Understanding Retail Security Insights

Chris Reesa 

Welcome to Retail Retold, the stories behind how that store landed in your neighborhood. I'm Chris Ressa, in conversation with the people and stories shaping retail and real estate, brought to you by DLC. Welcome to Retail Retold, everyone. Today I'm here with Mark Bradshaw, Vice President of Property Management at DLC and Paul Ganz, Vice President of Business Market Development at LVT LiveView Technologies. Welcome to the show guys.

Mark Bradshaw 

Thank you, Chris.

Paul Ganz 

Happy to be here Chris.

Chris Reesa 

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So why don't we start, everyone tell a little bit about themselves. We'll start with you, Paul.

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Paul Ganz 

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Yeah, I have an interesting journey for sure. I started my career off as a police officer and I did that for 13 years and then had to make a career change due to an injury and got into retail loss prevention and worked for some big box retailers and some small specialty retailers and then got into some supply chain work, which I had never experienced before. And then spent the last 16 years of my career was at Home Depot where I was over a variety of different functions there from supply chain and store manager and district manager and then back into supply chain and then left to become a chief security officer for a company called Primo Brands. And now I'm with LVT.

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Chris Reesa 

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Very cool. Mark?

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Mark Bradshaw 

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So I am the vice president of property management, as you said, for DLC. Been with DLC for coming up on four years now. I've got a little over 20 years experience in the commercial real estate world, doing everything from construction project management to retail and office and industrial medical property management. And currently I'm responsible for half of the DLC's commercial portfolio.

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Chris Reesa 

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Awesome. So most of the listeners know what DLC is and what we do. Paul, why don't you give us a little bit about who LVT is and what you guys all do?

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Paul Ganz 

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LVT is when you think about technology and you think about the space of protecting people and environments, LVT took a unique approach and developed a tower. Everybody thinks about the parking lot tower, which we call the MSU, which was a way for us to help provide camera technology into places that maybe you just can't put a camera and not only raise awareness about the camera being there on the preventative side, but also be able to record information for really good analytics and investigative purposes. From there, they have taken that technology and evolved into other form factors as they call it, which are other unique ways for us to offer a total site management solution to protecting whether it be commercial sites, whether it be residential locations, parking lots, remote areas, places that you don't have any infrastructure using certain different technologies to be able to communicate and to bring the best technology possible to the customers where they need it and when they need it to provide a safe environment.

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Chris Reesa 

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Let's start from a high level in the validity of deterrence. You have a lot of experience from being a police officer to being in loss prevention and now with a security technology company. I think there's some people out there who are like, "Does deterrence really work?" I come from a place like. My dad grew up in a tougher neighborhood and he didn't lock his door. And I was like, "Dad, why aren't you locking the door? Why didn't you lock the door to your house when you were growing up?" He goes, "Because if they want to get in, they're going to get in, Chris. The lock's not going to prevent them from getting in." So for those who are suspect on deterrence, walk us through why deterrence actually works.

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Paul Ganz 

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Sure. So it's funny, it's actually the most difficult thing to validate or prove when you think about an ROI conversation. How do I put a value on something that never happened? And the argument of the conversation really needs to revolve around what are the risk factors that you're concerned about? What are the things that you have anxiety or people say what keeps you up at night? And then how can you deploy things to mitigate that or reduce that risk? When you talk about doing that, what ends up happening is that you create a picture of, if I do this, then this won't happen, which is great, but it's very difficult to prove the value of that statement. And so when I think about deterrence today, when I think about what I believed in all the years of me helping develop strategies for different companies I worked for, was what are the known factors?
What are the things that I absolutely know that I am at risk for experiencing and how do I stop those from making me a less likely target? How do I make what they call harden the environment, if you will, how do I make sure that I'm not the one they choose to do that in? So that was step one. And then step two is how do you validate it? And that's where you look at, lack of a better word, you think about the theory of when crime occurs, you talk about that bang effect. So you have the bang, which when everything happens, and the goal is to get as far left of that as possible because I don't want to be experiencing whatever those things may be. And everybody can articulate the message about how they either respond to or react to an event, but it's more about how do I make sure the event never happens to begin with?
And that's where technology, that's where people, training, process, environmental design, all those things come into place. So you have to talk about first, what are you afraid of?

