Webinar Coming Tomorrow

RLPSA+TPOP Workplace Violence Preparedness for Food Service Industry: The Importance of Situational Awareness

Jan 11, 2023 1:00 PM ET

This webinar, co-hosted by RLPSA and The Power of Preparedness (TPOP), will be led by William Flynn, TPOP's Co-founder and Chief Content Officer. Mr. Flynn is a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security where he helped to nationalize the Run, Hide, Fight active shooter response methodology.

Mr. Flynn will provide a mini-workshop on two essential forms of training for employees: recognizing gunfire and situational awareness. A common mistake during active assailant attacks is assuming that gunfire is something else: firecrackers, popping balloons, or car noise. Recognizing gunfire and taking all similar noises seriously can buy time and save lives. Situational awareness is the practice of recognizing anomalous behavior and physical surroundings and knowing what to do in case of emergency.

For more information about The Power of Preparedness online training for verbal de-escalation and active shooter preparedness, and the RLPSA member discount, click here

Register here


Wireless Indoor Gunshot Detection Sensors
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Issues Seventh Gunshot Detection Patent to Shooter Detection Systems

New patent awarded for cable-free (wireless) indoor gunshot detection sensors

Shooter Detection Systems (SDS), an Alarm.com (NASDAQ: ALRM) company and the world’s leading gunshot detection solutions provider, today announced the issuance by the USPTO of SDS’ seventh patent for its gunshot detection technology, Patent No. US 11,417,183 titled Cable-Free Gunshot Detection.

The patent describes the application of indoor gunshot detection sensors that use a cable-free device powered by a battery. The foundational concepts and designs in this patent are currently offered by SDS as their Guardian Wireless product, a dual mode acoustic and infrared gunshot detection sensor that has been on the market since 2019. This patent builds on earlier SDS patents, specifically US 10,657,800 B1 titled Gunshot Detection Within an Indoor Environment, which focused on techniques for privacy-centric gunshot detection in an indoor environment utilizing two-factor authentication. The Guardian Wireless product has allowed SDS to achieve commercial success by meeting its goal of lowering overall customer costs by as much as 40-60 percent via reductions in overall project infrastructure costs.

Read more here
 

NYC's Shoplifting Crisis is Destroying Businesses - Lawmakers Want Action
Lawmakers express outrage over NYC’s ‘revolving door’ shoplift crisis that’s killing local businesses
Lawmakers expressed outrage Monday over the shoplifting crisis that’s killing local businesses — including by calling for the return of 1990s-style law enforcement in the wake of complaints from nearly 4,000 grocers.

“It’s utterly ridiculous that a small subset of career criminals make up 30% of shoplifting arrests in 2022,” said City Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens), citing alarming statistics that the NYPD revealed last week that 327 career crooks were busted a total of about 6,600 times.

“We can’t have this revolving door of criminality in our state — it’s time to dust off the successful tactics from the ’90s in New York City, which actually worked to reduce crime.”

Councilwoman Julie Menin (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Small Business Committee, also said she’s planning a joint hearing with the Public Safety Committee because “we urgently need solutions to address this issue.”

On Sunday, The Post exclusively reported that a new coalition of grocers was demanding a rollback of the state’s controversial, 2019 bail reform law to target “repeat theft offenders” and a new law so prosecutors can combine cases to charge a serial shoplifter with felony grand larceny instead of multiple misdemeanors.

The Collective Action to Protect our Stores group also wants retail workers covered by the same law that makes it a felony to assault cops, MTA workers and livery drivers.

State Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt (R-Lockport) said he was “very confident” that his GOP conference “absolutely would support” the CAPS proposals “and maybe even additional ones.”

But “getting my colleagues across the aisle to enact a new crime -– I might be able to invent a new fusion power cell faster than that,” he said. nypost.com

NYC grocers want to stick a fork in serial supermarket shoplifters

Hochul expected to walk tightrope on bail reform in State of the State speech


Chicago Street Vendors Fighting Off Robbers
After a series of armed robberies of street vendors, Little Village residents organize to protect each other
Though street vendors are vulnerable to robberies because they are working alone and only with cash, most robberies reported over the years were sporadic. It wasn’t until early December when aldermen of Southwest Side neighborhoods, community leaders and the Chicago Police Department alerted the community to a recent string of armed robberies targeting vendors.

