Matthew Schriner:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are around the world. We will get started in roughly two minutes, at 1:01 PM Eastern Standard Time. Please be patient with us as we allow everyone into the Zoom platform as we prepare for our broadcast. Thank you.

Once again, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Thank you for joining us. We will get started in roughly one minute, at 1:01 PM Eastern Time, to allow everyone into the Zoom platform. Please be patient with us as we prepare for our broadcast.

All right, I have 1:01 Eastern Time. Thank you for joining us today for our LPF webinar titled Fear & Safety: Evaluating Parking Lot Interventions for Aggressive Street Behaviors. My name is Matt Schriner, and I'm the senior director of operations for the Loss Prevention Foundation. I will be your host today. Before we get started, we would like to thank LiveView Technologies for being a valued LPF partner and for sponsoring today's session. LiveView Technologies has spent years developing the first remote full security solution. LiveView Technologies camera units rapidly deploy whenever and wherever you need them. No need for wires, power, or internet. So whether you need surveillance in a parking lot, on a lonely roadway, on a busy intersection, or at a concert or sporting event, LiveView Technologies has a solution for you.

We would like to cover a couple logistics items. First and foremost, this session is being recorded and all registrants will receive a link to this recording tomorrow in a post-webinar email that you'll receive. Everyone is muted and the audio is available through the webinar platform, as well as the dial-in number provided when you register. We do ask that any and all questions you have, that you enter them into the Q&A box throughout our performance, and we will get to as many of those questions at the end of the presentation as possible to ensure we're able to get through the material that has been prepared. So let's meet our distinguished speakers. First up, we have Matt Kelley, head of retail go-to-market with LiveView Technologies. Good afternoon, Matt.

Matt Kelley:

Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having us.

Matthew Schriner:

Absolutely. And next up we have Orion Santangelo, research analyst with the LPRC. Good afternoon, Orion.

Orion Santangelo:

Hey, good afternoon. Excited for the conversation and discussion.

Matthew Schriner:

Absolutely, and I'll turn it over to Orion. Thank you.

Orion Santangelo:

Let's go ahead. All right, everyone. All right, so today what we're going to be talking about some of that fear and safety. So if you think about what we're going to be going over today with security towers and looking at the different interactions within your parking lots, I want you all to take a step back and think about what's going on right now. We're going into the holiday season, it's very active. I know a lot of individuals on this call is probably dealing with a lot of new events coming into the holiday seasons. A lot of things are uptick. It's just a busy time in the season, so you have a lot of different people coming into those parking lots and what we're going to be assessing here is that fear and safety, not only from a green guest, as you can see here from the left, the green guests. You think about your customers, your associates, employees, people that are supposed to be there, but also those red guests.

And for this presentation, we're focusing on aggressive street behaviors, what is typically defined as homelessness. So think about that behavior that's unwanted, unwarranted, a lot that wants to be avoided, things like that. So in this presentation, this webinar, we're going to be talking about a few things like defining that concept for aggressive street behaviors, look at the typology, which we had gathered through focus groups from retailer responses and incidents that have been happening across the nation and looking at those differences for the typology that define a concept. And then we're going to talk through some of the actions of fear of crime, perceptions of perceived safety.

And what I'd really like to go through is CPTED, crime prevention through environmental design. So breaking down some basic things that you could do and incorporate or integrate that with, say, security towers like LiveView's. And then we'll go through some of the project objectives that we had went through with the parking lot trials with the security towers, talk through methodologies, findings, implications, things like that, and then the power behind this research. What's going to be coming from this, the future? How do we incorporate this later on and what's really needed from the limitations that we found in this study?

So without further ado, I want to start off everything with a question, right? So the question that's based off is where at your physical retail locations are you having the most problem with customers or associates being approached by unwanted individuals? Now, what does that mean? As I explained some of that red guest behavior, think about those individuals that may be homeless, the aggressive behaviors outside in your physical retail locations. And some of these answers that you can answer in the polling is the entrance or exits of the stores, at their vehicles, so at any vehicles, probably outside the parking lots. Outside displays, think about maybe you have a garden center or maybe you have some items that you place outside of your stores, or also inside the stores, including bathrooms, which I'll talk a little bit later about a vulnerable spot. But while you guys are answering, I want to pass it over to Matt to talk through maybe some of the cases that he has seen through some of these incidents that involve this.

Matt Kelley:

And then how I think about it, what you were talking about, Orion, is really, is it safe for my wife and family to go shopping at without me being there, or would it be a safe environment for them to go at night? How well lit is the parking lot? If you ascribe to the broken windows theory, if you've got a messy parking lot in disarray, what does the inside of the store look like?

