Michael Hanks:

Hello. Welcome everyone to today's webinar. We'll be starting in one minute. We're excited to get started. So we will wait about one minute to let more people join. So in the meantime, enjoy your free minute, and I'll talk to you soon.

All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Welcome everybody to this wonderful day, webinar that we have. We're really excited to talk about Enhancing Zone 4 Security. Before we get started, a couple of logistics, this will go about 30 minutes with about 10 to 15 minutes Q&A, if the questions are rolling in. If you do have any questions, feel free in the question slide to ask them and we will get to them as soon as we can. So to jump it off, we have Read Hayes who is the Director of Loss Prevention Research Council, and Dave Studdert who is the Chief Business Development Officer for LiveView Technologies. We're really excited to have these two experts on to discuss what Zone 4 is, and I will turn it over now to Dave Studdert to then just do a little bit more introduction and get this thing started.

David Studdert:

Hey Michael, my name is David Studdert. As Mike indicated, pleasure to be here with Read today. Read's been a phenomenal resource for LiveView Technologies for a lot of years, and I want to take just a minute and sing LPRC's praises. For anybody on the call who's not super familiar. For us, we're a company that started... We started in 2005, but none of us come from the security industry or retail. And so to find data points early on was really hard until we found LPRC, right? This is a group who... Oftentimes it's a challenge because there's self-interest. I'm going to tell everybody on this call, we are the greatest thing since sliced bread. You got to take that with a grain of salt, right? Because this is what I do. I love what we do, and I'm passionate about it, but to be able to find Dr. Hayes in the LPRC who comes from academia, a data-driven, best practices environment, where their purpose is to really prove using data and fact what's happening in the space, what are the trends, what works, what doesn't work?

They've been a phenomenal resource for us over the years to really understand what's happening in the space, specific to Zone 4, right? We're one of those groups that plays really well in this Zone 4, exterior environment. And they really have helped us create. We innovate based on their data sets, right? What's happening out there? So again, just to say, Dr. Hayes, we are grateful for the relationship, we're grateful for you, your students, and for the research that you do. It helps us get better every day. With that said, I'll turn it over to Dr. Hayes for his intro.

Read Hayes:

All right. Well, thanks so much, Dave. And we love doing this. This is what we do all day, every day, all year long, and that is engage with over 70 retailers on their theft, their fraud, and their violence issues, and in a couple of ways. And the initial founders of the LPRC in 2000 were 10 vice presidents of asset protection or loss prevention. And at the time, the mandate was the same. Help us, number one, better understand the dynamics of the problems that we have. How does this start and progress and end? What's going on here? How can we get better at understanding it? If we get better there, can you next help us to research better, understand well? What should we best do about it? It's not what you do, it's how you do it. So let's align that. And other than that, we don't know what else to do.

So us 10 chains are going to throw some money into the pot, and can you go forth? And here we are our 22nd year of this experiment called the LPRC. And now again, we're over 70 chains and growing more coming, stand by on that. And we've also got though 90 amazing, what we call SPS or solution partners, and you're one of those, right? Dave, you, and the team at LiveView Technologies. So by bringing together 160 corporations all day, every day, to work together to use labs in the field, good research methods to share people, and places, and access, and data, it's amazing. So we're excited to work with you on what's called Zone 4, the parking lot.

David Studdert:

Thank you, Read. I'm curious, as we talk about Zone 4, and this is kind of how we're going to roll out. First Zone 4 Security and Safety, the five D's of security, deploying the right solutions, and then, as Mike indicated, Q&A session. But I'm curious, Read, talk to us a little bit about Zone 4 and the genesis. I'm pretty sure this came from LPRC, the different zones, how we interact amongst from zone to zone, not only solutions providers, but what does that mean to the general public? Tell us a little bit about the zones in general, and then, Zone 4 specific.

Read Hayes:

Well, I mean, forever... In other words, let's say in the last 50, 60 years or, maybe more, people have thought about security as some concentric circles, right? We've got layered defenses and things like that. But going back, even before the beginning of the LPRC, I was trying to come up a way to think better about how to be more three-dimensional. And it goes back to what we talked about with the LPRC founders saying, "How do we better understand the issues, the problems. These people, how they're doing these things, why they're doing it, and where, and so on. What's all that mean to get better at preventing some of this stuff?" And so that's where it came about. I just came up with these five zones, and who knows, you can number them one to five or five for one, but in this case I started with Zone 1 being actually the target of interest.

