As some of you know, retail crime prevention is close to my heart. In many ways, it’s why The Public Safety Report exists.

TL;DR - I previously worked for a retail crime intelligence company and needed a way to quickly understand the law enforcement market as we expanded our audience.

I’ve been talking to a lot of folks on the AP/LP side recently and doing my own research for PSR. With that, I thought it would be a good time to summarize those insights.

(Later this year, we’ll introduce a newsletter that is specifically focused on retail crime prevention globally.)

Progress-on-a-page:

The current state of retail/law enforcement collaboration against ORC

The landscape of Organized Retail Crime (ORC) is shifting from reactive containment to a proactive, unified front. This year, the collaboration between retail asset protection (AP) and law enforcement (LE) has reached a critical inflection point, driven by federal legislative momentum and a shared data-first approach.

Federal/State Momentum

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) has cleared significant hurdles in the House Judiciary Committee this year. If passed, it will establish a dedicated Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). This federal hub aims to eliminate the jurisdictional "blind spots" that criminal rings have long exploited.

Meanwhile, 15 states have recently updated criminal codes to allow for theft aggregation, enabling prosecutors to combine multiple smaller thefts into single high-level felony charges.

The Tech Bridge

For tech professionals and AP leaders, the focus has moved beyond simple surveillance to integrated ecosystems:

• Intelligence Sharing: Platforms like Auror and ALTO are becoming standard, allowing retailers to feed real-time digital evidence directly to LE task forces.

• RFID & AI: Retailers are increasingly using RFID to trace stolen goods back to specific point-of-sale, providing the chain of custody proof for prosecution.

• Marketplace Accountability: The FTC has intensified enforcement of the INFORM Consumers Act, forcing online marketplaces to verify high-volume sellers and making it harder for fences to offload stolen inventory anonymously.

The era of siloed investigations is ending. Stay tuned for more focus on this from PSR.