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Chris Reesa 

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So what is LiveView? The first piece of the technology was the camera technology in the parking lot, right? And so what incited that to be created and where is that in its life cycle today as far as deployed across America?

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Paul Ganz 

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So it was originally, the founders developed it in the garage. They built it, they saw a need. 

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Chris Reesa 

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What was the need? Where did this need come from? What was going on that created a need?

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Paul Ganz 

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Yeah, I think it was more of just the evaluation of, there was a lot of noise around construction thefts and construction site. There was a lot of growth and a lot of booming around the country, especially. They're founded and based out of Salt Lake City, Utah or American Fork, Utah is where they're at. And just tons of growth and tons of opportunity. They saw a gap, if you will, in the security infrastructure because construction sites don't have power. When I say power, they don't have, they have a construction trailer, but the site itself doesn't have that good level of protection. You're not going to go put fencing up. You weren't going to go create all these other, going back to the word I used earlier, the hardening environment, they weren't thinking that way. So when they sat around, they developed this tower - And

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Chris Reesa 

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This was the time when people really started stealing copper. Stuff like that, right?

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Paul Ganz 

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Yes. I mean, there were just some of the things that were not the normal targets were becoming targets and you had to become more innovative. And so when they sat down and developed the tower, it was very simple. It was a very, well, I say simple. I wasn't there when they designed it, but the concept made a lot of sense is to put something into a remote location that could operate on its own technology and to provide a communication tool back to wherever they felt it needed to go, whether it be law enforcement or to some type of recording device and to create a prevention technique of a flashing light and a camera and let people know that they're being watched. That was how it started and it's evolved into, I mean, there are cameras all over the United States, technology using these towers. And as I talked earlier, they've evolved into other form factors to even make it even more useful in other use cases that they originally did not design for.

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Chris Reesa 

Mark, you've spent a lot of time from the property management side being a deterrent expert working with municipalities, security companies, technology companies to make properties as safe as they can be for customers. What's your take on deterrence as a validating deterrence as a protocol for, in our case, shopping center owners? I

Mark Bradshaw :

Think it is a very important part of a holistic approach to security. It's not a simple answer. It's not just a one, it's like, "Hey, let's just do some deterrence from the live view units and this will stop all of your issues." You've got to have some reactive other components to that that will help assist in the deterrence. So for an example, the live view system is very good at noticing that there are people loitering, right? It's got some components. This is how we use it at some of our centers where it can say, "Hey, there are people gathering for more than a certain period of time in a certain area and it will flash lights and send notices. And we've got some really interesting footage of it acting as a deterrent, as these mobile units getting people to disperse from an area." Now, there's also instances where they're used to that and so they're not moving now.

Well, that's where the system can notify our onsite guards who might be on the other side of the shopping center. It might actually be patrolling to or roving to another site. They get alerted, they can come back and now there's a physical confrontation of, "Hey, you guys need to scatter." So those are the kinds of deterrents that we use. And we use lots of other ways to, you speak of hardening a site, we try to lift lines of sight, lift tree lines, eliminate hiding places, all those kinds of things to make our centers safer. But I think there's not just a simple one pronged answer. You've got to hit it from every possible angle.

Chris Reesa:

And so the live view mount, camera technology, flashing lights, but Mark started to speak about that it does some other things. It has alerts. Can you go a little bit more about what it does?