That's that asset, that human, that money, that merchandise, or other property, or whatever it might be, that's the target of a criminal, of an offender, of a victimizer. Somebody that's coming there, and they want to steal that, or otherwise harm, create harm there. Zone 2 though, seemed like that close-in space around one. So if one is a pack of razor blades that's highly stolen, what can we do on the Zone 1 to make it harder, riskier, or less rewarding for the offender? We have these modes of action. Well, what can we do in Zone 2 right around it, to prime that, to make that more effective? Where does actually deter right there get a U-turn? And so Zone 2 is that proximate space, that place right there. So if we're talking about a pack of blades, we're talking about right around that pack. In signage, or public view monitors, or things that we might do there, alarms, a good customer service engagement.

Zone 3 is overall space, that interior space, particularly the in and out, the entry, exit area, that transition from outside to end or inside to out. How do we get more at the door, more impact? How do we create a better impression of control there by signage and people, or technologies, or the way it's designed, lighting, and other things to influence behaviors, people approach that entry and as they come through or while they're in that space? Four, the natural progression was all right, that goes from the wall of the building to the edge of the property, that parking lot, that hard park as they would say in the UK, and so on, that's Zone 4. And forever, it really, at least from my impression was Zone 4, the parking area really wasn't heavily discussed. The retailers or others typically lease their spaces or did back then their building.

So some property manager or whatever might be in charge of that area or just, "Hey, we got people inside, we've got our hands full, we don't really know what's going on out there. We're not trained to." And so we try to make it a priority probably about 15, 16 years ago saying, "Look, whatever happens at Zone 1, wherever that is, didn't start there and it's not going to end there." And what happens in the parking lot though from let's say from a user experience, a UX, or a customer experience, the CX, it begins and ends there. The same thing with an employee's experience. So they're going to come through that parking lot, they're going to park there, whatever. And if it's scary, if it's dangerous in their mind, if it's disgusting to them, or whatever it might be, that's a problem, right?

And so before they even come in the store, they may even make U-turn to say, "You know what? I'm not going in that parking lot." The same thing on the outbound, you may have a great experience in the store. They were in, stock service was good, whatever the studies were great. And you come out and your car has been broken into or somebody runs up and starts pounding you for a gas money or whatever the experience or worse, that's a problem, right? That's the last impression.

So for us, the parking lot, that Zone 4 became very critical for the user experience. But also it's a place to create an impression control for Zone 5, which is beyond the parking lot out there in cyberspace, the social environment, the built environment. How do we create an impression control so that it would be a fender that's driving or walking or whatever coming that way, their near site approach, they're like, "You know what, there's other places that I can have more success or that I'm not as at risk or whatever it might be." So Zone 4 is huge for us, and it's probably the number one area of our research and development right now because of intimidation and particularly violence against women.

David Studdert:

Read, I love that. And I learn this every time I talk or go to one of your events, or jump on one of the calls that LPRC does. It's interesting to hear you talk about Zone 1, right? The target and creating that impression of control, right? Let's call it the razor blades. We look at the store as the razor blades. How do we create this buffer in that Zone 4? Create an impression of control, make the good guys feel better about their environment and the bad guys feel worse.

And we've talked about that over the years. I'm curious, as you look at this changing environment we're in daily, we're constantly trying to innovate around this environment that's changing. How do you look at Zone 4 as a buffer? And again, you guys deal in a lot of different spaces. There's parking lots everywhere specific to retail. How do you take that Zone 4? And how have you seen that dynamic change over the years, right? Because where you started with a real focus on the zone 1, 2, 3, what kind of successes are we seeing? How is that evolving? The space seems to evolve every day. Is Zone 4 evolving?

‍Read Hayes:

I think it is. And I was a practitioner before I went to grad school, and I go back with Ross stores and even before, but our boss back in the day, the director later VP, Dave Whitney, used to tell us, "Okay, here's what we do. You ride up to your store, circle through the parking lot, go around back." That's going to give you an idea of the safety and security, the atmosphere, how well attended the area is, those signs of disorder, in other words, broken windows concepts. Then you go in the store, you see if the desk says hello or the people in the store, and then, you go check the restroom. And then, you can come up with your audit score. But the point is, so we've thought about it a long time, what the role that the parking lot, that parking area plays Zone 4.

But that has continued to evolve as you said. And we know critically people were looking at curbside transactions, and some were even carrying them out. But so many things the pandemic hit, and it forced retailers that were already doing it to do a lot more, including returns and exchanges, not just purchases. And a lot of retailers that never, ever considered curbside, all of a sudden it became a mainstay. And then, I can remember we were having cluster calls during 2020 with our members, and we would do five of those calls, six of those calls a week. We have so many retailers we only wanted a dozen or less on each call. But the point is those that had started to go into curbside, a lot of them were saying toward the end of the year, "All right, we're done, we're out. We're going to discontinue curbside."

