Federal Legislation Needed to Fight the Source of ORC
Op-Ed: INFORM Consumers Act Is Needed to Fight Organized Retail Crime
The economic ramifications of these crimes have been noticeably detrimental. In 2021 alone, the Retail Industry Leaders Association reported $213,959,136 in stolen merchandise, $47,990,000 tax loss, and 5,044 jobs lost. Unfortunately, organized retail theft operations are rarely isolated to one state. For example, the Middletown Rhode Island Police Department and agencies across New England dismantled a massive crime ring that had been terrorizing Staples stores spanning the East coast - from Massachusetts, to Rhode Island, to New Hampshire - for over three years.

Rhode Island’s state legislature has already tried taking a swing at addressing the pervasive problem. This spring, H7676 was introduced to curb the crime wave by defining organized retail crime as a “concerted action of three or more people'' and by making it punishable by up to five years of imprisonment. Though commendable in its effort, this bill is just a band-aid fix to an issue that warrants a much more comprehensive solution.

What Rhode Island and states across the country need is a uniform approach to disincentivizing these crimes from occurring in the first place. What we need is H.R. 5502, the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers (INFORM Consumers) Act.

The INFORM Consumers Act would combat organized retail crime by making it more difficult to sell stolen goods online. By requiring online marketplaces to disclose the name, tax I.D., bank account information and contact information of certain high-volume, third-party sellers, the INFORM Consumers Act encourages even more transparency from the millions of people selling on online marketplaces. Losing their anonymity on the internet means that criminals will be left without their usual channels for peddling poached products, rendering large-scale robberies much less enticing.

Moreover, by creating a uniform selling standard, the INFORM Consumers Act would also save hardworking online sellers from navigating through a patchwork of state-by-state regulations. Ultimately, without a blanket standard, these various bills will end up creating more obstacles for honest entrepreneurs than the nefarious criminals they are intended to target.

Amid a nationwide recession and historically high inflation, Rhode Island’s small businesses simply can’t take much more economic strain. Thankfully, the INFORM Consumers Act is a commonsense solution with overwhelming bipartisan support that touts retail, tech, and law enforcement groups as champions of its passage; an anomaly in Washington, D.C. Given its resounding stamp of approval, come September, Congress must prioritize passing the INFORM Consumers Act, the best path forward to keeping sellers nationwide supported, safe, and successful. golocalprov.com

Column: Congress must help Oklahoma combat organized retail crime

Armed Store Security Guards Becoming Commonplace
Retailers Are Adding More Security Guards To Stores — And A Lot Of Them Are Carrying Guns

Faced with rising theft and violence — and pressure from scared employees — grocery stores and other retailers are bulking up on armed security.

While a national debate rages over whether armed guards should be stationed at public places like schools, retailers around the country are beefing up armed security presence in stores, mostly using ex-police and military. Since July 2021, there’s been a 108% increase in demand for armed guards at grocery stores, according to Allied Universal, one of the world’s largest security staffing firms, which works with many of the nation’s biggest retailers and shopping malls.

In December, Iowa-based grocery chain Hy-Vee said it would be adding armed guards to its stores. The move was intended to “provide another layer of safety and security for our customers,” chief operating officer Jeremy Gosch said in a statement. The 285-store grocer released a video that shows security staff in black uniforms roaming the aisles, appearing to have badges, guns, handcuffs and pepper spray. The decision was not prompted by any one incident, the company said, but rather a rise in retail theft nationwide.

Another grocery chain, ShopRite, added armed guards at some stores in the early innings of the pandemic when it faced a crush of customers rushing to stock up on items for quarantine. Guards patrolled the aisles and stood at the front door.

Security firms are being inundated with requests. The number of calls from retailers interested in increasing their security has jumped by more than 50% in the past 12 months, said Sean Meehan, director of sales and marketing at UFI Security.

There’s also been a rise in smash-and-grab burglaries, with groups of professional thieves breaking into stores and grabbing thousands of dollars of merchandise. Often times, these goods are then resold online. Nearly 70% of retailers reported a rise in organized retail crime last year, contributing to theft and losses of as much as $69 billion a year, according to the Retail Industry Leaders Association and the Buy Safe America Coalition.

In Colorado, union members are pushing for armed guards at Albertson’s and Kroger locations. Some Starbucks workers have also been requesting security officers. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry commented last year that rising theft at its stores could make it more difficult to hire and retain workers.

