Voiceover: 0:01

Welcome to Spirited Discussions. A podcast by Alcohol Beverage Services exploring alcohol products trends and policies in Montgomery County.

Jocelyn Rawat: 0:12

Thanks for joining us. I'm your host, Jocelyn Rawat. As retail theft continues to be a topic of concern across the country, we're taking a look at the ways ABS and its partnering agencies approach this complex issue. So, to help us sort it out, we're joined by Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets, who works in the Montgomery County Police Department's 4th District, serving Wheaton, Glenmont and Silver Spring areas. Sergeant Dickensheets has been in the department for 21 years, and prior to his recent promotion (congratulations), he spent 10 years investigating property crimes for the 5th District, so much of that time was spent working in retail crimes. So, hi, Sergeant.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 0:48

Morning. Thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Rawat: 0:50

And from Alcohol Beverage Services, we have Pete Schomburg, who joined ABS three years ago in order to create a comprehensive loss prevention program. He comes to us with a strong background in this area, including work with several high-profile retailers. And I would like to note that the ABS Loss Prevention Program has won a couple of high-profile best practices awards nationally. So congratulations for that, and welcome Pete.

Pete Schomburg: 1:18

Good morning, thank you for having me.

Jocelyn Rawat: 1:19

Pete, I want to start with you because, although today we're going to be focusing on retail theft, loss prevention is a lot bigger than that, so can you tell us what it entails?

Pete Schomburg: 1:28

Certainly, the primary focus of any loss prevention or asset protection team is really just to identify potential loss within any organization, wherever it may be. What we do is pretty much a support unit making a positive impact on everything from incident follow-up to operations of the business sales, making our stores more secure and enhancing overall customer shopping experience.

Jocelyn Rawat: 1:56

Okay, but it could look at other things too, right? Not just what's happening in the stores. You might look at the warehouse or best practices or the way our equipment works, or anything that would cause us to lose something.

Pete Schomburg: 2:08

Yeah, that's right. When I got here and I've been doing LP for 25 years or so I didn't really want to reinvent the wheel and in fact I kind of took a little bit of a backseat and kind of understood the operation of the business, understood the needs of the organization. Specifically, being a government entity, it's a little bit different than working in a private business and so our primary focus is operational shrink loss from theft and fraud and things like that and then any internal situations that might arise.

Jocelyn Rawat: 2:46

Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit about that, more about the way that government and retail kind of mesh together in a unique way here. But before that, Sergeant, I have a question for you. There's been a lot of discussion in the news and on social media about retail theft, which includes shoplifting and organized retail crime. But I find it a little bit difficult to understand really what's fact and what's exaggeration, because, you know, sometimes there's a little exaggeration on social media. So how serious is retail theft?

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 3:13

Retail theft is a huge problem for society in general. What we have are most of us pay for our goods and other people are stealing goods, and what it does is it creates a problem in these areas where people shop. It creates higher prices. It can sometimes create an unsafe environment, causes a lot of stress to employees and business owners. I'm going to throw a stat out at you. I got this from the National Retail Federation, and because they take nationally the amount of information that they get, and it takes a while to compile this, the most recent data is for 2022. And in 2022, there's $112 billion in losses. Now, that includes shrink. That includes a little bit of calculation error as well, but they have it pinned down that $40 billion of that is from external shrink, meaning from loss prevention oriented cases like shoplifting.

Jocelyn Rawat: 4:07

Okay, so that's why we're here today, right To talk about that piece of it.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 4:10

More recent information real quick and we got this. This is from 2023. Maryland had 104,000 shoplifting cases that were officers made arrests. Approximately 104,000. That's a lot, so it's a lot of theft going on. It's a problem. It's an arena that I've been in for about 10 years and there's a big difference between shoplifting and the organized retail crime. I don't know if you want to go down that rabbit hole or not.

Jocelyn Rawat: 4:39

Okay, so Pete, how? How does this retail theft generally translate to ABS stores? What's happening there?

Pete Schomburg: 4:47

When we designed the program, we came up with a solution for stores to report incidents that occur in retail. Obviously, we can't be everywhere at the same time. There's only four of us and we focus on operational and different things here and there. So, from a shoplifting standpoint, the easiest thing that we came up with was a reporting system that's used by stores to report things that they're seeing out there. From a shoplifting perspective, we've worked on about 3,000 theft-related cases this year and last year combined. Wow, that's roughly a total of $176,000 worth of reported incidents of shoplifting over the course of this and last year.