But it's our perception from the same people. We're still going strong, as long as the customer demands it, we're going to be here. So you're right, the parking lot is the first and last place anybody deals with, whether you go inside or outside the store to work, or shop, or deliver, or whatever there. There's a lot of opportunity to create more aesthetics, make it more convenient, and certainly make it a lot safer as far as two-ton vehicle versus pedestrian, that's never going to end well and extremely dangerous.

And then, finally, just the transactions themselves. And if somebody comes out with their brand new smartphone or the employee brings it to the vehicle and somebody relieves them of that smartphone with a handgun or worse, that happens out there, and these things happen all the time. We're seeing even aggressive behavior where somebody parks in a transaction parking spot, and then, goes into store, instead of a handicap, and then, now there are confrontations happening, right? So you name it, it seems to be happening in the parking lot. And one last thing, we all know that for long time, particularly in large, large parking lots, like we see with some of the mass merchants that we all know, RVs parking there, a lot of transactions from some of the online sellers, and a lot worse and crazier going on out there. So parking lots offer a huge opportunity to not just create a more aesthetic and convenient experience for everybody, but a much safer and more secure experience.

David Studdert:

See, Read, I love that, right? You talk about the aesthetics, and we deal a lot in overt security at LiveView, right? We've got these big systems in the parking lot, flashing lights and strobes and speakers and cameras, and it's got a big solar panel on it. So there's instantly this impression of control that people feel. One thing that I love, and we've recognized this over time, is not only the employee morale increases with a safer parking lot, but we took a page out of the LPRC playbook and we went out and we started interviewing some of the people, some of the actual customers in these parking lots just to see, "Hey, how do you feel about this?" And I often go back to, it was actually a news report out of Missouri that they interviewed a woman Myra, probably in her eighties, and she made the comment how she feels safer when she's in the parking lot. She feels this added protection as if someone is concerned about her safety.

And for us at LiveView, that's always been a really big part of what we do, the why of what we do, right? We love creating technology that creates not only a safer and more secure. Add the value of affecting shrinkage in a store, reduce theft. But one of the drivers for us is Myrna, right? Can we provide something that helps our communities feel safer? Not only feel safer, but actually be safer through what we call our five D's. Deter, divert, disrupt, detect, document. I think a lot of times the document side gets lost, right? There's lots of tools out there. You guys see all of them at the LPRC that will deter, they'll divert, they'll disrupt. We love getting into the space, specific to Zone 4, around actionable information. How do we not only help solve the problem as it's happening, but can we take that same data set and get predictive around it or provide documentation around prosecution or some of those things that we haven't done in the past real great, but we're getting better at as IoT devices change and more technologies.

Again, back to LPRC, seeing this really broad spectrum of technologies. We love the opportunity to play in that same bucket and say, "Hey, whether it's gunshot detection or LPR, all these different devices, let's begin to combine forces where it becomes much more of instead of a reactionary tool, a proactive tool." And I'm curious, Read, as you see a lot of these solutions providers over the last... Did you say 27 years, Read?
Read Hayes:

Well, so the LPRC has been here, this is our 22nd year.

David Studdert:

22nd, okay. But you've been at this... Well, I think you're 37, right? So you started this when you were 14?

‍Read Hayes:

Yes, that's right. No, I've been around a lot longer than 22 years in this field or in this space, and trying to think about this and do something starting out. I actually started out as a store detective when I was 18, but I was a DLPM, and a regional, and so on with Ross stores. But I think in this case, you're right, the idea is integration. And as you know, because your team was there, and another 15 or 16 other solution providers or partners were at Kroger company in Cincinnati and end of last year. And it was the idea, and it was brilliant on the part of the Kroger Asset Protection Team was, let's talk about one thing, and that's integration. We've got to integrate our strategy across these five zones. We've got to integrate at each of the five zones. And so to us, that means what are the sensors that we need throughout that bad guy, the red guy.

And you mentioned before, good and bad, as you know, call them the red and green guys. The green shoppers, the person and includes a good employee, that we want to come to our place and we want them to come back to our place because it's a great experience and they had a great outcome. The red guy, that's the one throwing up all the barriers, that's the one creating the harm, the victimizer, the criminal offender that's committing theft, fraud, or violence against the people in place there. How do we keep that red guy from coming there? Or if they do, how do we keep them from coming back that return journey? Either they don't want to, it was bad, or they can't, they're incarcerated or incapacitated in that case. So that's really the overall red and green experience. And as you said, we want to integrate to both the red and green journey as they are in their home or wherever they stay, and who they connect with.