Orion Santangelo:

Exactly. So there's a lot of things that go into this, and I think we got some of the answers back. So it looks like a lot of at the entrance and exits of the storage, 43% of respondents answering there. At their vehicles, about half of the percentage, and then there's a couple at the inside of the store. Now, interestingly, this even came up talking through this. As we go into the holidays, you got to think some of these individuals are now working their way into their stores based on some of that weather pattern, so there's going to be an interesting aspect of where some behaviors are and how we can prevent that and get that recognizability, the noticeability of there's safety and security if you come into our parking lots to do bad behaviors. Thank you, everyone, for responding on those questions.

So as we go further, we're going to break down a little bit more in depth with aggressive street behavior, so changing the way we look at homelessness around retail spaces. So what does that mean? Some of what we want to define and what we talked through in focus groups before this project was really deploying the LiveView trailers was defining what it really means to have aggressive street behaviors? So you can see up on the screen here, we have a few different things. Aggressive street behaviors, sleeping, panhandling, drug/alcohol abuse, and theft. Those were just some of the categories that came from it, but ultimately what we're looking at is some anti-social behaviors. So some things that you all may be familiar with, such as vocalizations such as cat-calling, clicking, snapping, verbal harassment, loudly yelling at another customer or employees or associates.

It could even include physical actions like approaching a person being uncomfortable, and I'm using some of these keywords because it'll come up later in some of our project, our trial here. But you'll see some of these uncomfortable actions that are consistent in the findings. So again, aggressive street behaviors is more on the accosting, impending, stalking, yelling. It can even go down to indecent exposure, things like that associated with aggressive street behaviors is what we define it as. And then sleeping, you got to think about if you're talking about homelessness and these aggressive street behaviors, talk about sleeping in vehicles, it could be a tent. We've been seeing some of those tent areas around your retail locations or being on sidewalks or parking spaces. It's very big on benches, tables, and chairs. A lot of communities have looked at how to use that as a way of deterrence, placing them in areas and doing those items.

Then panhandling, that's pretty self-explanatory, but again, asking for money. You see this holding at the doors, so as the answers came back, at the entrances and exits, think about that panhandling capability there. And then also being more aggressive at those vehicles. Drug and alcohol use, obviously that's pretty self-explanatory too but interestingly, we'll go a little bit in detail with where those locations are and the findings at retail locations. Interestingly, what was coming out from the focus groups was not only just theft from a vehicle like maybe inside the vehicles or around the area, but also thinking about the parts. Stealing maybe shopping carts, parts from vehicles, parking lot items, cones, things that are associated with the poles, things like that. Outdoor merchandise. So there's a lot of things that came out from the focus group that we just wanted to find conceptually as we talk through homelessness and aggressive street behaviors.

Matt Kelley:

Orion, just to jump in there, outside of the AP space, think about how that impacts store operations from your facilities management partners where they have to go clean up graffiti. Do your environmental health and safety folks have to come pick up used needles? Things like that that could be impacted outside of just the AP space.

Orion Santangelo:

It is a very good point, and interestingly, having some of that verbiage from AP/LP side and looking at this from that perspective is going to actually come up in some of the findings, and how do we actually put that vocabulary to use there? So thank you for that. So from my side, my background's in criminology. I was part of an intelligence community, went to school for criminology. And so there's a lot of strategies that we approach whenever we talk about reducing crime, right? Crime response. The big ones that we're going to focus on today as you see on the left side is crime prevention through environmental design and situational crime prevention, mostly because at a retailer location, you can really break down things at basic levels from design, right? And LiveView towers, security towers in general being mobile is a perfect application to understand how you design things and really change the influence of those behaviors.

And then situational crime prevention, if you think about everything's situational. When you place these different designs, how does that change and how do you react to those changes? So think about lighting, think about placements of the actual sensors, maybe barriers and layouts of the parking lot. Simple things like that are what we're going to talk about more on there, but I also want to bring up other strategies like community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing. I won't dive too far into that because most of that's going to be what we call the SARA model, so scan, analyze, respond, and assess. So when you break down those types of strategies, those law enforcement are thinking about their beats, where they're walking. Maybe they have stronger beats, more involvement, and as they do those things, they're going to be able to scan and analyze maybe potential threats, and then respond in accordance to it and assess what those outcomes were.

So those are some of the typical ones from law enforcement side, and then you can go a little bit further and talk about smart city initiatives and safer places, connected places. So a few of these examples, I was looking through some of the major cities. You can talk through Dallas, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina, Chicago and North Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, New York, New York, Washington, DC, just to name a few are some of the smart cities that exist. And what does that really mean? It really is just improving city life by integrating new technologies to improve safety, to reduce crime, to save energy and emissions, and ultimately bridge communications, especially during times of crisis or maybe some of that crime incidents. So those are the main strategies that we see when we approach aggressive street behaviors traditionally.