While armed guards have long been common at jewelry stores and other high-end retailers, an increasing number of retailers are exploring the option. forbes.com

Newspaper Publishes How-to-Shoplift Guide
Australian university student newspaper defends publishing controversial how-to-shoplift guide

The article in the Australian university newspaper offered readers tips on how to shoplift

A student newspaper at Australia’s University of Queensland is defending a controversial article that provided shoplifting tips to cash-strapped students.  The piece, "The Subtle Art of Shoplifting," was published in the student newspaper Semper Floreat on Saturday.

In the piece, the anonymous writer advised readers on "frifting," or "free shopping." As explained by the writer, frifting is "a legitimate action for the working class to take in ongoing class war."

Tips included wearing a mask and covering identifiable markers like piercings and tattoos. Frifters are advised to go to whichever self-serve machine is closest to the staff monitoring them and take off the metal tags.

As reported by Nine News, public officials quickly condemned the article. Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said it ought to be withdrawn. Shadow Education Minister Christian Rowan said encouraging people to commit criminal offenses would lead to anarchy.

But the newspaper has refused to back down. Editor-in-chief William Kugelman wrote an op-ed saying that Semper Floreat stands by its "decision to publish the hypothetical safe shoplifting guide."

The entry included a response from the anonymous author, stating: "We’re in a housing crisis, experiencing the highest cost of living and lowest wages rates since WW2, and yet the wealthiest keep (getting) wealthier – forcing people to live in tents, consolidating their monopolies on housing, starving people on stagnant levels of centrelink support and inadequate minimum wages."  foxnews.com

Response Times Increasing - Calls For Service Spike - Trying to Curtail High Rates of Violence
'Law-Enforcement Agencies Nationwide Facing Hiring Crisis With Fewer People Wanting to be Cops'

“I heard people say it’s a perfect storm" Dallas Asst. Police Chief. Exacerbated by the nation’s labor shortages, steep competition, mental-health struggles and negative perceptions about officers.

Dallas police aren’t alone in those difficulties. A June 2021 national survey of 194 police agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit of police executives mainly from large areas, showed a 45% increase in officer retirements and an 18% uptick in resignations from 2020 to 2021. The percentage decrease in staffing levels was most severe for agencies with 500 or more officers. Editor's Note: Big Cities hit the hardest. dallasnews.com

Police Staffing Shortages Since 2020 Have Fanned the Flames of Crime in Big Cities
More than 100 officers leave Seattle police this year

Seattle rocked by deadliest month in recent history in wake of defund police movement

Seattle saw its deadliest year in decades in 2020

Seattle’s data on homicides follow a national trend from 2020. FBI data show murders increased by nearly 30% in 2020, marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes. The data show murders disproportionately affected Black Americans, at a more than 32% increase compared to 2019.

Experts pointed to the defund the police movement, the pandemic and its lockdowns, which upset daily life in unprecedented ways, and the Ferguson effect for the rise in crimes in 2020.

As crime increased in the city since 2020, the police department in Seattle has faced steep staffing shortages — a problem that has affected nearly all law enforcement agencies in King County,

Seattle is far from alone in dealing with police staffing issues — cities across the country have reported more of the same since the protests and riots of 2020 that called for police departments to be defunded. Philadelphia, for example, is bracing for at least 800 police department members to leave the force over the next few years while it's already operating at 20% below its targeted staffing level. And in Chicago, police reported the lowest number of employees in recent history at the end of March. foxnews.com

Philadelphia police face staffing crisis that's projected to get even worse

Police from across US discuss 'perfect storm' of issues facing cities over past 2 years

PERF survey shows steady staffing decrease over the past two years

Getting Creative to Stop Violence
A New Bid to Crack the Code on Gun Violence

Amalgamated Bank and the nonprofit Guns Down America are trying a different way to use the financial system to clamp down on mass shootings.

A majority of shooters use credit and debit cards to acquire their guns, ammunition and body armor — and the companies behind those card networks have a unique vantage point to spot suspicious buying patterns before law enforcement, families or just about anyone else.

Back in 2018, I proposed that banks and credit card companies create a new “merchant category code” for gun-related transactions at stores that sell firearms, which would allow them to flag suspicious activity. After all, banks are legally obligated to scrub transactions to help identify domestic terrorism. Oddly enough, while the financial industry uses distinct codes for dozens of different types of merchants, there are none for gun stores.

Now, a financial firm — Amalgamated Bank — has been working behind the scenes to make the idea a reality. The bank, with the help of the advocacy group Guns Down America, recently reapplied to I.S.O., the standards agency, to create a new set of merchant category codes for gun sales. nytimes.com

State of Emergency in Texas, Arizona & D.C. Over Migrant Crisis
DC Mayor declares public emergency over migrants being bussed in from Texas
Washington D.C. is now in a state of emergency after Texas and Arizona sent thousands of migrants from their states to the nation's capital – and Mayor Muriel Bowser announced $10 million to create a new office dealing with this crisis.

