Theft by theft, and fraud by fraud, Organized Retail Crime (ORC) can take a hefty toll on any organization. Combatting it at scale takes retailers and their law enforcement partners coming together with structured, reliable, and consolidated criminal intelligence.
“To stop ORC at its source, you need a foundation of quality intelligence that you can give to your loss prevention team and law enforcement partners that help everyone understand who’s doing it and to what degree,” says Bobby Haskins, Vice President of Retail Partnerships with Auror.
Traditionally, that “foundation” of intel has been built with disparate pieces of evidence, testimonies, and paper reports from various sources – much of which is never combined and analyzed to form a larger picture. The emergence of smarter, more collaborative criminal intelligence platforms like Auror , however, is giving retailers the tools to make those critical connections.
“Without collaborative crime intelligence, you’re running in circles. You’re not going to have all the dots to connect and figure out who your repeat offenders are, or identify the larger groups going around the province or country making a living off of ORC, ”says Daryl Blackmore, Director of Loss Prevention with Rexall Pharmacy Group, adding, “That’s why, in my line of work, you have to invest in the people and technologies that will help you gather and leverage that criminal intelligence to chase down these groups.”
Blackmore has learned the value of aggregated criminal intelligence over his career. That experience led him to implement the Auror platform within Rexall as a means of transforming its loss prevention approach.
“When I first came in, one of my main goals was to understand how much ORC was impacting the company,” he recalls. “One of the first and most important insights we got from using Auror was that ORC and repeat offenders were our number one problem.”
Through Auror, he continues, Rexall’s frontline staff now have the means to report events and upload evidence to a shared, and secure online retail incident reporting platform. That information is then compiled and shared with law enforcement professionals who combine it with other cases to build, manage, track, and resolve cases easier and faster than previous means.
“One of the biggest challenges that retailers face is figuring out who is going to take those reports and do something with them,” says Blackmore. “The advantage with this new breed of retail case management and investigations software is that it’s easy for us to plot incidents on a map and see where patterns are starting to form. Then, we can share that information with law enforcement agencies and say, Here’s all of the data, here’s all the video, and here are all the statements. You don’t have to run around collecting evidence; you can start putting the pieces together now. “
Since introducing Auror, Rexall has worked with law enforcement agencies to shut down five major ORC groups, representing over a hundred thousand dollars in retail crimes.
Haskins says Rexall’s loss prevention successes have been duplicated among Auror’s clients across North America, reporting, “We recently had a client identify one group that was traveling over 3,000 miles in the United States, causing over $ 100,000 in losses. Thanks to the platform, they quickly got California highway patrol and several law enforcement partners engaged. ”
Haskins adds that its that shorter window between reporting and taking action that helps accelerate the arrest process, noting, “The time it takes to identify criminals and start making charges accelerates dramatically for these retailers, because they’re working with law enforcement in a single platform, and they’re working with more and better intelligence. “
Frontline Empowering
Criminal intelligence platforms can give retailers a significant edge in loss prevention, but only if real people are willing and able to use them.
“If it’s not an easy system to use, then you’re going to fail,” says Blackmore. “It’s like exception-based reporting; if you need to be an analyst to use, then your analyst will love it, but your frontline people won’t touch it. ”
The Auror team has taken this truth to heart, designing an intuitive and user-friendly system that can be learned by anyone, regardless of their tech-savviness. As a result, Haskin reports that the company’s clients have seen a 300 percent average increase in reported events.
“That user experience is huge,” he adds. “Everyone in the company needs to be able to access and understand that data in order to make the right decisions on how the company will address theft-related loss and harm and what resources are needed to make it happen.”
That being said, better criminal intelligence is about more than saving money. The rate of violent thefts has doubled in the past 12 months according to Auror, making ORC prevention more of a worker safety issue than a bottom-line concern.
Learn more about Auror , and how to sign to begin using it for free in partnership with Canadian retailers. Visit www.auror.co/join/rexall