Paul Ganz 

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Sure, sure. So what's interesting is what makes the LVT towers unique is the fact that, to what you spoke to, is it can identify what it believes to be suspicious behaviors or things that it's been told not to allow, meaning congregation or people doing loitering or doing things they shouldn't be doing or entering areas they shouldn't be in. And it takes that information and it utilizes technology to where initially it will do what it's designed to do, which in most cases will have some type of flashing light. It will make a noise, if you will. It will obviously call attention to itself that you're in an area that you shouldn't be in, and then will progress to a talk down where it'll use AI technology to actually speak down to the individual identifying by the clothing they're wearing and tell them to leave an area they're in an unauthorized location or to disperse, whatever that may look like.
And it gives an opportunity for that to occur. And then if that doesn't happen, then it will escalate to the next level, which will notify a command center. It'll notify, it'll send an alert to the individual management group or whoever's overseeing that tower specifically with next step directions, which would be either maybe they engage through the speaker or they contact law enforcement or whatever, maybe contact a local guard company, whatever it is that their protocols are done. And what's very unique about this, which made me think about when you were talking is if you think about the car alarms of the 80s, car alarms would go off in the early days, people would react to a car alarm. Oh, somebody's car alarm was going off. Now today, if a car alarm goes off, people are probably calling the police saying, "Hey, there's a noise going off in my parking lot. Can you come solve it?"

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Chris Reesa 

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Are people using the car alarm to just try and find their car? Where are we in the parking lot?

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Paul Ganz

Correct. So where the uniqueness comes in with what our MSUs are doing is they're avoiding to be just become that car alarm. They are smart, they are engaging and they are providing not only resource information about how they can improve security, but also managing that specific event to eliminate it from escalating.

Chris Reesa 

For those who don't know, the acronym MSU, what does MSU stand for?

Paul Ganz 

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I'm sorry. It's a mobile security unit or in this case it's our towers.

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Chris Reesa 

So you mentioned one of the hottest buzzwords a couple times now, AI. So talk to us about, let's talk about AI in the field from a security perspective and then I'm going to bring us off track after that. 

Paul Ganz 

Okay. Yeah, look, so I would tell you it is probably the biggest challenge that is out there right now in the security industry. And even stepping aside from even the LVT role that I'm in today, thinking about how do you integrate AI into your security strategy? And then who do you partner with and what do you believe, what don't you believe, what do you trust? And really understand what its limitations are and capabilities are and to bring that into a smart application within the world of security. Where will it work and where will it not? And then more importantly is don't over commit. Test the waters. One thing that's very impressive about what I, and yes, I can say as a part of LVT, but is that they're making sure that the technologies that we integrate into our towers and bring to market actually meet the expectations of what we want them to do.
And not every bit of AI that's being integrated into the security world is doing that. And so there's a lot of anxiety out there. There's a lot of leaders who are afraid to even broach into the world of bringing AI into the workplace or the security workplace because they don't understand it or they're not sure yet what the risks are of it. So there's a lot of questions yet to be answered.

Chris Reesa 

How is, just to take a step back, LVT corporately, forget about on the security side, are you guys using AI like Copilot, Claude or something like that in your daily workflows?

Paul Ganz 

Yeah. I mean, we utilize it like you would expect. I mean, there's a lot of validation, a lot of learning, compiling of information, but the human factor and the elements of the genius of the folks that were creating the different technologies are still at play. And we try to, again, manage the amount of exposure or utilization like every organization's trying to do today to understand the balance between human work effort and what AI can solve.

Chris Reesa 

What about Mark? How often are you in Copilot or AI or something?

Mark Bradshaw 

Been using it a lot more recently for sure to try to get through lots of challenging workloads, but do Claude, Gemini, Copilot, multiple platforms.

Chris Reesa 

We have a few applications we're using at DLC for a bunch of different things. What's been your experience with it? Have you found it to be useful?

Mark Bradshaw 

I've found it to be very useful. Specifically the Claude Cowork has been very helpful. It's not perfect. Certainly still need human eyes to verify and double check things, but it's been very helpful in kind of streamlining processes and saving me a lot of finger work on the keyboard.

Chris Reesa 

So we talked about it's hard to put an ROI on something that didn't happen, right? We talked a little bit about AI, but I think the next piece about security and deterrence is really about partnerships and relationships. So why don't you two talk about the partnership of DLC and LVT to start and we'll go from there.

