and also collect efficacy in an area. So one project that I can talk about is a project we did down in Port St. Lucie with a retailer and then also with law enforcement. And one of the things that we saw when we looked at the store incidents versus what the police department knew is that there's a huge gap there. So there was incidents that were happening at these retail stores, and that the retailer was aware of, and that was pretty much always... they had a lot more that they knew about than PD knew about, and our goal was to kind of close that gap and provide visibility to both.

And so we deployed these units to try to understand how that would actually improve collaboration between those groups. Just as an interesting aside, one of the things we found is you can see for the stores where there's fewer incidents, there's actually less variability in the amount [inaudible 00:39:33] and the difference between what PD knew and what the retailer knew. So what that means is that areas with higher crime may actually have less-accurate reporting. When you have less-accurate reporting, you're going to have reduced severity on law enforcement side, and then also that may end up making it a lower priority because law enforcement simply doesn't realize how bad the problem is. But if we can work together, everyone can understand each other, and then work together better.

So I'm going to open this up to all of you. And Ben, I'm going to kick it over to you first, but how can these units and this collaboration really help to divert people from crime?

Ben Dugan:

Yeah. I'm glad you included this, Cory. I think it's a great point. Listen, deploying these devices, the more intelligence that we gather and that we share with one another, we can better understand the root causes of retail crime. And then it empowers us to better-support alternative sentencing for people that need drug and alcohol treatment or mental health treatment or homeless shelters. And I do support and most of the retail community does support those things. However, the flip side of that coin is we also have to gather intelligence and make sure that the right people are going to gym, because in certain circumstances, that is the best option, to protect our business and our people.

Cory Lowe:

I thank you for that. Mike, Matt, do you have anything else about how we can use these to promote social order and maybe divert more people from this life of crime?

‍Mike Ricupero:

When I went out to try to integrate businesses during the program that we had in New York City, I would go out there and I would speak to the community. And their questions, I would answer their questions, and I would give them real answers. I wasn't making anything up. I would give them the answers, not what they want to hear but the truth. So we were being 100% transparent. And what I found out, that they actually wanted us to have access to their cameras, the majority of them. Some of them were, like, Big Brotherish a little bit, but I'm like, "Hey, listen, there's a registry part of this. If you don't want that, you could be part of the registry, which is very effective as well when it comes to the data."

But now that I'm retired, I could speak freely, and a lot of this stuff goes down to recidivism. Most of these criminals that are going into these retail stores, it's not their first time. It's their 10th, 20, 30. Some have like 50 arrests. I've seen the ones that we've helped catch at the Crime Center assisted with the GPS tracker devices, I've seen some people with over 50 arrests, and that shouldn't be happening. We should get people more help out there that need it and give them the services they need so they don't have to do this, a life of crime. That's what basically it's coming down to.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you very much for that, Mike. And Ben, so we've spent this entire time talking about crime. Retail is supposed to be a place, it's a lot more fun and it's a lot more satisfying. It's supposed to be a place where people buy stuff, not where crime's occurring. So I always want to make sure that we're thinking about that customer, and everyone else who's in a place for legitimate reasons. At the LPRC, we're always working on balancing, deterring what we call the red guest and then enabling the green guest. And what we're talking about here as a red guest is that individual who is in a place for illegitimate purposes or illegal purposes. That might be to hurt people, steal property, whatever that might be. They're there with malintent. The green guest or the green place user is there to work, vend, manage, shop, because that's what we really want happening in retail stores, all of those good things that represent the good in the world. So my question is, to y'all, how can the LVTs be leveraged for all these good things to promote the good in a place?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think for me, it's more about what I've seen in customer conversations and what I know to be true as a former practitioner is our customers want to know that you're investing in their safety, you're investing in providing them with a good shopping experience, and having an overt measure that's proactive in the parking lot to try to divert, deter activity from happening out there. Because everything starts in the parking lot for that customer, once they put their car in park and open that car door.