Now, from taking a more narrowed and focused approach, let's break down crime prevention through environmental design. So there's four main key concepts when we talk about CPTED. I'll refer to it as CPTED. The four main ones, natural surveillance, natural access control, territorial reinforcement, and maintenance. And the reason why I wanted to talk to this more is because security towers from LiveView really bring out the different aspects of CPTED. So in natural surveillance, you want to think about the placement, design, and physical features. And interestingly, this also includes maximizing ways that people see the visibility of that sensor so they know that there's a safety and security aspect to that.

Now, this also influences do people want to go there for activities? So for retailers, examples, would people want to go there to shop there? Do they have that maximum visibility to understand that there's safety in that area? Now you move to natural access controls, now you're looking more at the physically guided space. So I like to use the example, you go to a retail location, it's dark outside and you may have been in a situation where some parking lots may not be as well lit, right? Well, now you have an example like a security tower like LiveView, you could have some of the lighting in that area to light up potential walkways, guiding them through the space to be more safe and to get to the store so that they can go there to conduct their shopping. Go ahead.

Matt Kelley:

I was going to say this is all around creating that impression of control, making the green shoppers feel safer and deterring activity from the red shopper. So it's creating that welcoming environment for your customers, but then also for the bad actors that you don't want on site, letting them know you're making an investment in, whether it's the natural surveillance, the access control, the reinforcement, setting a boundary around and protecting your location.

Orion Santangelo:

And that's exactly a good point of the perception of having control. So the next concept here is territorial reinforcement. So a design that presents ownership, you go into that area, you know that there's going to be consequences if there is going to be a bad actor. So they have to not only see it, they have the access, but now they know that there's going to be some consequences there. And then the last concept is just maintenance, so promotes activity. Obviously if you're able to maintain the area, keep it safe, I think Matt earlier talked about the windows, so thinking about your space around it. If it looks clean, if it looks like it's accessible and it looks like it's safe, more than likely, and you'll see some of the responses, there's going to be a higher response to go to those locations compared to ones that don't have it.

So the last part of this, I really want to give some good examples through the use of security towers. You got three sides of this, right? You have visual, oral, and digital aspects of a security tower, which we'll talk more about in the actual project, the research that we conducted. So lighting, you think about visual cues. Talking about the strobes, the types of color used in the lighting, the lumens. You see in the left corner here, you see the Kelvin color scale. Some of the previous research and things that we're looking at right now is what kind of differences does the lighting make for individuals shopping in these areas? Are they going to feel more safe at a more light, like a blue sky, a brighter Kelvin scale, or more of a warm orange, red lighting Kelvin scale scale where maybe they feel more safe in that?

Then move into detection/deterrence alarms, so think about the sound. In the research that we conducted here we used some music, and there's different types of music that means different things. There's been other past research that talked through different types of music such as classical to hard rock. There's going to be different behaviors based on those. And there's other examples such as talk downs. So for this research, it didn't involve the talk downs, but that is very much another alarm that can influence behaviors. And lastly, data collection, digital. Think about what everything is documenting in those security towers and what's being produced so that you can change the design to fit the needs of your space. So you can see some of the locations, what bright lighting means for a parking lot compared to dark spots. And then also, I have another example. This is actually at our labs, a LiveView trailer here at a sidewalk. What kind of challenges does that present? Is it positive for those four concepts as far as visibility, access, that ownership, and the maintenance around it?

All those things go into just the movement and flow of people. So I wanted to go into the next question that we have for the audience here based on the discussion around CPTED, crime prevention through environmental design. Where do you believe security towers can be used to promote safety and increase, like Matt said, the perception of control? So you have those four concepts. That natural surveillance, which again is that visibility of the actual sensor, so seeing it. Natural access control, so being able to guide people through lighting, especially having a good, safe walkway for the individuals. Then you have territorial reinforcement. Again, that's more of the ownership, so knowing that there's going to be a consequence, or is it more of a focus for maintenance? So making sure there's an upkeep around the security towers as a whole. So I'm going to pass over to Matt to talk through what are some of the strategies that you have seen to deter some of the aggressive street behaviors around some of the research that you all have done?

Matt Kelley:

We've seen with some of our customers very successful utilizing some of the things you had mentioned like overnight, having classical music or Baby Shark play overnight to deter the unwanted homeless encampments that might be adjacent to or on the properties of our customers so that we can push them away from the facility or from the location that the unit's deployed, and dissuade them from having an encampment there, from sleeping. Making it difficult for them to sleep, in partnership with looking at the design of the parking lot in terms of do I have grass or straw down on the green areas? And removing and replacing those with gravel or some sort of rocks that make it difficult to sleep. Making sure that everything's well lit, making sure that you've got good sign hygiene, making sure all your signs are up to date, making sure that they know that the location is being monitored are just some of the things that we've talked about.