And as they ideate about what they're going to do and they make that happen, they launch or initiate that action to come there and shop or to work or to do something worse to victimize somebody or that place. So how do we know about that? What are things that they're posting and doing out there in what we would call Zone 5 online or in physical place out there spaces is, how do we pick up on that with sensors so that if somebody's coming our way with a handgun, we can lock the door. If somebody's coming our way to do something terrible that we might be able to do something about it and we have. Just like in healthcare, early detection is best, best and we want to improve the diagnosis, the definition of what's going on. Who, what, when, where, why, and how to the best we can so that the human leader, that place manager can make the call.

And that's what we're trying to do with AI and everything else. So yes, how do we integrate to do all those things? And I think what you guys are doing with your platforms and the platforms are great for us in two ways. One, we use the platforms as research tools, right? The sensors there are data collectors, whether it's a microphone, or it's a camera of some description, or a radar, or LiDAR, or thermal radar, whatever we're talking about here. That's a way for us to understand behavior and current state. And then, what happens if we change something in environment? What adaptations do we see both red and green? Do we see behavioral changes that could be important in a good way to increase commerce and safety, and a good outcome? The experience for the green. And then, of course, again the opposite for the red. But also how do we dose this technology like other technologies or people that we work with?

So we work with guards and off duty law enforcement as well as tactics and other techniques like procedures and process, but mostly with technologies now, especially with fewer and fewer humans that are available or willing to work right now. So how do we create the impression control so that the green is comforted? And we've done, like you said, we've done a lot of intercepts in parking lots. We see by age the older, the more comforted they are, and at night obviously over the daytime. But how do we dose that technology? Where should we put it? What should it look like to, again, comfort the green and run off the red?

David Studdert:

See, Read, I love that. This is why we love the LPRC, right? Because given that data and the research that you guys provide, integration for us becomes... It is fact-driven, right? It's not, we're guessing that this is what the market needs. We're guessing that this might work using some of your research. It really provides a valuable tool for us, and that's the future as you very well know. And probably everybody on this call knows analytics continue to get better, whether it's AI, or machine learning, or all these touch words that we've heard over the years, it's getting better. And we're getting into a place now where, as you said, that integration piece, as you look at the broader zones, not just Zone 4. Zone 4 has got a lot of great integration, right? Whether we're speaking to a group like gatekeeper who's got phenomenal technology or gunshot detection tool or access control. How do we make things more intuitive, more automated without the human element?

We've run into these really interesting circumstances lately where, let's say, there's a labor shortage and whether it's traditional guard services, or loss, or different human type capital, it can be a challenge, whether it's COVID related, right? People get sick or they're quarantined, or we just run into these things where how do we take technology and begin to integrate it across platforms to make us really, really smart in the parking lots in this Zone 4 environment. And how does that bleed into Zone 5, and Zone 3, and Zone 2? I think we're going to see over the years to come where we're going to get really good. And I love these environments that you've created along with groups like Kroger where we can have these discussions across lines. We get that sometimes we get very siloed in our approach, but technology is a place now where we feel like there's just so much traction, and quite honestly, we're super excited.

The more we can work with other solution providers where they're really good at what they do, we love that, right? Get better, let's do this collectively. It's becoming a collective approach, and we're very much excited about that.

Read Hayes:

And I would say too, listening there, the other reason we like this platform as a research tool as well as an action tool to influence behavior. So we can use it to influence, but we can use it to measure, or one might be somewhat hidden in measuring the performance of another one. But is the idea that as we have particularly and you all have been there, we have the University of Florida's SaferPlaces Lab, right? And that is literally four square blocks that are just two blocks from main campus, and it's called the Innovation Square area or district now that are my living lab. And so I've got a lot of technologies going in, but right now we've got three of your platforms with two more on the way. But what they allow me to do is now each of those four blocks will be considered a specific place. And so I'll have one of the platforms at each of those four blocks with another one working with my colleague at UF, Joe Sousa, who's the Director of Security and Technology there, amazing partner, and absolutely brilliant, and very experienced at security.

So he and I can work hand in glove on a lot of the research in the SaferPlaces Lab environment, but then also across campus. And in particular, we want to work in the athletic areas, the swamp area, and basketball, baseball, and other facilities. But what I want to do though is try and work on self-protection of the units, cross protection. And we're starting to do that now, but as every mad scientist idea that I might come up with, I have a tech team to keep me honest, and I know somebody from your team is on there. We've got some great people on there, and they're going to, "Wait a minute, Doc, you need power and you need signal." Well, with the live view trainers right now, I don't need additional power or signal because they're cellular and solar, so I can keep driving on with all the crazy things we're trying to do out there to better safeguard vulnerable people.