So their ability to see that you're making an investment as a retailer in their safety and their security matters a lot to them. They're going to vote or shop with their dollars. So their dollars dictate how you're improving their shopping experience. I also want to go back to the question that you posed earlier on the social order aspect of it. Bad actors talk to each other just as much as green actors do, right? So that social network of, "Hey, I got caught here," or "They're doing XYZ to prevent this type of activity from happening," will make its way across the red actor community as well. So it works both ways.

Cory Lowe:

Yes. That's what we call vicarious deterrence in criminology, where because those bad actors all talk, they hear about the successes and failures of their co-offenders or their peers, and that does have a good impact. I love that response, Matt. That's a good peak point there.

How else are these being leveraged? Ben, did you have anything further on that?

Ben Dugan:

Matt, that was a great answer , I think I agree with that. I'll piggyback a little bit and say anything that's frictionless that provides a sense of security and safety is good. Retailers are always fighting this battle on how to protect our product, and how to do different things to make sure our product is available for our customers who want to come in and shop and they're looking for healthcare items or food or clothing or whatever they might need, and we exist to serve those communities.

So everything that we do that's frictionless, that creates an environment that makes them feel good about their shopping experience, we're all about. I mean, I know that other retailers can use LiveViews for how customers behave in the parking lot and where they drive in and where they park, and is there a cart available for them to get a cart and go inside the store and get what they need. A lot of different retailers use this technology a lot of different ways to make sure we're always improving the customer experience, with of course the number one objective around safety.

‍Cory Lowe:

Excellent. And speaking of safety, that's actually been a big point of the research that we've done and continue to do around these mobile protective units. So when we did the access 1.0 Opelika, Alabama, Paducah, Kentucky, where we deployed all those units to understand the deterrent effect, which we talked about earlier, we also want to understand how it affected perceived risk of victimization, feelings of safety, and things like that.

So we asked a series of questions and what I just want you to see, and we had several hundred respondents to this survey with community members, retail employees, retail managers and leaders, and then also law enforcement. And we asked them, do you agree or disagree during the day I would feel safer shopping the stores that have LVT units than stores that do not? And you can see the majority said that they somewhat agreed or strongly agreed, just looking at the green.

The reason I call this out is because you're going to see several more charts just like this. So the next question we also said, at night, because we know there's differences, we know that daytime versus nighttime can affect perceived risk of victimization and feelings of safety, so we also asked that question. You start to see that the percentage that said they somewhat agree or strongly agree bumped up some more, and I'll just go back and forth between those little bit. You can see with the community members and retail managers and leaders, that bumps up quite a bit there.

Another question that we asked, another set of questions we asked is we asked about loved ones, because we know that when we ask men, oftentimes they're not honest about their perceived risk of victimization or feelings about safety and things like that. So to get at some of that, we ask another question, which is, at night, I would feel more comfortable if a loved one shopped at a store with an LVT than a store without one. And you can see that this goes up pretty tremendously, to where greater than 80% in every category, so that they somewhat agreed or strongly agreed with that statement.

We also asked in terms of would you rather park closer or farther away to the unit? More people said that they would rather park closer to the unit than farther away. And we just asked all these questions because we really want to understand, is this going to disrupt or promote the green guest experience? And then of course, if a loved one, we asked the same thing, if they went to a parking lot and had an LVT at night, would you want them to park closer or farther away, and they once again said closer, so as close as possible or somewhat close. Those are all the safety things that we always want to be focused on, promoting as safe spaces for all of our green guests, the shoppers, workers, managers, everyone, using that space for the right reasons.

But they're not limited to just those use cases. There's a lot that we are using them for beyond that. We can understand vehicle and foot traffic patterns. This is one of the cameras that we have deployed on the east side of town as part of research. And really, all we're using it for is to understand foot traffic and vehicle traffic patterns for research purposes. It's less about deterring in this situation and it's more about just gathering intelligence. And we can use the cameras on LVTs to do that.