Jocelyn Rawat: 5:30

Yeah, that's a little concerning. So what's your team doing to prevent these types of incidents or to pursue justice if they do occur?

Pete Schomburg: 5:37

Yeah, so our first approach is a deterrence strategy. So we have various things in place. We have things like awareness in stores. We do store visits, talking about awareness and what to look for, how to report those things, what resources are available to find the information they need to report and what to report.

Pete Schomburg: 5:56

We have a program called well, I have called it "product security, so it's really called electronic article surveillance in the LP world. But product security is basically the little sensors on the bottle tops and the alarm when you go out of the store, which is really a visual deterrent for any petty shoplifting, and then if they do end up taking something with that item on it, it'll alert as they leave the building. When we receive the reports, we're compiling them in a way that and Jesse hinted at this earlier there's petty shoplifting here and there. Reports come in daily. But there's also something that we call complex investigations and those are the ones we really hitting committing thefts in multiple locations across the county or committing multiple thefts in the same location for higher dollar amounts. We try to focus on those as a priority.

Jocelyn Rawat: 6:57

Okay, so what do these techniques look like from the customer's perspective?

Pete Schomburg: 7:02

It's basically invisible. You might see the bottle tops here and there. Hopefully it's not too scary for people to look at that. I think it blends well and we're basically invisible from a personal standpoint. So we do visit and we do conduct audits and things in stores, but we it follow-up to cases that we get and things like that and almost all of our work from a law enforcement partnership standpoint is done behind the scenes.

Jocelyn Rawat: 7:27

Okay, so, sergeant, I'd like to know what it looks like from some MCPD's perspective too, including what you just mentioned. Like, how are you separating out petty retail theft from organized retail theft?

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 7:48

So typically when we get it, it would be most times it would be an investigator handling the case. Your patrol guy would go out, take a couple of reports, but usually Pete and his team are on top of it. They'll contact... it's usually a patrol investigations unit, which I did the last 10 years and you have a meeting. He'll typically provide the stats of what the amount is up to, provide the CCTV footage and any suspect ideas on who it may be. A lot of times they do a great job and they kind of have an idea who the person is before we get it. If not, we view the CCTV, we snip it or use pictures they provide to us and we are looking for and this is something that ABS does a great job of they have really good video.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 8:31

That is a huge discouragement, a discouraging factor to criminals coming into the store because if they've been prosecuted before, they know crystal clear video helps make cases. So we're looking for any personal characteristics like a mole, a tattoo, some kind of a snaggle tooth, anything that's going to stand out. I made a case on a bad toenail one time on somebody. They had a toenail fungus infection and it's hilarious because anything that you can show that has a personal characteristic. You can ask the judge to see that in court. They don't always have to give it to you, but it allows us to make a case and ID who that person is. And then what happens is we work together with our victim in this case ABS they tell us what they would like as an outcome and we prosecute the case together as a team with the state attorney's office.

Pete Schomburg: 9:16

Yeah, really, when I came in here I had a few of these answers already, but partnering with Jesse and other people from Montgomery County has been a blessing, because they've really given us the answers to the test. As far as, like, what to report, how to report it, I've heard a lot of times and I don't know how true this is but they copy and paste our stuff and interject where they need to, you know, to give it to prosecutors and things like that.

Pete Schomburg: 9:40

So I take personal pride in some of that, but a lot of that is, again, partnership with law enforcement and them telling us what they need from us.

Jocelyn Rawat: 9:47

Okay, so that's interesting. So I hear you both saying that this is a meaningful partnership for the community, and I would imagine that a piece of that is that ABS is a pretty big entity. We have 27 retail stores, which I imagine is more than most private retailers. So does it make a difference that ABS is so large and has these different locations that are kind of unified under one umbrella?

Pete Schomburg: 10:13

I think the biggest factor there is that we're the only game in town from a certain perspective. I know beer and wine stores exist, but as far as spirits, it's Montgomery County stores, and so if people are committing crimes in liquor stores per se, it is going to be in one of our retail stores. Another point of that, another factor to consider, is that a lot of these crimes that are committed are theft, but the same people that are committing the theft in our stores are committing other crimes, potentially somewhere else, and so it really helps the community to identify some of these folks and close their cases.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 10:53

The only thing I'd like to add with that is there is a challenge, and this is a really big challenge right now. When I was in the 5th District working in my capacity as an investigator, I was responsible for 5th District crimes. Now, with this being a county-wide organization, ABS having 27 stores, a lot of times Pete and I had a good enough relationship that I would work cases even down in Silver Spring or Rockville wherever the need was. It's really about as a business in the ABS having good relationships with law enforcement, that you have somebody that you can go to. I've moved on. I don't work these cases right now because I'm supervising a shift, but it's going to come to ABS making that relationship with somebody new to handle the cases, most likely in a patrol investigations capacity. But it's getting difficult because many of patrol functions and police functions are basically being used to run police calls. So with manpower dwindling, the shoplifting arena becomes very difficult for the police department to handle because of strictly manpower alone. It makes it tough.