David Studdert:

Great. There's real power in that, right? What you create in the innovation lab, I go back to my 74-year-old mother who I love who shops at most of your retailers stores. And so for me and for all of us, it's personal. What you create at the Innovation lab is something really special. Again, it's academic by nature, and it's data driven. You're providing these areas of research where we can really innovate and push for something better. So again, super grateful for the opportunity to be part of your innovation lab, and our hope is to be able to innovate towards real solutions. It's something phenomenal. I know you think you're the crazy scientist, and we love that, right? That's how we get better. So we're really grateful to be part of that.

Read Hayes:

That's awesome. And I appreciate the partnership and the ability to put so many different sensors and other action tools on the platforms, move them around, use the platforms to further measure, have this flexibility, but the ability to get enough of the platforms to really study how do we influence behavior at a specific place, and then, connect the platforms across different places, and it just keeps going.

Michael Hanks:

Read and David, this has been awesome. I want to open it up to some Q&A. Anyone out there if you have, we have a few come in, but if you do have any questions, feel free to shoot them over, and we'll get to those. The first question I think is good for both of you, it ask, what is your vision of loss prevention, and asset protection, and how all these solution providers work together provide safety and security? I think you've touched on it, but yeah, maybe a high level overview of what both of you feel on that.

David Studdert:

Read, I'll let you dive in first.

Read Hayes:

Well, I mean, I think the overall vision is to be able to get better at earlier sensing a potential problem. Somebody's out there running their mouth, somebody's out there posting, or talking about, or gathering tools, or there's a pre-event indicator. They're visiting a site before they do something there. And so we want to get better and better at early detection. And so that's the big vision is leveraging cloud-based tools or online tools, scrapers, and other things, crawlers that we can pick up on some of the threats. We think in our SaferPlaces Lab environment, we already know that some of the local law enforcement agencies, we've got maybe even beyond local, our extremely fired up to work with us to work on use cases where we're working with those strong law enforcement, other partners as well. So how do we work within a place between retailers and again, between retailers, and partners and, leveraging these technologies, and integrating them? Again, at each aiming point, each target, and across all of those targets.

David Studdert:

The leveraging of technology for us, quite often we'll listen to our Chief Technology Officer talk about the orchestration of data. Our hope in the months and years to come is where we get really good at taking advanced analytics. It can be human anomaly. Traditional behavior says, when I get out of my car, I walk from my car to the front skirt of the store. Well, if I'm walking between the cars or I'm serpentining through the parking lot, chances are I'm up to something no good, right? I'm probably in the red category. And whether it's smash and grab or whatever, can we begin to identify some of those human anomaly behaviors through advanced analytics? And at that point can we then trigger this orchestration of data where we're sending information both to other machines as well as to people. I often use the gunshot detection idea. Can we understand where this event happened? Then can we speak intuitively and autonomously to other devices where it's, shut these doors, have the audibles push people this direction, right? Begin to be really intelligent about that orchestration, about that integration. I think that's the future.

Michael Hanks:

Awesome. Next question. Read, this one's for you. The question is, how can I access some of the data LPRC is finding, and I'm just going to elaborate on that basically to how does anyone get involved and learn more about the LPRC and how can they become a part of it?

Read Hayes:

So on the LPRC side, the way the retailers have set it up, and we have a board of advisors that includes the VPs of over two dozen of those retail companies and others on that board, is that everybody's a member. It's a community. It's in a huge and growing community. And so the number ones, as we call it, the ones, the VP or the Pyramid Heads, what they want is they want all of the organizations to join the LPRC. They pay some nominal amount every year as their membership every 12 months. And that goes into the kitty, right? That's what funds the organization. And we have five physical labs. We've got all these outdoor environments, and we have four criminologists, and technologists, and a growing team, and so on. And we travel and so forth for projects. So that's what funds that you get into the seven working groups that are clustered by topic. And we've got six events for them throughout the year, physical events now, hopefully again, and so on.

So how do they do it? They just reach out, go to lpresearch.org, and you can go on there or shoot us an email at operations@lpresearch.org. Again, we'd love to get you into the community.

Michael Hanks:

Awesome. Well, I'll just say I love this last half hour listening to you two talk about Zone 4 and the security and the safety that it brings to all the green players, so to speak. So has been great. I always learn something new when I chat with you guys. So thank you so much Read and David for joining us. This has been wonderful. If anybody does have additional questions, like Read said, you can reach out to operations@lprc.com, or you can reach out to sales@liveviewtech.com, or give us a call and we'd be happy to answer any additional questions. And thanks again, everybody, for joining, and we wish everyone a happy rest of your day.