Welcome back. Edition 02.
Here's what mattered this week if you run LP or AP for a serious retailer.
The federal piece is finally about to move
After three years of stalled introductions, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) is expected to come to a House floor vote this month. The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee in January with 197 co-sponsors signed on, and RILA is now publicly framing the floor vote as a "significant bipartisan vote" pending in May.
Establishes an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center inside DHS, under Homeland Security Investigations
Creates a formal channel for retail LP teams to share intelligence with federal investigators
Adds federal-level tools for cargo theft and interstate ORC prosecution — the exact gap state laws have not closed
Brings retail trade groups (RILA, NRF) and freight associations (AAR, IANA, ATA) into the same coordination structure
What it does not do: it does not preempt state law, it does not create a new federal theft offense, and it does not give LP teams subpoena power. The mechanism is coordination and information flow, not enforcement.
The practical read. If you've been building case files that languish at the state level because the network operates across three states and resells through online marketplaces, this is the federal lane you've been waiting for. Start identifying which of your active case files would benefit from the coordination center the moment it stands up. Your DHS/HSI relationship management matters more next quarter than it did last.
By the numbers: the violence is the story
New data from Auror across major North American retailers, published in early May:
1 in 7 retail crime incidents in Illinois involved violence, weapons, or threatening behavior
63% of reported incidents traced to the top 10% of offenders
7% year-over-year increase in violent events
Translate that for a CFO: retail crime is not getting more frequent everywhere — it's getting more concentrated and more dangerous. The frequency narrative misses the operational reality. Your duty-of-care exposure on associate safety is going up even where total incident counts hold flat.
If you don't have a repeat-offender file with photographs, vehicle data, and incident timelines cross-referenced across stores, you're working without your most leveraged data asset. The top decile of offenders is doing the majority of the damage. Treat that decile like a watchlist, not a queue.
Tech radar: the self-checkout reckoning
A few signals converging this quarter.
Diebold Nixdorf reported Q1 2026 retail revenue up more than 25% YoY, with North America retail up 70% off a small base. Their Smart Vision platform is being positioned not as a self-checkout tool but as a store-wide computer-vision platform addressing shrink at multiple points. Backlog at $790 million. Management framed Smart Vision as the platform driving larger conversations with retailers about checkout, software, and store ops in general.
NCR Voyix filed 2026 US patents on computer vision applied to self-checkout camera feeds, with a two-model ML pipeline covering both shrink risk identification and prescriptive recommendations. The patents themselves disclose the underlying data point: approximately one-third of total retail shrink occurs at self-checkout lanes, and 40% is employee-related.
Trigo, Shopic, and the broader CV-on-existing-cameras wave at NRF 2026 — the pitch is now consistent across vendors: turn the CCTV estate you already own into a shrink-detection layer. No new hardware. Edge inference. Latency in milliseconds. Reported payback windows of 6–9 months for self-checkout overlays.
The operator's question. If 33% of your shrink is concentrated at self-checkout and the cost of layering CV onto existing cameras is dropping toward six-figure pilots, you have a defensible business case for a sub-12-month payback. The harder question is the one most teams haven't answered: when the CV system flags an event, who intervenes, on what authority, and what does your associate safety policy say?
The technology is no longer the bottleneck. The operating model is.
The contrarian read
Public retailers — Target, TJX, Kroger, Dollar General — spent the last two earnings cycles telling investors that shrink is back to pre-pandemic levels. Most attributed the improvement to "operational improvements" without specifics. Target's CFO was the only one to publicly credit "industry and community efforts."
Meanwhile, industry sources — Appriss Retail, NRF's survey work, EY — still describe a $90B–$112B shrink problem that is structural and growing in sophistication. Appriss adds the missing piece: of $706B in returns last year, roughly $100B is preventable fraud and abuse. Returns now account for 20% of total retail loss.
Both stories can be true. Public retailers may have made real operational gains. Industry totals capture a wider universe of retailers with less sophisticated programs. But the public narrative has a side effect operating LP teams should notice: it makes it harder to justify investment internally when the CFO read the same earnings call you did.
If your CEO or CFO is referencing the "shrink is over" story in budget conversations, the counter is not louder data. It is granular Total Retail Loss classification — by store, by category, by transaction type — that shows the specific places your loss has not improved and the dollar value of fixing them.
Total Retail Loss thinking is winning the budget argument. Pure shrink thinking is not.
Quick hits
Colorado Springs PD arrested a three-person ORC crew on May 8 after a multi-month investigation. Charges include theft, money laundering, robbery, and narcotics. Pattern worth noting: ORC investigations are increasingly multi-charge filings.
California ORC Task Force reports nearly 800 arrests, 500+ investigations, and $8.6M in recovered goods in 2025. The state-funded model is now in its third year and producing measurable conviction volume — a useful precedent for state-level investment cases in other markets.
Illinois Retail Merchants Association estimates $2B/year in retail theft losses statewide, with the state ranked top-three in the US for cargo theft.
Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit disclosed 15M+ counterfeit items seized in its 2025 Brand Protection Report. Marketplace cooperation channels are becoming a real LP lever, not a PR talking point.
Closing note
If you find yourself defending shrink budget against the "shrink is solved" narrative this quarter, reply and tell me how it's going. The most useful intelligence I'll publish in this brief is what's happening in your boardrooms — not what's happening in mine.
Forward this to one LP or AP leader who should be reading it.
— Gabriel
The LP Brief is a weekly intelligence read for senior loss prevention and asset protection leaders. Free. No vendor noise.
Not yet subscribed? thelpbrief.com