The Hidden Cost of Retail Crime

Organized retail theft, often referred to as organized retail crime or ORC, is no longer an occasional nuisance for store managers. It is a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar challenge that impacts retailers, communities, and law enforcement alike.

Unlike shoplifting, which tends to involve individuals acting alone, ORC is structured, coordinated, and highly mobile. Offenders target multiple stores across cities, counties, and even state lines, often reselling stolen merchandise through online marketplaces or fencing operations. For retailers, the immediate cost is lost inventory and revenue. For communities, it means higher prices at the checkout counter and, in some cases, heightened risks of violence. For law enforcement, it creates an investigative nightmare where every agency only sees part of the larger network.

The end result is simple: everyone sees a piece of the puzzle, but no one sees the full picture.

The Silo Problem

Retailers are well-equipped to track what happens within their own walls. They gather loss-prevention reports, security footage, and store-level incident logs. Law enforcement, on the other hand, collects arrest records, CAD and RMS data, and license plate hits from public and private cameras.

But those data sets do not naturally connect. Even when they do, questions about privacy, liability, and data control create hesitation. Retailers worry about oversharing sensitive information. Agencies face CJIS and legal compliance obligations. And because success is measured differently, shrinkage rates for retailers and clearance rates for police, collaboration often stops at information hand-offs instead of forming a sustained, joint effort.

This fragmentation leaves room for organized offenders to thrive. A crew might hit a national retailer in three different cities over two weeks, and unless someone connects the dots, each case looks like a one-off incident. By the time patterns are recognized, thousands of dollars of merchandise are gone, fences are moving product online, and investigators are left playing catch-up.

Why Shared Wins Matter

One of the biggest barriers to fighting ORC is not just siloed data, but also siloed definitions of success.

• Retailers measure recovery of goods, reduced shrink, and cost avoidance.
• Law enforcement measures arrests, case clearances, and charges filed.

Both matter, but neither tells the full story. The real measure of success in organized retail crime is disruption: preventing repeat offenses, dismantling networks, and protecting communities from ongoing harm. That can only happen when both sides align on what they are trying to achieve and measure impact together.

The ForceMetrics Approach

ForceMetrics Velocity™ was built to help agencies move from siloed reports to actionable insights. With Velocity's Network Graph analytics, search, and pivoting capabilities, retailers and law enforcement can finally see ORC not as scattered incidents, but as connected networks of people, vehicles, and locations.

Here is how it works in practice:

1. Linking Repeat Offenders
2. • Connect suspects across multiple incidents, retailers, and jurisdictions, even when identifiers are inconsistent.
   • Detect individuals who appear repeatedly in different stores or with different crews.
2. Connecting Vehicles and Locations
3. • Map vehicles used by ORC crews, linking parking lot video, LPR hits, and police reports.
   • Identify common stash houses, drop-off points, or pawn shops where stolen goods flow.
3. Distinguishing Petty Theft from Organized Crime
4. • Pivot through incidents to spot offenders appearing in coordinated patterns, separating shoplifting from ORC.
   • Give agencies a way to prioritize investigations that warrant organized crime unit resources.
4. Measuring Impact Together
5. • Shared metrics can track cases linked across jurisdictions, goods recovered, offenders disrupted, and reductions in repeat calls for service.
   • Both sides see progress in real time, not just individual wins but cumulative disruption of criminal networks.

Building Trust with the Right Controls

Collaboration between retailers and law enforcement does not mean abandoning privacy or compliance safeguards. In fact, it only works with the right controls in place:

• Role-aware access: Retailers share case data into a secure, CJIS-compliant environment where only relevant fields are visible.
  
• Partitioned sharing: Agencies filter out unnecessary personal identifiers while still connecting meaningful data points like vehicles, times, and locations.
  
• Audit trails: Every query and access is logged, giving both sides confidence that data is being used responsibly and within agreed boundaries.

These safeguards transform collaboration from a liability risk into a trusted partnership.

Measuring Disruption, Not Just Arrests

When both sides measure impact through a shared lens, the benefits become clear:

• Cases linked across multiple agencies and retailers.
• Networks dismantled rather than individuals arrested.
• Goods recovered before they are fenced.
• Fewer repeat incidents, fewer calls for service, safer communities.

This is not just about catching shoplifters. It is about proving that coordinated, data-informed collaboration can reduce harm, protect frontline staff, and create measurable wins for the community.

The Bigger Picture

Organized retail crime is more than a financial issue. It erodes community trust, fuels underground economies, and creates risks that ripple far beyond the aisles of a store. Tackling it requires seeing beyond silos, aligning on shared goals, and measuring success in terms of disruption and prevention.

ForceMetrics Velocity™ provides the tools to do exactly that. By linking people, places, and events across systems, and by giving both retailers and law enforcement a way to measure shared wins, we are helping agencies and businesses move from reactive investigations to precision disruption.

If your team is ready to go beyond piecemeal reports and measure real disruption in the fight against organized retail crime, Velocity™ can help. Visit https://www.forcemetrics.com/request-a-demo to see it in action.