Cannabis Retail Offers Crime Prevention Lessons
What Retail LP Can Learn From Cannabis Stores

By the D&D Daily staff

Cannabis dispensaries may not look like the typical retail environment, but their experience with crime and security could offer lessons for the broader Loss Prevention and Asset Protection industry.

Legal cannabis retailers face a distinctive combination of risks. Stores can carry valuable inventory that has an established illicit resale market, while federal restrictions have historically complicated access to traditional banking and payment services for cannabis businesses. That can leave some locations handling significant amounts of cash — creating attractive targets for robbery and burglary.

Those risks have also forced security to become a fundamental part of cannabis retail operations.

Depending on state and local regulations, dispensaries can face extensive requirements covering video surveillance, alarms, product storage, inventory tracking and access to restricted areas. Some businesses supplement those measures with security personnel, reinforced entry points and procedures designed specifically around robbery and after-hours burglary risks.

For traditional retailers confronting organized retail crime, there may be lessons in that security-first approach.

One is the importance of layering defenses. Cameras alone don't prevent crime, just as guards, alarms or access controls cannot eliminate every threat individually. Combining physical security, technology, employee procedures and inventory controls can make stores more difficult targets while providing investigators with better evidence when crimes occur.

Cannabis retail also illustrates how criminals adapt to the characteristics of a particular industry. When merchandise is valuable, portable and resalable — or when offenders believe substantial cash is available — retailers can attract more coordinated and aggressive criminal activity.

That dynamic isn't limited to dispensaries. Electronics, luxury goods, pharmacies, home improvement products and other high-value retail categories face their own versions of the same problem.

The comparison also highlights a larger question for LP leaders: What would retail security look like if crime prevention were considered during the design of a store rather than added after losses occurred?

Cannabis retailers have had little choice but to confront that question.

As conventional retailers continue battling theft, burglary, robbery and organized retail crime, some of the industry's most useful security lessons may come from one of retail's newest sectors.


Retailers, Police Use Auror Against Theft
ICYMI: Schenectady, New York police, stores partnering to stop repeat retail theft
Schenectady police and local retailers say a new digital partnership is helping them target repeat shoplifting suspects across the Capital Region.

The release said the work has been aided by the Retail Crime Hub, which connects retail crime intelligence software Auror with Axon’s digital evidence management system. Schenectady police said the Auror network helped investigators connect the 112 cases across retailers and identify an alias used by the suspect.

“The hard work of local retailers, the strong relationships we’ve built with them, and our collaboration through Auror have helped the Schenectady Police Department save time and work more efficiently when investigating organized retail crime, both locally and across New York,” said Det. Mancino of the Schenectady Police Department. “Judges have also recognized the value of the detailed case packets on repeat offenders and have commented that retailers’ reports are much higher quality, which helps strengthen prosecutions.”

Auror data cited in the release shows the top 10 percent of offenders were responsible for 60 percent of recorded retail crime across Capital Region stores from June 2025 to June 2026. The same data says one in every nine retail crime events involved violence, weapons or threatening behavior toward retail workers.

The release said knives were the most commonly used weapon in Capital Region retail crime events, followed by firearms and blades.

“Retail crime is not only violent and organized, it’s also an extremely high-volume crime type, and the worst of it is driven by prolific offenders that don’t respect jurisdictional boundaries, so it’s important the sector works together to focus their resources on those causing the most amount of harm,” said Raul Aguilar, Auror’s head of law enforcement partnerships for the Americas. wnyt.com


2026 On Track for Record-Low Murder Rate?
Crime Analyst Projects Record-Low U.S. Murder Rate for 2026
Asher’s forecasting tool combines monthly 2025 data from both the Crime Index national sample — compiling data from 600 agencies — and the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, or CDE, to determine which set of monthly data best predicts the FBI’s estimates and uses that result to create an estimated number.

Asher said the data is rounded to account for imperfections. All predicted figures contain a 90% confidence interval.

Despite the inability to say with complete certainty what the FBI’s data will show, Asher believes the ability to predict the data has made sufficient progress to produce an accurate result.

“Counts are rounded to the nearest hundredth and rates are rounded to the nearest tenth,” Asher said. These rounded numbers attempt to account for imperfections in the raw data.

The FBI also rounds its data, often revising “previous year estimates up — sometimes quite a bit,” Asher said.

The FBI’s estimate of the murder rate for 2024 was initially undercounted at 16,935 total murders in the U.S. but was later rounded up to 17,240 murders reported in the U.S. There is always the possibility that some murders are not reported but still occur, accounting for part of the total rate.

Asher said it is possible that data could still change for 2026, despite it being unusual for many crimes to be reported this late in the year. Despite the chance that new data could emerge, Asher still claims that 2026 will hold a record-breaking low for murder rates. davisvanguard.org


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