How connected data helps agencies dismantle organized retail theft networks
KEY IDEAS:
- Organized retail theft investigations require agencies to connect evidence across incidents, individuals, retailers, vehicles, devices, and jurisdictions.
- Fragmented data forces investigators to manually search disconnected systems, making it easier to miss key leads or patterns.
- Data integration links information across systems and jurisdictions, helping investigators uncover leads, identify trends, and build stronger cases.
- With unified data, law enforcement agencies can conduct faster cross-jurisdictional investigations and more effectively disrupt organized retail theft networks.
Organized retail theft (ORT) is a serious challenge for California businesses and law enforcement alike, costing retailers and small businesses billions of dollars a year. Rampant theft poses real risks to residents, and it’s not something businesses in our communities should suffer from.
ORT poses a uniquely complex set of challenges to municipal public safety agencies. Crimes often involve networks of perpetrators employing a wide variety of tactics and strategies. This complexity calls for interagency coordination and the use of sophisticated tools to uncover critical leads.
To disrupt ORT, agencies need more than isolated evidence or single-system searches. They need the ability to connect incidents, suspects, vehicles, locations, and collaborate across jurisdictions.
🧠 KEY CONCEPT: What is organized retail theft?
Organized retail theft involves coordinated theft activity by groups or networks that target retailers, move stolen goods, and often operate across multiple jurisdictions. Unlike isolated shoplifting incidents, ORT investigations require agencies to connect evidence across devices, systems, and partner agencies.
Why organized retail theft networks are difficult to dismantle
Unlike crimes involving a single individual, organized retail thefts are conducted by sophisticated groups. While the makeup of the people physically engaging in the thefts change, the leadership largely stays the same. Because the individuals committing the crimes change, law enforcement considers a broader set of factors in order to effectively stop ORT.
These common factors serve as crucial leads. For example, while the thefts might occur in different places, criminal groups might use the same vehicles or cell phones. If law enforcement can effectively identify the connections, police can more effectively dismantle an organized retail theft group’s entire operation.
The investigative challenge is not collecting more data; it is connecting the data agencies already have.
READ MORE → How the Concord Police Department Uses Real-Time Data to Solve Cross-Jurisdictional Crime
How fragmented data prevents departments from identifying leads
Relevant information about ORT is extremely fragmented. Potential leads could result from:
- Fingerprints
- Cellphone data
- NIBIN hits
- Informant statements
- Traffic citations
- Fixed video footage from retailers’ security systems
- Handwritten reports
Beyond data in departments’ own systems, newly formed partnerships between retailers and law enforcement will provide a small set of retailers’ information to public safety agencies. While retailers’ data could result in new leads, it also adds to the overall complexity of solving ORT-related crime.
This degree of fragmentation, amplified due to ORT's multiple and often changing actors, makes identifying leads a manual and onerous process: Log into one database. Look for information. Do that again for another database. And another. And another. Then manually find connections between siloed information to try to cultivate a lead. Then investigators and analysts must remember and cogently synthesize the connections they’ve identified to try to solve the case.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: Fragmented data slows ORT investigations. When evidence is spread across disconnected systems, investigators must search each source and draw conclusions manually. Data integration helps agencies connect those sources so leads are easier to identify.
How integration connects evidence to reveal leads and patterns
Data integration can streamline this process by connecting evidence across systems and sources. By dynamically integrating, securing, modeling, and transforming data of any kind, Peregrine automatically connects information together, so the process described above is near instantaneous and seamless. Peregrine can link unstructured data in a PDF to a case file from a record management system (RMS).
Any information that’s integrated into Peregrine is transformed by making connections to other relevant data clear — giving patrol officers, investigators, and analysts the context they need to move cases forward efficiently and with precision, avoiding previous manual and time intensive processes.
💡 HOW PEREGRINE CONNECTS ORT INVESTIGATION DATA
- Peregrine integrates structured and unstructured data from systems such as RMS, ALPR, case files, PDFs, retailer data, and partner agency records.
- By transforming that information into connected, searchable data, Peregrine helps investigators identify links between people, vehicles, locations, incidents, and evidence that may otherwise remain hidden.
Helping investigators identify patterns across incidents
Peregrine empowers departments to better evaluate any single instance of retail theft while continuously examining higher-level patterns and trends. The platform simplifies the process for detectives seeking answers to questions like:
- Do certain large-scale thefts target similar types of retail items?
- Has a specific cell phone been present at multiple crime scenes?
- Have particular vehicles or license plates been identified at the scenes?
The power of Peregrine is its ability to surface answers to questions like the ones above. Department personnel can use those answers to make timely decisions while ensuring robust governance, security, and compliance around data usage.
CASE STUDY → How the Pittsburg Police Department Uses Data Integration to Solve Human Trafficking Cases
How unified data helps agencies tackle cross-jurisdictional criminal networks
Criminal networks conducting large scale retail theft cross jurisdictional boundaries. To effectively dismantle these organizations, agencies within regional criminal justice ecosystems must work together. Prosecutors and investigators focusing on retail theft who rely solely on data from their own department or jurisdiction could overlook vital information. Key insights that could lead to a breakthrough during an investigation or help a district attorney build a robust case against ORT suspects might live with neighboring departments.
Just like Peregrine clients within the same city can arrange cross-agency data access in the platform, so can partner agencies across jurisdictional lines. These interagency collaboration arrangements are crucial when tackling regional issues like organized retail theft. These arrangements begin between agencies themselves and are implemented after a legal Memorandum of Understanding governing that data access is signed.
COLLABORATION AND DATA SOVEREIGNTY
You will never lose control of your community’s data in Peregrine. There is no interagency collaboration by default; each instance is established on a one-to-one basis and subject to strict and granular access controls that you decide. All collaboration arrangements require signed Memorandums of Understanding between clients and the system architecture enforces the data holder’s access policies. Access can be revoked at any time. Read more in our Trust Center.
Connecting disparate data empowers investigators to conduct their investigations thoroughly, quickly, and with confidence. Police and district attorneys can use Peregrine to collaborate and build the best possible cases to hold organized retail theft groups accountable.
CASE STUDY → How the Richmond Police Department Reduced Cross-Jurisdictional Violent Crime Through Interagency Data Sharing
Building a stronger organized retail theft strategy
Our team is ready to help your department fundamentally disrupt organized retail theft in your city. Peregrine has also been used to collate the data agencies need to apply for grants and subsequent grant reporting requirements they use to keep their communities safe.
If you have more questions about how Peregrine works, reach out today.
About Scott Seaman
Scott Seaman, Principal of Scott Seaman Consulting, serves as an advisor to Peregrine. He also provides law enforcement executive coaching to chiefs of police and command personnel. He has worked in law enforcement for 39 years including 27 years at the San Jose Police Department and as chief of the Los Gatos/Monte Sereno police department for 12 years. He served as President of the California Police Chiefs Association in 2012 as well as 8 total years on the board of directors of CPCA. He serves as an executive fellow with the National Policing Institute in Washington, DC. His consulting practice also includes over 20 years of expert witness consulting to police agencies on police practices and use of force issues.
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