For the third straight year, the National Retail Federation is hosting a “Fight Retail Crime Day,” which entails a last-ditch effort to pass the “Combating Organized Retail Crime Act,” a bill that was introduced in both houses of Congress last year.
Among its provisions are expansion of the federal enforcement of criminal offenses related to organized retail crime; prosecutorial latitude under federal money laundering statutes; and the establishment of an Organized Retail Crime Coordination Center within the Department of Homeland Security.
On Thursday, the NRF is holding a zoom call (closed to the press), billed as “a one-hour overview of the current state of retail crime [to] learn how to advocate for solutions to combat ORC.” The group is also urging participants to send messages and make phone calls to members of Congress.
With this Congressional session rapidly winding down and the bills relevant to ORC still in committee, there’s little chance of the legislation becoming law this time around. That may be why this year’s event is scaled down compared to 2023, when NRF brought 70 retail asset protection executives from nearly 30 retailers to Washington to advocate for the legislation. They held 65 meetings at lawmakers’ offices, which NRF said helped the bills gain 36 new sponsors, pushing the total above 100. The effort garnered an award for “best lobby day.”
This year, Congress is out of session on Fight Retail Crime Day, so there will be no press conference or meetings in legislative offices. Participants are conducting store tours throughout the month with members of Congress in their districts to demonstrate the impact of retail crime.
“We continue to pursue every avenue for enacting [this legislation] before the close of the 118th Congress,” Mary McGinty, NRF vice president of communications and public affairs, said by email.
The bill’s fate remains uncertain even if is reintroduced in the next Congress, however. While it has bipartisan support, last year a member of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement and Intelligence told David Johnston, NRF vice president of asset protection and retail operations, that lawmakers needed better data to proceed. Weeks before, the NRF had pulled a statistic from a special report on retail crime following Retail Dive’s discovery of flawed statistics.
NRF now quotes from its latest shrink survey, covering 2022 and released a year ago, noting that “more than two-thirds (67%) of respondents said they experienced an increase in violence and aggression from ORC perpetrators compared with a year ago.” Those surveys, which the organization conducted for three decades, are no longer being published.
Instead, the NRF is working on the release of new crime data, which according to McGinty will be available “in the near future.” In a September press release, the NRF noted that “It can be hard to grasp the vast impact of ORC.”
But it isn’t all that clear how vast it is. Visibility into shrink is poor, according to several experts, and asset protection industry experts disagree about just how much is lost to theft in general or ORC in particular. That’s in part because dependable data has been scarce and terminology convoluted.
via https://www.aiupnow.com
Daphne Howland, Khareem Sudlow