Mark Bradshaw 

So when I first came to DLC, we had several of the LiveView mobile units at the shopping centers. I had never used the technology before and I was kind of a little bit skeptical, but we have found it, I have found them to be very helpful, not only from a security standpoint, but from property management standpoint where we have properties spread out. We have managers that manage assets in states that they don't live in to give us eyes on our. We can put eyes on our own shopping centers. We can check in on our vendors. The resolution and the ability to pan, tilt and zoom on the cameras remotely has given the property managers at DLC the ability, those that have them on the properties that we have them on, to monitor our centers, to double check vendors, to check on work, to monitor snowstorms.
It's given us a lot beyond the security capabilities. The resolution I have found to be very helpful. There's a fisheye component that's available that I've had installed on all of the units that we use because it gives you a 360 degree view and flattens out and is very helpful. So that was kind of where my exposure began with LiveView. And as I started to learn the capabilities of the units, LiveView continued to add capabilities, adding some of these AI components that allow you to have this passive security component where it's monitoring things for you. It's notifying your security team without you having to stare at the computer and watch these cameras. So that was kind of where my relationship with LiveView and DLC's relationship even kind of started to grow. And LiveView now comes to us and says, "Hey, here's some of our new products.
What do you think?" 

We've been allowed to beta and test some of their new products at some of our centers, including the license plate readers and some of these other things to help us monitor and make sure that we keep our centers as safe as they possibly can be.

Paul Ganz 

Yeah. I would tell you, look, just learning as my time with LVT is obviously short, I spent some time learning more about the relationship with DLC and the things that the team has done to really grow and support your needs and learn from your needs and learn from how we can improve the form factors, how we can improve what the technology is doing. And you made a really good point is that it's not just a security camera. It can be utilized in components of operations every day. Thinking about weather, thinking about events that you are not necessarily involved in, but you capture some information about and know how to react to for future cases. But it's really been a great journey and I know that as we continue to provide you different technologies, we are looking forward to hearing more about how they work for you and how we continue to evolve and grow that relationship. And that's what it is. It's all about a relationship.

Chris Reesa 

Super helpful. So let's bridge that to going from the partnership of security technology and property owner and moving that to the relationship with local government and local law enforcement. And how does that relationship all work?

Mark Bradshaw 

So this is one that's certainly close to my heart. There's a lot of footwork and a lot of handshaking and kissing babies, as I like to say, that goes on at our shopping centers. We put a lot of effort into building the relationships with the community in all of our locales, everywhere we have shopping centers. It's beyond as a property manager, you're supposed to know your tenants, you're supposed to know your vendors, but getting out and going and shaking the hand of the police officers. If you see an officer on site, going over and starting that relationship, that conversation, "Hey officer, I'm the property manager here. What are you seeing out here? How could we help you? Are there things going on that you see that as the landlord we might be able to improve upon?" And then taking those short conversations and building them into something bigger, meet the captains, meet the majors, even responding to community concerns.

Quite frequently as property managers, we will get contacted by local HOAs, local people in the community who see a leasing sign and say, "Hey, I've got a problem here." And they'll call and the message will get forwarded to us and responding to those, taking every one of those complaints to heart because these are your customers, these are the people you rely on. We operate in a very unique space where these are private properties, but we're open to the public. We want the community to come. That's what we're there for. And so you want to give them the best experience possible, so you have to take that feedback and getting out there and meeting the community, which we do, going to the HOA meetings, participating with walkthroughs with local politicians when they reach out, going and meeting the police captains when they say, "Hey, there's some things going on at the center we think we can improve on.

We like your partnership. Will you come meet us?" I mean, Chris, we've spent some time going out and shaking hands with the local community and the politicians. And we've had walks with 70 to 100 different people from the local community, the police, to go out and make sure that everyone there, the tenants, the customers, everyone knows that as landlords, we care about our assets. And LiveView has begun to participate in those conversations with us. They have joined us for some of these walks with the police and with the community to go into our centers and LiveView can get the feedback directly from the police officers who can see these cameras. We're like, "Hey, we've got some issues over here. Officer, take a look at this." And they can say, "Hey, you know what? We got some blind spots. Let's move these mobile cameras because they're mobile.
We can move this to a different location, maybe over at one of our shopping centers." So LiveView has been a great partner in joining us for these community outreach efforts and meeting with the police and taking the feedback from the police, hearing from them, this is where you've got gaps in your system. It's been a tremendous effort to build these relationships between all of us.

