ORCAs in Action, an LP Magazine initiative to support the nation’s organized retail crime associations, held another in an ongoing series of virtual conferences on June 8, 2022 featuring presentations by top leaders and subject-matter experts on topics critical to the fight against organized retail crime (ORC).
In this presentation, hosts Kevin McMenimen and Jac Brittain carry on a discussion with Cory Lowe, PhD with the Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC). Lowe reviews how science is being used to combat organized retail crime—using research and analytics to identify opportunities, address ORC trends, and build strategic plans to support collaboration, mitigate losses, and enhance investigative productivity. He also discusses current research projects and the results of a recent ORC survey, as well as the LPRC organized retail crime working group’s efforts in the campaign against ORC.
The LPRC works with six different types of research labs that host varying projects and experiments with the common goal of discovering offender insights. A lot of the research in the modern crime prevention world focuses on development, while Lowe focuses on situational environments and community crime prevention. He believes that by preventing theft and other retail crimes early in a person’s life, there is greater opportunity to deter the potential for an individual to commit more serious crimes later on. “If we are preventing retail crimes, we are removing opportunities for kids to learn about how to commit retail crimes. Most research shows that when we’re talking about developmentally limiting those opportunities—if we can prevent those crimes early in the course of someone’s life—then people avoid getting into life crimes,” Lowe said.
Another goal of the LPRC that Lowe shared was the concept of constantly increasing the risk and effort needed to commit a crime. It is believed that by increasing the effort an offender has to put into the act of committing a crime, the less likely they are to follow through with their malicious intensions.
Watch the full webcast below.