A Democratic council member accused Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona during a press conference Thursday of creating the crisis and insisted District of Columbia should now be considered a 'border town.'

Her claims come after years of Republicans claiming that all towns in America are border towns because the migration crisis – coupled with drug trafficking – is spilling over and affecting communities across the nation.

So far, approximately 9,400 migrants have been bussed from Texas and Arizona to D.C. over the last nearly five months, according to Bowser's office. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered more than 2 million migrants at the southern border in Fiscal Year 2022 after hitting a record-setting peak in May with 241,166 encounters in that month alone.

More than 2,100 migrants have been sent on 40 busloads from Texas to New York – and thousands more have arrived in D.C. over the last nearly five months. msn.com

Philadelphia: South Street businesses want to revisit public safety

DOJ Recruits AB InBev Data Expert to White-Collar Crime Force

US: 96.9M Cases - 1M Dead - 92.9M Recovered
Worldwide: 612.7M Cases - 6.5M Dead - 590.7M Recovered

Private Industry Security Guard Deaths: 362  
Law Enforcement Officer Deaths: 796
*Red indicates change in total deaths

No Post-COVID Return to the Office for Amazon
Amazon has no plan to make workers return to the office, CEO Andy Jassy says
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy isn't looking to force the company's workers back into the office anytime soon. "We don't have a plan to require people to come back," Jassy said at the Code Conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. "But we're going to proceed adaptively as we learn."

The online retail giant announced last October that it would let individual managers and teams determine how much time they spend in the office, with Jassy saying at the time that "there is no one-size-fits all approach for how every team works best." And it appears that attitude will continue for the foreseeable future.

Jassy's stance may serve as a marker to the tech and corporate world, as companies look beyond the summer and intensify their efforts to bring workers back to the office

While the flexible policy applies to Amazon's corporate workers, the company also has thousands of delivery drivers and warehouse employees whose jobs do not allow them to work from home. Notably, a number of those are attempting to unionize in a quest for better working conditions. cnn.com

Did COVID Shutdowns Help or Hurt?
What scientists have learned from COVID lockdowns
Lockdown measures did what they were supposed to. When they were enforced rigorously enough to reduce people’s social contacts sharply, they shrank COVID-19 outbreaks; several studies had demonstrated this.

Most scientists agree that lockdowns did curb COVID-19 deaths and that governments had little option but to restrict people’s social contacts in early 2020, to stem SARS-CoV-2’s spread and avert the collapse of health-care systems. “We needed to buy ourselves some time,” says Lauren Meyers, a biological data scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.

At the same time, it’s clear that lockdowns had huge costs, and there is debate about the utility of any subsequent lockdown measures. School and university closures disrupted education. Closing businesses contributed to financial and social hardship, mental ill health and economic downturns. “There’s costs and benefits,” says Samir Bhatt, a public-health statistician at Imperial College London and the University of Copenhagen. nature.com

Who should get the updated coronavirus vaccine booster now—and who should wait?

Is COVID-19 winding down? Scientists say no.

Uber Exec's Trial Will Have Massive Impact on Security Industry
Lawyers for Uber’s Ex-Security Chief Say Company Scapegoated Him

A federal trial began on Wednesday for Joe Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor who is accused of not disclosing a data breach while at the company.

Federal prosecutors say Joe Sullivan obstructed justice when in 2016, as the chief of security for Uber, he failed to disclose a breach of driver and customer records to government regulators.

But Mr. Sullivan’s lawyers say that he in no way concealed the incident and that claims that he broke the law stem from Uber’s efforts to recast its image following the turbulent reign of the company’s former chief executive Travis Kalanick.

Opening arguments began on Wednesday in a San Francisco federal court in what is expected to be a monthlong trial for Mr. Sullivan, who, in addition to obstruction of justice, is accused of concealing a felony. Many security experts believe that Mr. Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor, is the first executive at a company to face potential criminal liability for a data breach.

Corporate security officials say the trial’s outcome could inform how they handle security incidents, including how they interact with hackers and when they reveal information to consumers and regulators.