Paul Ganz 

If I could just quickly comment on that from being former law enforcement, I will tell you that nothing is more important than the relationship you have with the communities that you are supporting. And what you described is really a critical element of that because when crimes happen and when things happen that the community's expecting a response and support, it's nice to have resources that can provide some of that evidence, some of that deterrence, going back to that word, to minimize the risk of it happening in a certain area. But when it does happen, for law enforcement to know they have a good partner and somebody that can help them solve the issue and come up with a strategy around how do you move technology or how do you add technology or how do you articulate a message differently or educate the community on what they could do differently?
Times have completely evolved and changed as we think about the risk factors that exist. And the more that we are able to build that connection with law enforcement, the more that they feel like they have a partner, the more likely they are going to be to help try and solve problems with you as well and to work together. That's all they want is they want a partner.

Chris Reesa 

And LVT has been super helpful to law enforcement across the country. Can you give some examples of what you guys do to help law enforcement that they found super critical?

Paul Ganz 

Yeah. I mean, I think first and foremost, the easiest thing to revert to is just there's been areas that they've had opportunities of criminal activity that they need help in areas that maybe are not owned by anybody. One of the most recent ones that we just talked about was in California, the sheriff's department needed help with dumping and it's vacant land. It's county land, but they have no idea who the owner is or what the issue is. And they were having issues of, they say millions of dollars worth of cleanup activities that they were having to navigate through because they had no way of catching these individuals or preventing it. And through partnership with LVT and deploying towers in these high risk areas -

Chris Reesa 

Got them on camera.

Paul Ganz

Got them on camera, identified the tags, identify who the people these actors are, these bad actors are, and the activities have stopped. We were talking to one of the deputies when it was at our last conference with them and he was even talking about they can't get there quick enough. If somebody dialed 911, say there's somebody dumping, by the time they got a deputy there, they'd be long gone. And so having the LVT towers there, not only to deter, but also to capture the evidence was a huge, huge win for them. It's something they are extremely proud of. And we're talking thousands upon thousands of acres. We're not just talking a parking lot.

Chris Reesa 

And does LVT, let's call it at a, we're talking about retail real estate at a shopping center. If there's a crime that happens at a shopping center, does LVT often provide camera footage to law enforcement?

Paul Ganz 

Yes. Generally not direct. Usually it has to go through that property owner or property management. It is not something, while we want to be supportive and provide the information, the data itself, we've got to make sure that it's our partner that is the one who's releasing that information and not LVT.

Mark Bradshaw 

Got it. And that is something that we looked at very closely as a company. There is a platform called Fusus that has been integrated by multiple police jurisdictions around the country. And it allows for in the moment of an actual incident of a police pursuit, if you will, while there is a command center that is watching the public cameras to help the police in a reaction to getting the police to a 911 call, if you will. And through the Fusus platform, there is the ability to integrate private cameras, but they're only allowed to be used in the event. It's not constantly watching, if you will, right? It's not just unfeathered access. It is in the event that there is an issue, they can go and access those live view units. And so the live views, if they're given permission, have the capability of being tied into that Fusus platform, which allows the police to have direct access for crime fighting.

Chris Reesa 

So we've talked about deterrence, we've talked about AI, we've talked about relationship between security company, property owner and law enforcement. What haven't we talked about that we should be talking about?

Paul Ganz 

Well, I hate to bring us back to the conversation, but around AI or technology in general, I would tell you that there needs to be good conversation and really good understanding of how do we deploy the right technology in the right places to do the right thing to support a welcomed environment. You speak about a shopping center is guaranteed public access. We want people to come there. We want them to feel safe. We want them to choose your shopping centers because they feel safe. And you want to make them realize that you are doing the steps in partnership with whether it be a technology provider or things you're doing with how you're building the properties to welcome them. And sometimes when there's too much technology deployed or when there's nothing that they're used to seeing deployed, people may become hesitant to want to go shop there or go there.
They don't feel safe there. They know the communities better than we do sometimes. And so it's a nice balance. And that's the challenge I would offer is making sure that we are leveraging the right balance of protecting our properties, protecting our customers, protecting the environment, and making sure that we are doing it in a metered effect or approach so that it doesn't overwhelm or make people feel like they're entering an unsafe area. It can have a counter effect. If you overdo it, then all of a sudden people think that they're not in a safe place. Why do you need all these cameras? So you got to find that balance and have a really good strategy.