Orion Santangelo:

Yeah, it's a really good call-out with those examples. And as the answers came back, it looks like most everyone, 60% looked at the visibility such as knowing that it's there. Some had answered about access, so the access control, and then the rest of the answer is focused around that ownership, which I think will be also an important aspect of looking at signage. So do they actually recognize that there is that consequence? So thank you everyone to those answers in that poll for that. So we'll go to the next slide here. So now let's switch gears a little bit and look at it from a customer perspective. And I think there's some answers or there's some questions in the chat here that ask about what is a good approach to store management when dealing with unwanted, some soliciting outside of the store and the impact on having security power increasing in sales.

Well, so previous research and fear of crime, some of the literature suggests, and this is back in the criminology side and there's a few different studies, Felson and Cohen from 1979 talked about situational crime prevention where the design and the effectiveness of designs really improve behaviors in going towards an area. There's even studies on street lighting and decreasing fear of victimization, which is part of that fear of crime, going back to even in the nineties, looking at video surveillance and decreasing fear of crime and evidence, looking at how that changes that behavior. But ultimately, the things that came out from some of the surveys and understanding the literature was there's going to be a different effect on the shopping experience, the customer traffic, and employee performance. So as we go into the actual research, which will be in the next few slides, we're going to break down what does it mean for an employee and an associate to feel safe and break down? Do they perceive themselves to be a victim?

So from an employee associate, they're the first ones that interact with those shoppers and individuals, the customers coming into the store. So if the employees don't feel safe, then there's probably going to be a less interaction with those customers. And if there's less interaction with some of those customers with some of the help or whatever the case may be, or helping with the flow of traffic, then we're dealing with some problems as far as wanting to go there again. So the point of the research that we conducted with LiveView was trying to understand the use of these security towers and ultimately, where's the effectiveness of placing these security towers? What does it mean for employees and associates? And now, the focus wasn't directly on seeing if there was an increase on sales, but the focus was on the employee and associate perspective and if the interactions with customers were actually improved, thinking about safety and things like that.

So our objectives were to see where the placements matter, what kind of load outs and analytics that were used for the detections, the deployment of the sensor, and then we looked at the different type of interventions to improved safety. And I put up there something that the LPRC talks through, is the SEE.GET.FEAR model. So briefly, I will say the SEE.GET.FEAR model is basically a little extension from CPTED, but you see it, you have to notice that there's something there. You have to get it, so recognize that there's something watching, there's surveillance, things like that, and they have to fear it, so there's some kind of respect to a consequence, which ultimately leads to increased perceived effort, increased perceived risk, and ultimately a reduction in perceived benefit. So all that goes into from a criminological aspect, how do we change those behaviors based on rational choices?

They're probably not going to go in there conducting red guest behaviors if there's increased effort, increased risk, and they don't know that they're going to get their rewards that they're trying to get. So my next question based on this is one, does your organization have security towers, yes or no? Straightforward. And then if you do or if you don't, how would you deploy or do you deploy the security towers? What are your focuses? So think about lighting, the audible deterrence. So you can include the musical side, but also the talk down I explained. Well, the audible deterrence is just talk down, the music is a separate answer choice as a deterrence, and then placement of these sensors. So think about that design and everything we talked about prior to this. How would you deploy those security towers? And so I'll pass it over to Matt to explain some of what he has seen in some deployment of these sensors.

Matt Kelley:

Well, first I want to circle back to something you had mentioned about employee engagement, what their perception of crime is, and really talk about the upstream and downstream impacts because if you have associates who don't feel safe, they're not going to have a good experience. They're not going to have their time available to give good customer service, which is going to impact your customer or the voice of the customer, what their perception of your brand is. And then ultimately, it could lead to turnover if you have a really unsafe environment and then you lose that knowledge and long-term associate benefit to being able to know a lot about your internal processes, a lot about your store. So then if you have constant turnover, obviously there's going to be a financial cost to onboarding folks, but then also having that warm and fuzzy feeling every time somebody comes in, they know the people who are there, that's just really going to drive brand perception for the customers.

Orion Santangelo:

And exactly what Matt was talking about, there's a lot that goes into this and just with the answers, it seems like it's pretty evenly matched across the board here. So I think it's about split between who has it, who doesn't have it, and really, each one has a pretty similar percentage from lighting to the talk downs to the placement. So it's really, again, going back to that situational aspect and realizing what works, what doesn't work at your location. And that's really leading into the actual project. So the project was looking at different places, different locations across the United States here, and looking at those different visual and audible interventions. So the method here was a mixed methods approach. We gave surveys pre and post to employees and associates between two weeks to a month out of the dissemination of the deployment of the tower before and after.

