Linked with the Law
Over the course of a recent weekend, Charlotte Russe prevented 87 attempts by organized retail criminals to steal merchandise. Had the would-be thieves been successful, the San Diego-based specialty retailer would have lost product valued at $34,264.
The loss prevention team for SUPERVALU’s Albertsons Southern California division recently nailed a serial shoplifter who, when caught in the past, had been charged with only misdemeanors. This time, however, the investigative work done by the LP team sent him to jail on a substantial sentence as a felony criminal.
In both cases, these retail loss prevention teams used crime incident reporting databases to supplement their LP/asset protection programs. In the process, they accumulated the intelligence they needed to pro-actively repel retail criminals and obtain the evidence that would help capture and convict them.
Charlotte Russe and SUPERVALU created their own databases for tracking and recording internal ORC incidents, but both companies supplement them by subscribing to LERPnet, the Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network, a national database for reporting major retail crimes and serious incidents.
LERPnet, which is supported by retailers and retail associations, connects a wide variety of corporate LP teams with one another and with law enforcement agencies. In this way, all participants can monitor ORC activity and patterns from store to store, chain to chain and state to state. What appear to be disparate incidents are suddenly identifiable as related parts of a broader criminal enterprise.
The police and the courts aren’t going to spend their time and their resources tracking down and convicting someone who has stolen a $25 package of Zantac, says Bob Soto, director of loss prevention for the Southern California division of SUPERVALU. “But they will invest time and resources when the cases involve hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and LERPnet helps the retail community build such powerful cases.”
Twenty-seven retailers operating more than 43,000 stores with total annual sales in excess of $726 billion currently subscribe to LERPnet. Subscribers participate in monthly conference calls with one another and FBI retail crime analysts, sharing data, identifying trends and discussing crime prevention and law enforcement strategies, says Angélica Rodríguez, NRF’s senior director of loss prevention. As of August 1, more than 98,000 crime incidents were recorded in the LERPnet system.
“Now when we capture someone, it will not be because they committed a single shoplifting incident, but because there were many incidents involving thousands of dollars which makes their crimes felonies,” Soto says. “This way we can put people behind bars for a lot longer.”
Law enforcement allies
But what really makes LERPnet important is the fact “that law enforcement is involved as a partner,” he says. “They see the same incidents we see.” That visibility helped break a 2008 ORC case in Polk County, Fla., in which more than $100 million in merchandise was recovered. “That’s not petty theft,” Soto says, “that’s big-time crime.”
In a typical scenario, an incident is reported by a SUPERVALU store manager or LP investigator. An LP manager pulls up the incident on the chain’s camera system, and all the images and incident details are communicated to the company’s ORC specialists. These specialists issue alerts to other stores, look to see if this particular group has hit their stores before and input the crime incident data into LERPnet. SUPERVALU does all of this “as quickly as possible because we know [the thieves] will leave our store and go straight to another store,” Soto says.
Retailers can upload data via Excel files using LERPnet’s Simple Case update tool. If their LP departments are using either the Wazagua or the LPSoftware case management systems, they can establish a direct connection and automatically upload incidents to the LERPnet system.
Soto emphasizes that retailers must provide as many specific details as possible so that investigators have something tangible to work with. “If they just say, ‘Came in yesterday, $400 in razor blades missing,’ that doesn’t give us much to work on,” he says. “But if they say, ‘At this time, on this date, in this city, three males with this description and this vehicle robbed us of this particular product,’ then the network gets going.”
Charlotte Russe is using LERPnet as the foundation for an initiative that integrates LP into an operations/marketing training program focused on providing the best customer service possible. Through RU (Retail Underground), management is driving sales, building strong customer loyalties, reducing shrink and preventing out-of-stocks due to theft.