Chris Reesa 

So totally agree. Give everyone, you mentioned AI not meeting the expectations or AI not delivering on the expectations of humans for what they want it to do. For those who aren't deep in the security technology world, what are some things people are talking about? What is the panacea moment of what is AI going to do that's going to change the game? It's not there yet, but people in the security world are waiting for AI to do.

Paul Ganz 

Yeah, sure. Well, look, so first and foremost, let me hit with that first what AI is doing really well, which is there was a time when, and you see you can buy memes or video of it, you'll see a security guard or somebody in a security office staring at a hundred monitors recording data. I mean, the old days of VCRs and digital recording, right? And that's great, but what do you look for? And how do you identify the uniqueness of whatever actions are happening to make that monitor be the one you want to look at versus the one that's right in front of you? So what AI is doing really well is able to identify behaviors or activities that we've identified saying, "Hey, we don't want that to occur." Loitering, people reaching into cabinets, people walking where they shouldn't belong, dwelling in an area, entering places they don't belong, all of those things you can tell AI to, "Hey, if that happens, there should be an alert." And you've seen those alerts, you see the red squares, but the uniqueness of it is that information comes directly to that person monitoring to be able to take whatever action necessary versus staring at an endless wall of cameras.
So that is a value statement of the direction it's going. And where we want AI to get to, which it's not able to do today, is do something with that, meaning it's learning from those behaviors. It's learning how to be better at identifying those activities, but then what? And that's the big question. I personally don't think there'll be a time, and I'll put this out there, I don't see a 911 dispatcher taking a phone call. From AI and dispatching law enforcement without a human intervention. But they can get pretty close. They can get some really good information captured and details captured and articulate a good, clean message that would go to a 911 operator so they could get what they need to know at that very moment to dispatch law enforcement. That'd be a huge win. It's not there yet. I think additionally, I think about AI being able to tell you, kind of like looking in the future, if you've had this event occur, it may occur in other places.

So here are the behaviors or actions you should take in these other similar locations. That'd be great. That will eventually happen as it learns more and agentive AI becomes more intelligent. But to tell me today that it can do that and feel confident as a customer, I would have apprehension to that.

Chris Reesa

Well, that was super insightful, guys. Is there anything else, last words you want to leave the listeners with?

Mark Bradshaw 

I think the only thing that I would say is that, again, there's a reminder that there is not one simple answer to security at our shopping centers, at any shopping center. I don't think there will ever be a time where it's just AI and it's just a mobile unit. I think there's always going to be layers. There's going to be human intervention that's going to be required, whether it's in digesting the information that's coming through the video or in physically responding to an incident or a situation. I don't ever see there not being some kind of human component. And I think that's important to have. Again, this is a relationship driven world that we live in, in commercial real estate. And those relationships include the interactions with everyone, whether it's security guards interacting with our tenants, with interacting with the police, interacting with the community.
It's all about personal one-on-one interactions, whether it's on the phone or in person. And I don't think that it will ever be completely replaced, but I think that technologies and the kinds of products that LVT has are a key component to some of these situations. It is a mandatory step to have and a mandatory component to help get to the ultimate goal of keeping a safe space for people to visit.

Paul Ganz 

Chris, and the last component I would just tell you from both being on the operator side and now the solution provider side, and something that really excites me about my opportunity with LVT and working with them and working with a lot of our customers in the role that I support is helping identify the path from not the task or the tactical approach to what you're going to use or what you're going to deploy, but more about how we become a partner in strategy. We have conversations around what are you trying to solve? How can we help you? Where are the areas that have most interest and what are you overall trying to achieve? That's the real conversation that should be happening, not does this tool solve this problem? Anybody can say that, but when you couple that with what's the overarching goal and I want to be a partner in helping you solve and achieve that goal, that's priceless.

And that really is what separates, in my opinion, LVT, but it's absolutely a great way to build those relationships and the partnerships on strategy.

Chris Reesa 

Awesome. Well, Mark, Paul, thanks for joining. Really appreciate it.

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