Cart detection, this is something Ben mentioned. If I'm wanting to detect, is the cart corral full? Does it need to be attended to? You could detect that with the right analytics, using the cameras on them. We need to get outside of the box with some of this stuff. Curbside vehicle detection has a car pulled into that area that we should be aware of, whether they are or are not a curbside customer.

We also did a project on fire lane parking, which is ultimately a safety issue, but we deployed a unit out there to see if people would stop parking in this, in the fire lane, and we did see a decline in that post deployment. But there's a thousand other things. And we think outside the box, you could use these for a lot of different things. I mean, you could use it to make announcements in a parking lot if you wanted to, but a ton of different options.

Matt, did you have anything else that you want to say about that?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I think that's an interesting thing is challenging your solution providers to be a Swiss Army knife rather than just a corkscrew, and think of outside the box of different cross-functional partners. That way, your budgets are expanding because as budgets get tighter and tighter, you're going to get questioned more and more, why are we making this investment on a year-over-year basis, whether it's on the capital expenditure side or the opera operations expense side. Taking a partner cross-functionally to figure out use cases to apply technology to areas they haven't normally been is something that I've found, in previous experience and in my conversations with our current customers, really opens up a lot of budget, makes it easier to sell projects when you're going to do that. So that's something that I would challenge the retail industry to start to do more and more.

Cory Lowe:

Yes, value engineering is always going to be very, very important. The more use cases you have for a solution, the more value propositions that you can find for a solution, the better off you'll be.

Ben, Mike, did you have anything further y'all want to say about that?

Ben Dugan:

No, I think you covered it really well. I mean, that's a great point. The more you can sell technology to the business as an operational benefit, the stronger your case is going to be in trying to get some of these things secured or getting funding for some of these initiatives.

Cory Lowe:

Fantastic. So at this point, we're coming down the homestretch. If anyone has any questions, please put those in the Q&A. We're wrapping up here, but we have a Q&A for a reason, so if you have any questions, be sure to put them there in the Q&A section. Do not see any currently, but let me go over to the chat, see if anyone has put that in here. Nope, not there either.

I did want to end, while people are thinking about their questions and putting it in the Q&A, I did want to end by just saying and thanking Ben for your partnership. We enjoy working with your organization and everything that we're doing together. This is a community and we can't do it without our partnership with folks like you. Mike, same thing to you. Everything that we've done together has been a fantastic experience. And then finally, LVT and Matt, thank you for everything that we continue to work together on and continue to innovate and work through a lot of this stuff together. So that's been a very good partnership and look forward to many more years.

Mike Ricupero:

Thank you, Cory. Appreciate it too.

‍Cory Lowe:

Oh, we have some questions. So, can these be integrated with centralized vision? Matt, can you answer that question?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah, I mean it's always... resources are limited just like with retailers, and we take it out on a case-by-case basis on what strategic partners from a technology standpoint we integrate with. We're always open to conversations, so if you're a customer of LVTs and you have another strategic partner that you think an implementation would benefit your business from, don't hesitate to reach out and let us know what that is, and we'll have a conversation about why that is and what impact it would make for your business.

Cory Lowe:

Thank you. There's another question that says, is this an integration with LVT? If you could provide a little bit more context there, we can definitely answer that question for you. Anyone else have any other questions? Thank you, attendee that says, "Very, very informative." We appreciate your attendance.

All right, we'll give it another minute for any other questions. But gentlemen, once again, thank you for joining us today.

It's looking like there's not any more questions though. So everyone, thank you for joining us today. It's been a fantastic presentation. Done a ton of research on these units. Going to continue to do more, not only on this, but on everything else that the LPRC is doing. So thank you all for attending, and for attending this webinar specifically. We look forward to seeing you in our next event or webinar, podcast, whatever we see you at. Thank you very much.

‍Mike Ricupero:

Thank you.

Matt Kelley:

Thanks, guys.