And it was a randomized control trial through these different stores, so five different waves equaling out 21 stores all together in our sample, with a 90-day deployment focusing on the time period of 8:00 AM to 4:00 AM with the events happening at these store locations. And again, I want to point out that these were all across the United States, different locations, so there's going to be some differences in what worked, what didn't work, but ultimately you'll see some of the findings here on the customer interactions. So the research question that we drilled down to was how do securities detect, understand what kind of behaviors were being detected? How fast were they alert? Things like that. Does the security towers in turn displace the behaviors, especially around aggressive street behaviors, and then how do you document it? What are the things that are going to come from it? How do you use it again and again?

And just to reiterate, we're focusing on the different waves here. Waves one through three are visual interventions, so think about lighting, and waves four through five for more audible, so we introduce music, specifically classical music to these areas so that to see if there's any effects on the potential aggressive street behaviors or homelessness. So, what we're pulling it down to, some of the findings that we have. I want to start off with the surveys. So what we had done was we ran the responses through a statistical software where we're looking at how many times certain words were used and we placed them in a word cloud. So the question that was the initial one for perceived safety here, our metric, was are there people who are often loiter for extended times at night or dwell overnight your surrounding store, in or outside of those stores? And if so, what would you say were the effects on you at your work in any way?

And so it was an open-ended question where the respondents were able to start to talk about their experiences and how they felt whenever they may have been introduced to an unwanted behavior. So as you can see, the who was obviously the associates, the employees interactions with the customers, and then also a store perspective. The what here, the answers that came back were explaining their experiences. So you see, they may have been introduced with experiences dealing with money or vehicles, so think about that panhandling from the original concept that we had talked about. They talked about that it was constant and it was typically outside, early in the night, so it was a constant interaction dealing with that money or at the vehicles, having to deal with those unwanted behaviors, being approached, things like that.

It was consistent. And you can see some of the words around here, maybe they are steal, walk, constant, nights, around the building, loitering, products. So you can see uncomfortable. There's a lot of different words here that obviously there was a problem with these individuals changing the way they felt at these stores. Now, the feeling that they had, again, unsafe, nervous, scared, approach. Those were the common key findings here. We're still really in the last little bit of waves here, actually just came through this last couple of weeks. By the time of this analysis, there was over 153 responses with this. So our next question focused around location. So again, use the same technique, and what we were asking again was if there was any encounter with anti-social behavior or aggressive behavior with customers inside or outside of the store, explain where and what those interactions were.

And so what they had answered again was similar as far as they dealt with homelessness and it was dealing the associates or employees, dealing with the customers, and what the interactions were dealing with stealing, drugs. So going back to the concepts of drug and alcohol use and asking for money, going back to the panhandling, sleeping, yelling, think about accosting and being aggressive towards those employees and associates. And the big thing I wanted to pull out from here was the locations where they were talking about this was interesting because you think about the bathrooms, restrooms at the front door or at the garden locations. So I look at this as very vulnerable places where we can introduce different interventions to change those behaviors, maybe guide them to other areas that aren't as vulnerable. These were the answers from the pre-analysis or pre-deployment of the security towers.

The next question here, if you can put in the chat here, in a single word, describe what you have heard from your associates' experience of unwanted behaviors. So maybe they have had some kind of interaction. You're going through your stores and you're hearing this, it is a very emotional and very an incident that is very impactful. So in a single word, what are those words that you're hearing from them? And I'll pass this over to Matt to maybe some of the experiences and things that he's heard through working in the industry.

Matt Kelley:

And again, it comes back to how they feel when they pull into the parking lot. Do they feel fearful? Then their mind may not be on the task at hand of providing great customer service. Are they worried about their vehicle being broken into while they're inside working or as they leave for the night, how do they feel about the potential for them to be a victim of a robbery or their cars being vandalized or broken into? All those things that if you can eliminate those worries and concerns, you're going to have a better associate experience that'll lead to a better customer experience, that ultimately will lead to increased sales and a reduction of a lot of unwanted activity that you see in your parking lots.

Orion Santangelo:

Yeah. I think there's a very similar response and understanding. It's a sense of unsafety-ness, a sense of being approached, being fearful and things like that as far as what I'm seeing in the chats and stuff. So at the end of the day, bottom line of this type of research is trying to figure out how do we reduce that? And so going further into this research, in the first phase of this research, the deployment of one of the security towers, we looked at how many events had happened? And as you see in the first image on the left side here, when it was first deployed, they were averaging pretty high events, between 20 and 25 events. But after you see about at a month, 30 to 45 day deployment, those single date counts decreased, so you can see the number of events pre and post deployment decrease after implementing these security towers in these parking lots.