Jocelyn Rawat: 11:58

Okay, so these partnerships really matter, not just with ABS, but with private retailers as well.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 12:03

I would imagine yeah, absolutely.

Jocelyn Rawat: 12:04

Okay, so between the two of you, the team has had some really good measurable successes in terms of closed cases and restitution. So, Pete, can you tell us about that?

Pete Schomburg: 12:13

Yeah, so part of any prosecuted case would include restitution. Obviously, not everybody has the money to pay back the restitution, but we do get court ordered restitution. In every one of these situations and in almost all cases where there is probation as a part of their sentencing, restitution is a part of the probationary period. So if they don't end up paying the restitution for whatever reason, it could potentially violate the probation. We have demanded through prosecution approximately 33 to 35,000, over the course of this year and last year from prosecuted cases, and most of those again are the complex investigations that cause a large amounts of loss to ABS. We're currently working on a solution to track the recovered dollars because a lot of times they'll come to me or they'll come to the County or they'll go here and there and everything. So we're trying to compile all that information in a format that tells us the story, but we're not quite there yet.

Jocelyn Rawat: 13:17

So why do these successes matter?

Pete Schomburg: 13:19

Well, I mean restitution offsets some of the costs of the loss prevention program. Restitution goes directly back into ABS and what we contribute back to the community from sales and things like that.

Jocelyn Rawat: 13:32

OK. So what you said kind of reminds me, and I'd like to remind everybody that ABS is not supported by tax dollars. I think that's a common misconception that ABS is tax funded. It is not. The department is funded entirely by the sale of alcohol, and that includes all salaries and benefits. And then the remaining profits are used to pay for resident services that otherwise would be paid for with tax dollars. So that means that everyone who lives in Montgomery County benefits from Alcohol Beverage Services, whether they drink alcohol or not. And that includes not just the revenue that gets poured back into the community but also the safety measures that I would think then extend from our stores into the neighboring stores. Am I understanding that correctly? Extend from our stores into the neighboring stores? If an ABS store is safer then the retailer next door is safer too, is that a reasonable assumption?

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 14:24

I would agree with that, Jocelyn. It's one of those things where criminals hang out, where criminal conduct occurs. We know that consumption of alcohol oftentimes goes with other crimes. So if you have a bunch of stores that really don't enforce any kind of asset protection, it's going to be known and people are going to congregate and hang out in that area and it becomes a problem. So as a unified front, if you have a wide variety of retail stores creating a strong front with strong asset protection, it's going to discourage criminal activity from that entire area where those stores are and they'll go find a weaker target to hit yeah and, to that point, full speed ahead.

Pete Schomburg: 15:03

We've been at this for about two years and we've seen a dramatic decrease in these complex investigations and it could be called ORC or organized retail crime. But again, the complex cases are the ones that are causing large amounts of loss with multiple locations involved, multiple actors involved, and since we've been following up with these cases and reports and prosecutions and all these different things we're doing, we've seen a dramatic decrease in that type of activity.

Jocelyn Rawat: 15:30

Okay, so I heard you say that ABS is the only seller of liquor by the bottle, and that is correct in 27 of our retail stores, but there are hundreds of privately owned beer and wine stores and many of them are mom and pop businesses and they may not have the level of resources to invest into big loss prevention programs. So what measures do you recommend for them, Sergeant?

