Putting a Face on Crime
Redner’s Markets have become destination stores for law enforcement agencies throughout eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware over the past year. This has nothing at all to do with the quality of its coffee or pastry, and everything to do with an intelligent surveillance platform that features facial recognition.
A strong indicator of the system’s effectiveness became evident early on when Redner’s Markets, like several major retailers in an area outside Baltimore, was faced with organized retail crime activity by perpetrators who used a major highway to move quickly from one store to the next.
“The ORC groups were a big problem, especially in our Maryland stores,” says Cory Deily, the company’s director of security and loss prevention. “But with the facial recognition feature in our 3VR surveillance system, we have, basically, stopped it. We pull the video off a DVR, identify the group that was in one of our stores and forward the images to the next store” along the thieves’ expected route.
“There was one group that everybody was trying to catch and we caught them — with $300 in stolen merchandise,” Deily says. “With the facial recognition feature, we were able to focus on when they were in stores, what they were wearing and what they were stealing.”
Based on that success and others, law enforcement agencies now come to Redner’s first with the physical descriptions of suspects because of the merchant’s ability to identify those individuals — and to act quickly on the information.
The company installed the 3VR surveillance system in a selection of its 38 warehouse-size Redner’s Markets and 13 Quick Shoppe convenience stores in June 2008. (Prior to that, it had been using embedded DVRs, monitors and cameras.) As part of the upgrade, the retailer also installed new video recorders.
Easy solution
Based in San Francisco, 3VR Security attracted a loyal following in the banking and hospitality sectors and among government agencies before “tweaking” its surveillance system for retail clients, which now include several department stores, restaurants and quick-serve restaurants.
“Retail is a substantial market that we are very excited about,” says director of marketing Whitney Glockner Black. “What turned us on was our ability to address really meaty problems like organized theft and exception-based reporting.”
Glockner Black notes that retailers likely suffered losses of $2.5 billion to $3 billion from boosting, shoplifting and returns-desk fraud during the 2009 holiday selling season. “These are problems that we feel are solvable,” she says.
Although 3VR offers complete systems that include all the hardware and software for those clients that want to install or replace cameras, DVRs and monitors, most new clients use 3VR as an add-on. “They leverage all their existing surveillance structure but replace the recording devices and use our surveillance software with the facial recognition feature and the high-quality video,” Glockner Black says.
3VR can be integrated with existing exception-based reporting, can flag license plates and the movement of specific SKUs and has counting, directional and motion search capabilities. The feature that represents the sizzle, however, is facial recognition.