And so going a little bit further on that too, not only from the employee associates perspective, but now we're inputting the customer encounters. So think about when customers go to the employee associates or managers and say, "Hey, I just had an encounter. It was unwanted. I was approached, I feel unsafe." And now the big thing I want to pull apart, this is the first bar here said zero events. The good thing is that from pre to post you had less reported events, zero events that customers were coming to employees associates saying, "Hey, there's nothing to report." These were the responses from those employees saying, "Hey, there's less of those events." And as you see the amount of events go on, you see less of those encounters over the deployment of the security tower. So I want to talk through what we actually pulled, but before I do that, I'm going to pass over Matt to explain what you're really looking at with the security tower.

Matt Kelley:

So this is our command center, and that allows for that remote engagement of any unwanted activity with people who may be on site, and that's what Orion was alluding to when he talked about the detection of it. This is really where that detection starts with the analytics that are on the camera to be able to set an intrusion box around an area during the time of day that you don't want activity, and then the deterrence factor of getting that alert when that activity occurs, being able to log into the system, in real time engage with whomever is on site that you don't want them to be. Let them know that they are being surveilled and that if they don't cease that activity, some sort of accountability will take place in terms of whether it's calling local law enforcement, sending somebody outside to get them to move off property. And then at the end of the day, aggregating and collecting that data to have some sort of actionable insights that you can use to drive business decisions.

Orion Santangelo:

And ultimately, Matt alluded to some of the aspects that we're pulling apart, right? The intrusion. So for this project, and I'll show this in the next slide here, but the intrusion aspect of someone walking in and being detected. So when we pulled the reports, we had to be very careful and understand this is an intrusion venting for such amount of time and because of that, now we're using that part of this analysis. So the reporting system and how we utilize that in that command center that Matt alluded to really helped put together the reporting system and start to analyze the patterns and trends that you may be seeing and confirming now with the security tower.

So what we had done was any event more than zero seconds that was considered an intrusion, we added into this analysis. So we didn't want just an interaction of someone popping up, maybe it was a false alarm type of situation. We really wanted to encounter engaged things, events that were more than that zero second. So we also looked at the event object, person versus vehicle, so deciding on person and the vehicle. Detection, how many times did that event happen, and the total time and seconds. So what we are finding was 75% of those events occurred between midnight to 2:00 AM within these store locations, and the other aspect of this is knowing where the location of those towers were during the actual capture of these events.

So this slide talks through all the events that were picked up. Again, we were still going through the last little bit of this, but as of this point, this was 252 events that was picked up in that first space using visual interventions. And as you can see, the days of placement. So you can see when they first started off, again, there was more events that were occurring and then when you get to that 30 day, the 45 day mark, you're really seeing that decrease of events. We are seeing that the average time of incident was about 98 seconds, again, that intrusion, and we depicted that 77% of them were people and 23% were involving some type of vehicles. So going back to people going towards those cars and loitering and trying to interact, that was around those security towers. Those were some of the protections that we're pulling apart and defining.

Matt Kelley:

And that really validates the see it, get it, fear it model if you go back to that slide, and it shows that it takes some soak time for the product conceptually for people to understand what it is, but then once they do understand it, they realize that they are being detected and it does deter that activity.

Orion Santangelo:

Exactly, and that's the important part. So as we move to the future of this research and the implications, so we look at the first interaction for employees, unless you can break down the omni-channel presence and looking at e-commerce, even buy online pick up in store, going to shop in traditional brick and mortars, you're going to those parking lots. I like to refer to sometimes a liminal space, so it's a space in between. You're there to actually go and shop and you have to interact inside that space because you're going to park, or even in transportation, you have to walk through the parking lot. So the important part of this is to increase green guest experience, you have to decrease aggressive street behaviors so that there's more time with customers.

So the employees associates are feeling more safe, you are not dealing with labor shortages. I know that's a big thing right now, but maybe if they feel more safe, there's more reasons to be able to go to these locations working at these locations. And the other point I want to pick up is the importance of mobilizations of intervention. So as you can see, these were placed in certain parking lots, but by changing where they are, you're understanding the environment. You're defining it a little bit better and you're understanding the offender, or the red guest, a little bit better and you can consistently evolve with the problems that you have because you know know with the detection, with the patterns and trends, you can start to do those things.

So the last part of this is really just taking away the learnings and takeaways. So from a retailer perspective, when we had conversations, a few different things came up. So think about the feedback from your field operators. When you look at that from a retailer perspective, the big positive gain was to understand what was happening from your AP team. The more knowledge they have from the use of this research, the use of these towers, understanding where they're going to be, frequencies, viewpoints, things like that, it's going to be better. Now, the employees and associates may not understand that and get to that in, but the AP team is going to know those things. They'll pull from them. That was a very big thing as far as they're going to understand those little minute details because they're looking for it.