“There is the threat of jail time. You can’t put a company in jail. You can put an executive in jail. Now, that is on the table,” said Chinmayi Sharma, a scholar in residence and lecturer at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. nytimes.com

RELATED: Uber Exec Trial Has Security Officials Worried About Liability

Here's the Daily's previous coverage on the Uber case:

September 7, 2022: As Ex-Uber CSO Heads to Trial, the Security Community Reels

August 4, 2022: Fraud charges in hacking case against Uber ex-security chief are dismissed

July 26, 2022: Uber admits massive 2016 data breach coverup, cooperates with feds

April 28, 2022: Former Uber Chief Security Officer To Face Wire Fraud Charges

August 24, 2020: Watch: Former Uber CSO Charged With Covering Up 2016 Data Breach

August 21, 2020: Former Chief Security Officer For Uber Charged With Obstruction Of Justice

September 27, 2018: Uber Fined $148 Million for Breach Cover-Up

February 7, 2018: Uber Paid Hackers $100K to Destroy Stolen Data on 57M people, Keep Quiet

December 1, 2017: Three Uber security managers resign after CEO criticizes practices

New Law Boosting Storefront Safety
Storefront Safety Council Celebrates New Law that Aims to Protect Outdoor Diners

Storefront Safety Council says new law in California creates insurance incentives for installation of safety barriers to protect outdoor diners and other pedestrians

As outdoor dining and similar streetside venues became commonplace throughout the U.S. during the pandemic, so too did deaths and injuries from vehicles crashing into those diners and pedestrians. California Assemblymember Dr. Bill Quirk (D-20) saw the same trend in his state and introduced legislation that created incentives for installation of safety barriers in the context of outdoor dining and related activities on streets, sidewalks, and parking lots. Quirk’s bill, AB1989, was approved by Governor Gavin Newsom on August 26, 2022.

“Assemblymember Quirk used data from the Storefront Safety Council as part of the documentation showing how risks at outdoor dining areas have increased as such venues have become more common,” explained storefront safety expert Rob Reiter, who also co-founded the Storefront Safety Council.

“Right now, outdoor diners, waitstaff, shoppers and others throughout the U.S. are sitting ducks when there is no proper barrier between them and vehicles,” said Reiter. “This new law is meant to give property owners in California a financial incentive, in the form of reduced commercial property insurance costs, for installing bollards or similar standards-based barriers to protect people.”

According to Storefront Safety Council data, which was reviewed and validated by Lloyd’s of London in April 2022:

● Storefront crashes occur more than 100 times per day in the U.S.
● Nearly half (46%) of all storefront crashes result in injury, and 8% result in a fatality.
● Each year in the U.S., as many as 16,000 people are injured and as many as 2,600 are killed in vehicle-into-building crashes. prweb.com

Bed Bath & Beyond CFO Faced Overwhelming Stress Before Suicide
Inside Bed Bath & Beyond, Concerns Over Mounting Stress for CFO

Retailer’s leaders thought finance chief Gustavo Arnal was overwhelmed; Arnal had discussed taking a break before he died

In the weeks before Gustavo Arnal took his own life, there was growing concern among Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. officials and directors over the demands being placed on the chief financial officer and the stress of the intensifying financial crisis at the home-goods chain, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Arnal told people that he was stressed, his friends said. He was putting in 18-hour days while he worked on the company’s restructuring plans.

Mr. Arnal was discussing with the company the possibility of taking a break, the people said. On the morning of Aug. 31, Ms. Gove, Mr. Arnal and other executives announced that they had secured fresh financing and briefed investors on a major restructuring. Two days later, Mr. Arnal died from a fall at the 57-story New York City skyscraper where he lived with his wife, police said. The medical examiner determined it was a suicide.

His death and a shareholder’s lawsuit alleging wrongdoing at the company have become tabloid fodder. The company is investigating and reviewing Mr. Arnal’s emails; company officials have seen no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing, some of the people said.

His friend said he was under pressure at work but didn’t discuss the details, said Mr. Zijderveld. “He’s the sort of guy who carries the world on his shoulders,” he said. wsj.com

DOJ: Former CFO of Claddagh Irish Pubs Parent Company Charged with Defrauding States Out of More Than $1 Million in Sales Tax Revenue
CLEVELAND - The former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of CDG Acquisition, LLC (CDG), a company registered in the State of Ohio, which owned “The Claddagh Irish Pubs” chain of 15 restaurants, was charged with defrauding multiple states of sales tax revenue where the restaurant chain operated.

Ciaran Dillon, 56, of Solon, Ohio, was named in the indictment and officially charged with two counts of wire fraud.

According to the indictment, from January 2010 through May 2018, the defendant, acting in his official capacity as CFO of CDG, directed a company accountant to pay certain states less sales tax than the true amount owed. The indictment states that based on the defendant’s instruction, the accountant would edit the company's sales and sales tax figures, file false tax returns and pay states the amount instructed by the defendant.

In total, it is alleged that during this time, the defendant defrauded the States of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin out of more than $1 million in sales tax revenue collected from CDG customers across fifteen restaurants. justice.gov

Long lines form outside grand opening of Amazon Fresh store in Delaware County

Outgoing Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he won’t return for fourth stint