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 15:56

The best thing I can say is forge relationships with your local police department. This goes for anywhere in the country. If you have a retail store. Forge those relationships. Identify who's going to be your responding force. Typically it's patrol. Oftentimes if these are in your urban areas of the community, we have something called CBD. There's your guys out on bicycles, they're walking around making those relationships. They're usually the first to respond. Also, find out who your investigator is going to be, because a lot of times the criminal gets away with the product and an investigator has to look at it and figure out who they are. If you have cell phone numbers of those people or even office numbers and you're on a first name basis, when they hear that call go out, they don't associate it with a store. They associate it with an individual who's making that phone call. That they know because of that forged relationship.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 16:44

The other thing is there's like a street credit kind of game going on with criminals and for retail it's how good your stuff, how good your asset protection is. Ok, ABS has great cameras. That's something they're known for. Word gets out through prosecutions when they see themselves on video in a court case and they're like wow, that is really clear. You can't deny that you know. You can't deny that it's not you. That helps as well as airtight records, loss prevention reports. You just have to keep accurate records, because the last thing I want to do is testify over information I'm given by a retailer and then being proven that that's not accurate information. It makes me look like an idiot on a stand. I can probably get in trouble from that and your case isn't solid. It gets thrown out. Criminals know they can target that store then.

Pete Schomburg: 17:31

Yeah, and to that point I would say that it seems fairly standard and straightforward. But I have made it a point, and we are all making a point to attend at least, at the very least attend court proceedings. We take it a step further when we go there, because I feel like this is kind of a miss in a lot of retail loss prevention environments. I know it's kind of taken from a personal standpoint, an individualistic standpoint, but I think it's very important to at the very least attend these court proceedings. If you prosecute someone as a victim or as an LP professional, you should at the very least attend the court proceeding. But when you're in court, make partnership with the assistant, state's attorneys, talk about what happened in the store, talk about what your needs are, what you expect the outcome to be, those types of situations and eventually, if you're in there enough, they'll get to know you, they'll get to know your business, they'll get to know what your expectation is and they'll basically do everything for you. You would just have to say hello and that's pretty much it.

Jocelyn Rawat: 18:38

Okay, I don't know how many would- be thieves we have listening to our little podcast, um, but if we do, uh, what message do you have for would- be thieves?

Pete Schomburg: 18:46

This is the part where I interject something funny. Um, from my standpoint, I mean, it might not worth their time, it's not worth their money, it's not worth the potential jail time that could come with the situation. I mean, even if you, you know there's different levels of theft in Montgomery County there's theft under, theft over in schemes and all these things. I mean, even if you take a single item, it could be over the threshold of $100 and now you're looking at a misdemeanor crime and potential jail time and all these things you have to pay the money back. I would say it's just not worth it. I mean, none of those things sound pleasant to me, so it's not worth it.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 19:31

We have a few tricks up our sleeves. Technology has allowed us to do some things we could never do before. I'm not going to mention them all, but I'll just say that you're not going to outrun the drone.

Jocelyn Rawat: 19:45

Okay, so that's probably not our audience. What message do you have for the people shopping in our stores?

Pete Schomburg: 19:51

What message do I have for people shopping in stores? I would say, as a result of what we're doing, there is a more immediate product selection. I mean, people don't steal things that they don't want, right?

Jocelyn Rawat: 20:06

So if it's not being stolen, it's still there on the shelf to buy. That's correct and it's on the shelf to buy at a better price, I would imagine.

Pete Schomburg: 20:13

Yeah, I mean you'll see markups across the industry and even different industries, soft lines and hard lines and all these things. You'll see markups due to theft and then it's unfortunate that all the markups are on the products that people want to buy. So I would say that primarily, there's a better selection, a more immediate selection of the things that you want in stores and hopefully we're making it a more secure environment for you to come and shop.

Jocelyn Rawat: 20:40

Okay, that's my favorite environment to go and shop.

Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets: 20:43

My comment doesn't have to deal with ABS, but mine is a police response in general. Have fun, have your drinks, don't drink and drive, and if you're going to get a little out of control, make sure you're doing it in a safe environment where the police and the general public don't have to interact with you. But live it up, have fun.

Jocelyn Rawat: 21:02

Thank you. I really appreciate that reminder. So thank you, Pete Schomburg and Sergeant Jesse Dickensheets for participating in today's Spirited Discussion. If there's a topic you'd like us to cover on the podcast, email us at absspiriteddiscussions at montgomerycountymdgov. And thanks for listening.

Voiceover: 21:21

Alcohol Beverage Services is the alcohol wholesaler of beer, wine and spirits for Montgomery County and it operates neighborhood retail stores. Abs also manages alcohol licensing, enforcement and education for more than 1,000 businesses. Profits are used to pay for resident services that otherwise would be funded by county tax dollars. This podcast is brought to you by County Cable Montgomery, your source for news and information from the Montgomery County Government. Connect with us via cable, facebook, instagram or YouTube by searching for County Cable MoCo.