Now, the logistics side, coordinating the shipments of units. I know being on these calls, Matt, the LiveView side and the retailer involved. It was every single week, multiple calls, talking through the shipments, making sure there's access, all those good things. It took a lot of dedicated time for understanding the research side, but once it was in place, we're there just observing, understanding the events, right? Surveys and engagements, there was a huge success from the retailer's perspective. It was all volunteer-based. Associates really wanted to be heard on this topic, mainly because they're dealing with it. And explain the why, so why the stores were chosen and the methodology behind this. We weren't just picking certain stores. If you look at the different waves, this started off with the stores that were most affected by high crimes and it worked its way down. So it wasn't just looking at emotions and hearing that feedback, we are basing this off of different risk assessments in different areas to pick those different stores. So your biggest store is highest crime, you're going to find some of those results and work its way down.

Lastly, I wanted to point out from your retailer perspective how do we disseminate the effectiveness of these interventions to employees and associates? Now, the biggest takeaway was the employees and associates from these surveys, the post survey, some of them, they're really saying some of the same stuff with being unsafe and not sure of things, but at the same time, the data shows that the events are going down, the customer interactions are going down. So the AP and LP side might understand it, but how do we do this effectively to the employees? That's the big takeaway from retailers side and also just seeing from the research, the next steps of this type of research. I'll pass it over to Matt to through the LiveView takeaways.

Matt Kelley:

And then the themes that you just talked about hold true in this slide, and I'm not going to drain you, but it's about creating partnerships. Orion talked about being on constant calls, making sure we have the right placements ahead of time, and then creating a feedback loop with those frontline associates after you've engaged with them to make sure that they understood what the purpose of the project was, what the purpose of the units are, so that we can get real time feedback from them if we need to pivot mid-project or throughout the implementation phase to make sure we've got the right units placed in the right places. And then once you get that engagement and buy-in from the frontline associates and they understand what the point of the project was, so we can get that good feedback from them to make sure we have a good solution in place that's going to meet the needs of the customer. And that's really what the LiveView takeaways are, is continue to drive those partnerships, have that feedback loop, and have the open lines communication.

Orion Santangelo:

And that's been the really exciting thing to see this all play out and something that we're focusing really with LPRC is understanding that partnership, the collaboration, intelligence-driven decision-making. And it's everything that we're trying to focus on as an industry, is looking at how does all these things interact and how do we further go past to prevent the future events? The last question here for the audience is if you think about everything that we talked about today, if you were to conduct such a research that we just did, what were some of the limitations you think you would go through?

I want you to pick the one that would be the biggest problem for you. So think about legal, would that be the problem? Jumping through, getting that all signed off. The bandwidth, meaning do you have the amount of people that's going to be needed for this? Deployment, so talk about the logistics that Matt had just talked through. Would that be the biggest hang up? The return on investment, so do you think you'd be able to outline what you're going to take away from this and think about this in a financial aspect of implementing these things? So I'll pass it over to Matt, if you have anything else to include from experience on this.

Matt Kelley:

And just thinking back to a previous life, it really comes down to AP and LP professionals in that organization, by and large. When budgets are cut or things are trimmed from a P&L, oftentimes AP is the first one that gets hit, so that was always a frustration for me. And trying to make sure that you've got the right solutions in place for the stores to make sure that they've got a safe and secure environment to operate in, and helping leadership understand that it's not always do more with less.

Orion Santangelo:

That's such a good saying, do more with less, and how that interacts with everything. And interesting that with the responses, it's kind of going into that area. They're dealing with legal, it's pretty much split across the board, but also understanding what the outcomes are at the end of the day. And I think that's just from all the previous conversations, knowing what our problems are and focusing on the best ways to solve them. So without further ado, I'm getting to the wrap up here. I just want to mention as we finish up this type of research, we are going to be compiling the rest when we audit the audible interventions and things like that. So I'll open up to the Q&A and pass it over to Matt.

Matthew Schriner:

Excellent. Thank you Orion, and thank you Matt. Great information, and love the fact that we're getting quantifiable data on what this type of technology can do for retailers. So we have several questions that have come through. If you have questions, please enter them into the Q&A box and again, we'll try and get to as many of those as possible. So Matt, since these units are helping to address panhandling and solicitation in parking lots, how have these units improved the relationship with local law enforcement by reducing nuisance calls?

Matt Kelley:

And that's a very important point in my conversation with chiefs of police across the country. It's been, "Hey, these units free up the time of my officers to do policing work," and they don't want to get the sense that they are always going to be the first call anytime something happens. They want to know that retailers, property management companies or whomever else might be engaging with local law enforcement, that they are making an effort to mitigate some of that activity rather than just looking to law enforcement to be at their frontline defense.

‍Matthew Schriner:

Excellent. I had a feeling that that's how that was going to go. Next question, how much time did it take for the planning process for this research project to begin, Orion?

