When people discuss crime statistics in the United States, they are usually referring to crime statistics that are generated by what is reported to law enforcement. Unfortunately, one of the greatest problems with this method is that many crimes are never reported to law enforcement. Therefore, in the ORC across the States survey, the LPRC asked the respondents, “approximately what percentage of known crimes against your organization are reported to police?” 345 respondents answered this question. On average, they reported that 56.4% of incidents are reported to law enforcement in the areas they serve.
When we calculate the average percentage by state using data from respondents who serve one to ten states, we can see that the percentage of known incidents that are reported to policy varies by jurisdiction. Figure 1 (above) and Table 1 (below) provide the percentage of known crimes that are reported to police at the state level. All states for which there were fewer than eight responses have been omitted from the analysis. Nevertheless, the average percentage of crimes reported to law enforcement ranged from 45.8 (Maryland) to 65.9 (Delaware and Florida).
We also asked the respondents to rank a series of reasons that retailers might not report crimes to law enforcement. These reasons were selected by the leaders of the LPRC ORC Working Group members and leaders, comprised primarily of ORC managers and investigators, and senior loss prevention leaders.
The table below shows the number of respondents and percentage that selected each rank for each explanation for under-reporting. The reasons that tended to be ranked the highest included: (1) “there is too much crime for workers to report everything,” and (2) “law enforcement will not respond to calls for service.” The explanation that was ranked the lowest most often was “the brand might be harmed if too many crimes are reported.”
This analysis is not meant to point the finger. The members and leaders of the ORC Working Group, consisting of retail practitioners, law enforcement, and solution provider/technology company representatives have focused on the under-reporting, and have identified how many of these explanations are connected. In these discussions, it has become clear that all of these factors are related to each other. For example, retailers may not report crimes because they will not be prosecuted, and law enforcement may not investigate crimes because those crimes will not be prosecuted. However, prosecutors often comment that the crimes are not prosecuted for a variety of reasons, such as competing prosecutorial priorities and the fact that retailers often fail to show up to court. These are just a few of the reasons, but it is not helpful for any stakeholder to point fingers at others. Everyone should remember that this report focuses on the retail perspective—other research should seek to understand why law enforcement does not make arrests or investigate, or why prosecutors choose (or are forced) to not prosecute retail crimes.
Conclusion
Existing crime statistics only tell part of the story. A large portion of crimes known to retailers are never reported to law enforcement—this means that these incidents will never show up in the official crime statistics that most in the media and policymaking often cite. The most alarming part of this is that rates in reporting seem to vary by jurisdiction—if rates in reporting further vary over time, then this would seriously undermine the validity of any analyses that use crimes known to law enforcement as the primary data.
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: how ORC is changing, violence and ORC, and more!
