Our global Auror Network reached a massive milestone last year: over two million dots connected between events and offenders through Auror.
That means retailers and police linked the multiple crime events to repeat and organized offenders across different stores, cities and regions more than two million times. This is giving them the full picture of retail crime, and surfacing just how pervasive the impact of organized retail crime groups is across their store networks.
In the United States alone, retailers worked together to connect more than 730,000 dots just last year.
Think about how challenging it used to be to track high volume crime. Every store and every retailer recorded crime information differently. It could be using sticky notes, USB sticks or CDs, or the classic ‘walls of shame’ in the staff room or on the front window. None of this gives retailers any visibility into whether these are the same individuals that hit the store down the road, too.
On the police side, it was just as challenging having the highest volume crime type reported as one-offs. This offered no real lines of inquiry, and when it was investigated, officers would be spending hours of their time manually collecting evidence, statements and traveling to and from stores.
Retailers and police knew this was a problem but didn’t have the right information to prioritize their resources and make informed decisions to keep stores safe.
Repeat offenders have always thrived in anonymity and rely on stores not talking to each other. But now, retailers are using Auror to reveal the 10% of offenders causing over 60% of retail crime globally.
Auror gives retailers the structured reporting platform that makes this possible and it diagnoses what retailers have long been feeling: retail crime is organized, high volume, and violent.
When retailers all record crime in the same way consistently, the patterns become visible and they can respond.
We’ve seen this play out in real cases, like the dismantled organized retail crime ring involving 200 people across 28 states in the US last year, or the ‘baby formula’ crime syndicate in Melbourne, Australia connected to 19 offenders.
This is the network effect in action and demonstrates the power of collaboration to piece together otherwise disconnected incidents.
Two million dots connected. This milestone means a few things for the Auror Network:
- Frontline retail workers are doing phenomenal, proactive work to record crime as it happens, to make sure the totality of offending is understood.
- Collaborating and sharing information about crime is enabling retailers and law enforcement to solve that crime.
- It highlights the scale of the problem the retail community is facing across stores, cities, and regions, so we can adequately respond to the challenge.
Auror now has the largest Retail Crime Intelligence network in the world, used by more than 85,000 stores and in 3,500 law enforcement agencies worldwide. We have grown a remarkable community. This milestone is a testament to them, but we all know there is more to do.
Our shared mission at Auror is to reduce violent retail crime by 50% in five years, and the more our network works together, the more achievable this goal becomes.
To retailers still on the outside: the Auror Network is here, it’s working, and it’s making stores safer every day.
“It takes a network to defeat a network.”
- Retired US Army General Stanley McChrystal