Orion Santangelo:

I know in the beginning of this year was when the first conversation started to outline all this, and then we really went into the concepts, the focus groups in the early of this year, I believe it was March or April. So the initial planning was in the beginning of the year, then we did the focus groups in that March, April timeframe, and then it was the deployment of all these different security towers. So they were doing it in the different phases and we just wrapped up the last little bit of it this month going into the holiday season, so it was a pretty long project there, long project, but it was also measuring stores across, so there was a lot to go into it. So it was about a year of planning and walking through this in a couple months, about two or three months beforehand to really outline the concepts and objectives.

Matthew Schriner:

Okay, excellent. So next question, is there any data that would suggest having a tower has impacted and increased sales for the retailers involved this project?

Matt Kelley:

So what I would say is inherently, if you're driving shrink down through that impression of control through cleaning up the parking lot and you're driving shrink, that's going to translate to an increase in activity, increase in foot traffic into the four walls of your building. So we don't have any hard data that suggests that it increased sales, but that really would be the individual retailers to collect the data and look at sales in the stores that they have versus stores that they don't, but inherently you would think that that is the case.

Orion Santangelo:

I'll add on to that, and that's the importance of collaboration here. So this is almost just one piece of the puzzle. So now we know with the outside, now we get the actual data from inside those stores and compare and contrast and now you can't make the assumption, but there is going to be some kind of correlation. You'll see patterns and trends emerge from that.

Matthew Schriner:

Excellent. Next question. So a lot of the folks on today's call are AP practitioners. So similar to theft migration, based upon a path of least resistance, have you identified the red shoppers migrating to adjacent parking lots that do not have towers?

Matt Kelley:

It is funny you mentioned that because we actually just kicked off about a month or so ago a project called Access Task Force, that we got a bunch of our thought leadership from a AP retail perspective into a room and came up with a concept of let's go to a market that doesn't have any LiveView towers, that's got a significant problem in terms of crime and see how if we create that collaboration with local law enforcement, local governments and the retailers involved and go out there, put LiveView units across the community and then see what happens in terms of unwanted activity. So more to come on that. I would love to get on another webinar and discuss that in greater detail as we get some details from that project, but we are working on getting to the root of that problem.

Matthew Schriner:

Awesome. Thank you, Matt. Next question, what kind of integrations can these security towers have and where do you think the value lies on the tower? The cameras, lighting, audio, and do the integrations make up for the limitations of the technology?

Matt Kelley:

So I would say it's more about the orchestration rather than integration because I think those are two different things. So how do you take that data and hook it onto other sorts of sensory inputs and say, "How does that drive the action for access controls, for example, or a burglar when you see that activity, push that information to whatever that other platform is, and then how do they react?" I think that's really what we're going to is developing a holistic ecosystem of disparate technologies and bringing them all together and see how they can all come together to impact that activity.

Matthew Schriner:

Okay, excellent. And another question just came in and I love this question, so I'm going to go ahead and ask it. So have you collected any data about associate retention through the research and development of this project? Because it is such a pivotal issue within the workforce today, can you speak a little bit about how the translation of employees feel safe is translating to employees' tenure staying within a retailer after the investment of training them?

Orion Santangelo:

I will say from the discussions and working with the retailer, this is a great question and this is where we can improve upon that research, as I talked about. Unfortunately, we don't have the data from the retention, but I will say when the retailer was talking through their employee associates collecting the surveys and data, it was a very emotional situation. They're dealing with that unsafety-ness and I wouldn't say that's involving they're going to not stay there, but it is definitely in the back of their minds as far as if they don't feel safe, that'd be an interesting question. Do they leave? And if they feel safe, are they staying? So I can't say we have any data on that, but that's a really good question. I'll pass it over. Matt, do you have anything else to add?

Matt Kelley:

Yeah. I would say in walking stores and talking to our customers and their frontline associates, it's been hugely impactful. We don't have any quantifiable data, but I would say just anecdotally, it makes a huge impact for those associates, their psychology, when they pull onto the parking lot to help feel safer.

Matthew Schriner:

Absolutely. I have no doubt. And that's it for time. We are at the top of the hour, but we do have a couple of announcements. First and foremost, thank you LiveView Technologies for sponsoring today's session. Thank you to LPRC for the research and all you're doing for our community. But they are sponsoring a 20% discount code off of LPF memberships and certifications, so if you are looking to get LP certified or LP qualified, take advantage of that promo code. We'll include that in the email blast you'll receive tomorrow with a link to the actual webinar. Additionally, we will be awarding five LP certification course scholarships to random attendees, so if you opted in and you are looking for a scholarship, be on the lookout for that email, as you might be one of the lucky winners. As always, thank you for stopping by. Check LiveView Technologies out when you go to the NRF Big Show and we'll talk real soon. Thank you all very much.