In Little Village, the tamaleros have taken the biggest hit, leaving them in fear and scaring away their clients.

Some of the vendors say they have been assaulted multiple times by the same group of armed and masked men in the weeks before Christmas. The group took their cash, sometimes their phones, and even the tamales, said Elizeth Arguelles, a community leader and organizer of the vendors in the area.

Vendors, their families and local leaders have held several community meetings over the past month, demanding more police officers patrol the 26th Street corridor in the early-morning hours to prevent more attacks. But the “crew is not enough,” said William Betancourt, commander of the 10th District, during one of the meetings.

During the community meeting, Betancourt said there isn’t enough staff to increase police presence in the 10th District during the early-morning hours. So vendors, their families and neighbors have galvanized to protect each other by lining up volunteers to patrol the streets from 4 a.m. until about 9 a.m., when the sun is up and the streets fill with pedestrians, said Kristian Armendariz, a community organizer with the Little Village Community Council. chicagotribune.com


Is Seattle's Crime Crisis Receding?
Seattle’s pandemic crime fever may finally be breaking
One of the most disturbing offshoots of the plague years has been the violent crime that rose up and raged in Seattle and many other cities and towns.

“It was the largest recorded increase in homicides in United States history,” one criminologist said, about how the social dislocation of the pandemic had triggered an abrupt rise in violence back in 2020.

In Seattle, murder shot up 47% in that first year, and then has stayed high, like it’s a new normal. By last summer, overall violent crime here reached a 25-year high. But is this unusual crime fever finally breaking — receding now as mysteriously as it settled in?

Crime peaked, we hope, last August. That month saw a record 11 homicides and the most violent crimes, 554, for one month in city history. Most of these were robberies or felony-level assaults, such as attacks involving a weapon (usually a gun).

Last fall, starting in October, something started to shift. For the fourth quarter of 2022, violent crimes dropped 18% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. According to Seattle police records, December saw the fewest acts of violence reported in the city going back nearly three years, to March 2020, when the coronavirus first upended everything.

Property crime data isn’t as reliable, because so much of it goes unreported, Diaz said. But that too is falling. Total crime in Seattle, after looking like a chart from hell for two years, has dropped enough in the past few months that it now may be trending back toward pre-pandemic levels.

There’s no way to know right now what’s going on with these shifts, whether they are unique to Seattle, or whether they’ll last, said Jacqueline Helfgott, director of Seattle University’s Crime and Justice Research Center. She had proposed an empirical study with Seattle police to explore the root causes of the city’s crime surge, but they didn’t have the bandwidth for it. seattletimes.com


Robberies Down But Burglaries Up In Detroit
Detroit sees decline in overall violent crime in 2022; 'We're certainly not bragging,’ police chief says

Detroit saw one more murder in 2022 than it did in the prior year, while non-fatal shootings were down, police said

Violent crime decreased in Detroit last year but the city's top cop on Monday issued a warning about taking a victory lap.

Citywide, Detroit saw an 11% reduction in violent crime in 2022 compared to 2021, according to police data. Robberies were down 7%, rapes down 15% and aggravated assaults declined by 11%, according to preliminary police figures.

Non-fatal shootings were also down 10%, officials said. Homicides were slightly up from 308 in 2021 to 309 last year. White also said the city has seen an increase in crime committed by underage offenders.

Despite the good news, carjackings increased by 21%, according to police figures. Property offenses like burglaries and stolen vehicles were also up. White the police department will focus on getting abandoned vehicles off streets, finding unlicensed businesses and identifying dangerous buildings. foxnews.com


Retail Shootings & Violence Becoming More Common?
Survey: Ready for the Next Crisis? We Want to Hear From You

Progressive Grocer surveying the industry on crisis communications and preparedness

The time to prepare for the next crisis is before the next crisis actually happens. In 2023 and beyond, business survival will require pivoting at lightning speed and rapidly adjusting to whatever new crisis comes our way, one that may involve a mass shooting, attacks on energy facilities, or workplace violence.

