There are many shortcomings with crime data in the United States. One of the greatest problems is that, typically, when individuals refer to the official US crime statistics, they are referring to statistics that are generated by what is (or isn’t) reported to law enforcement. The major problem with this is that many retail crimes are never reported to law enforcement. In fact, a separate ORC Across the States report this year shows that, on average, only 56.4 percent of incidents known to retailers are reported to police, and that the percentage of incidents reported to law enforcement varies by jurisdiction. For more information about underreporting in retail, please see the ORC across the States: Underreporting report.
Regardless, the fact that retail crimes are underreported and that underreporting varies by jurisdiction means that we cannot rely solely on official crime statistics to understand retail crime trends. Therefore, in the ORC Across the States survey, we asked respondents “In the past 12 months, has organized retail crime increased, decreased, or stayed about the same in the areas you serve?” We also gave respondents the option “not sure” or “do not have access to this information.” 353 respondents completed this question, and overall 68.27 percent reported an increase, 1.13 percent reported a decrease, 20.7 percent reported no change, and 9.9 percent reported that they were not sure or did not have access to this information.
If respondents reported that ORC had increased or decreased, we asked them to provide the percentage change. If the respondents reported that ORC had “stayed the same,” we coded these responses as a zero percent change. Finally, we averaged the percentage change in ORC by state.
Figure 1 and Table 1 show the percentage increase in ORC by state because there was no state for which there was, on average, a decrease in ORC according to the respondents. States for which there were fewer than eight responses are omitted from these analyses.
As Table 1 shows, the states with the greatest increase in ORC (bold) according to the respondents included California, Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin, and Missouri. The five states with the smallest increases in ORC, according to the respondents, included: Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Georgia.
The results reported here show that ORC continues to increase, and other ORC Across the States reports show that underreporting is a major issue in the United States. If we are going to understand the problem of ORC, then we, as an industry and nation, must do a better job of capturing the necessary data to understand crime trends impacting businesses like retail companies.
The full results of the ORC Across the States study are being issued in a series of reports on the LPM site. The LPRC would like to thank Sensormatic for their generous support of this survey. Watch the LPM site for upcoming articles detailing the fascinating results of this survey, including: what hot products are being stolen from grocery, home improvement, and sporting goods retailers; how ORC is changing; violence and ORC; job stress; and more!