Research, innovate, collaborate, inform, engage—that was the message as the Loss Prevention Research Council (LPRC) started off 2025 with a bang at the LPRC Kick-off Meeting in New York City with the theme “Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Talk About.” Over 150 retailers and solution providers gathered on the 101st floor atop the Hudson Yards building to collaborate, educate, and network.
The LPRC’s Dr. Cory Lowe and Dr. Read Hayes started the meeting by highlighting many of the association’s wins from 2024 from the different research initiatives with various retailers and solution providers. Cory noted that 2024 was the LPRC’s most productive year yet in the number of reports released and walked all the attendees through what members can expect from the LPRC regarding events, opportunities to engage, resources, and the LPRC research strategy.
The “Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Talk About” theme was selected for several reasons. First, they wanted to emphasize the LPRC’s continued role in driving innovation and giving leaders frameworks and research to help them discuss and develop strategies. This really highlights the important role that the LPRC and other organizations, like the LP Foundation and LP Magazine, serve in educating and providing the industry with a common language. Second, the LPRC was encouraging loss prevention, security, and law enforcement stakeholders to do a better job communicating, whether that is through real-time crime centers, sharing incident data between retailers, or connecting technologies to build intelligence.
David Johnston, VP of AP and retail operations at NRF, and Julie Lawson, director of operations and partnerships at LPF, outlined how their associations are driving change in the industry and profession through research, policy, and training. These are two of the leading associations championing the industry’s challenges in 2025. Both organizations noted how retail violence continues to be a leading concern—the NRF continues to do important policy work in this area in collaboration with many of the state associations, while the LPF is focused on helping educate the industry about issues related to workplace violence and the role of technology. David Johnston also emphasized the importance of educating the industry, the public, and policymakers about technologies retailers are using and the implications different policies will have for retail generally and loss prevention specifically.
Several members of law enforcement engaged in a panel discussion on how collaboration with LPRC and its partners has been an excellent contribution to combating retail crime. During this session, Mike Ricupero of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and two other NYPD Real-Time Crime Center veterans (Joe Courtesis from 3SI and Eddie Coello from FaceFirst) discussed the importance of retailers sharing real-time intelligence with law enforcement. Hayes and Lowe emphasized that retailers currently spend a lot of resources on technologies and personnel that are intended to influence the likelihood that offenders will experience negative consequences for their crimes, such as incarceration or other penalties.
However, according to Dr. Lowe, retailers often fail to put enough resources into ensuring law enforcement has timely and actionable intelligence and that prosecutors have the evidence and support to fully prosecute retail crimes. This means that all the solutions that are meant to increase the risk of negative consequences do not have their full effect because the risk is conditional on the actions of the criminal justice system. Therefore, retailers must continue to work to ensure law enforcement and prosecutors see retailers as partners who will work with them on investigations and show up to court.
At the forefront of any industry is AI. Dr. Lowe was joined by Dan Connors from NVIDIA, Alex Siskos from Everseen, and Steve Lindsey from LVT Technologies to discuss how software and hardware advances create opportunities for loss prevention and retail security professionals. This includes advances in terms of integrating technologies to build loss prevention intelligence, video summarization, and video searches to be more efficient with video review, among many other topics.
The venue was sponsored by AT&T, who gave a brief presentation on some of the work their organization is doing to protect people and places, especially concerning making connections between people and technologies. They also highlighted how the LPRC plays a role in innovation and brings together stakeholders as a community to solve many of the most pressing challenges.
With the presentation of 2024 accomplishments and an update on a few current initiatives, Dr. Hayes and Dr. Lowe closed with a focus on the strategy for the LPRC in 2025. There are many new initiatives and research on the schedule that will be impactful to the industry. For the retailers and solution providers in the audience, everyone was excited to get involved, be involved, and stay involved with the LPRC to contribute even more to the LPRC and the industry wins for 2025. The message was clear: The LPRC is starting strong in 2025 to “give the industry something to talk about.”