Before 2017, there was just one mass shooting at a grocery store in the United States, according to The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research center, and CNN.

In the last three years, however, shooters have killed five people at a kosher market in Jersey City, N.J.; two people at a Publix in Palm Beach, Fla.; 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder, Colo.; 10 people at a Tops market in Buffalo; and six people at a Walmart in Virginia.

Over the 2022 holidays, at least five people died in grocery store shootings.

While it would be impossible to predict or stop every disaster, Progressive Grocer wants to help grocers take a longer view when it comes to crisis management, and specifically crisis communications. That's why we are taking the temperature of the industry on crisis management and communications, as we look to create crisis-related content essential to this essential industry.

Click here to take the survey: progressivegrocer.com


New Orleans closes 2022 with sky-high homicide rate not seen in decades

Seattle PD lost 153 police officers in 2022, over 500 since defunding

Preventing Workplace Violence: Early Identification and Intervention Go a Long Way

US: 103.1M Cases - 1.1M Dead - 100M Recovered
Worldwide: 668.9M Cases - 6.7M Dead - 640.2M Recovered

Private Industry Security Guard Deaths: 362  
Law Enforcement Officer Deaths: 828

COVID Wave Fueled by New Variant?
New variant XBB.1.5 is ‘most transmissible’ yet, could fuel covid wave
Three years after the novel coronavirus emerged, a new variant, XBB.1.5, is quickly becoming the dominant strain in parts of the United States because of a potent mix of mutations that makes it easier to spread broadly, including among those who have been previously infected or vaccinated.

XBB.1.5, pegged by the World Health Organization as “the most transmissible” descendant yet of the omicron variant, rose from barely 2 percent of U.S. cases at the start of December to more than 27 percent the first week of January, according to new estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 70 percent of cases in the Northeast are believed to be XBB.1.5. While there is no evidence so far that XBB.1.5 is more virulent than its predecessors, a recent swirl of misinformation linking the rise of new variants to vaccination has cast a spotlight on this latest strain and raised concern among some health experts that it could further limit booster uptake. washingtonpost.com


How the New Variant Threatens the Workforce
‘Kraken’ COVID-19 Variant Threatens U.S. Workforce
With the rapid rise of a new variant of COVID-19, nicknamed "Kraken," employers should take precautionary measures in their workforces to prevent outbreaks—even though many employees are tired of thinking about COVID-19.

Employers should continue to re-evaluate their pandemic plans in light of both COVID-19 and influenza, Levin-Scherz said. "This year has been an especially bad year for the flu," he said, noting that employers can encourage employees to get their annual flu shot and COVID-19 bivalent booster.

"Employers will meet with great resistance if they start requiring employees to wear masks again in the workplace," Robertson said. "It feels that much of America has moved on from feeling that COVID-19 warrants special safety measures."

Companies need to be aware of the general sentiment of their employees, whether that's heightened anxiety around an uptick in cases or a sense of having heard enough about COVID-19, according to Amory McAndrew, an attorney with Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney in New York City. Being cognizant of workplace mentality is important for successful employer-employee relationships and can guide how to plan throughout the endemic states of COVID-19, she added. shrm.org


Post-COVID Remote Work Has Become a Workplace Staple
Remote work popular 3 years after COVID-19 forced workers online
In 2020, workplaces across the country went online after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employees were patched together by networks of phone calls, texts, virtual meetings and online messaging. More than two and a half years later, remote work remains a staple of the modern workplace. What began as a necessity has slowly become a popular choice — one that some still favor over in-person work.

According to the Pew Research Center, 61% of U.S. workers work from home because they prefer it, not because their workplace is closed. This data was taken from a sample of nearly 6,000 Americans, and this trend is reflected in Ingham County.

Pew found that 64% of employees who did not work remotely before the pandemic but do now, say it’s easier to balance work and their personal life. news.jrn.msu.edu


90% of people in China province Henan infected with COVID: official
China’s third-most populous province. With 88.5 million people testing positive for COVID.

How do I avoid catching COVID while flying in 2023?