joe larocca

I had a brief chat with Ryan Kearney the other day. He is the general counsel for the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, and I wanted to check in with him to see how things fared at the recent New England Organized Retail Crime Symposium and Trade Show.

Attendance was up to about 300, he said, an increase for the event's sixth year. About 25 vendors partipated. Joe LaRocca, the former vice president for loss prevention for the National Retail Federation, now vice president and senior advisor, loss prevention, at RetaiLPartners, gave the opening address and was also honored for his work in the industry.

A highlight of the show, Kearney said, was the keynote address from Albuquerque Police Chief Raymond Schultz, who was accompanied by Karen Fischer, Albuquerque's strategic support division manager. They talked about their ORC partnerships with retailers, prosecutors and others. Albuquerque's private-public program for fighting ORC has been used as a model across the country, and it continues to grow. I hope to check in on that shortly and do an update on a story SDN wrote about it a year ago.

At the National Retail Federation's Loss Prevention Conference & Expo last week in New Orleans, Joe LaRocca, NRF's senior asset protection advisor, gave a keynote address titled, "The ETs of Retail: Emerging Technologies and Emerging Threats."

LaRocca argued that while many emerging technologies—near-field communication, mobile POS, touchless payments, RFID, e-receipts, etc.—will help drive retail sales, improve efficiencies and increase customer satisfaction, they will also pose challenges for loss prevention professionals.

Here's a clip posted by the NRF of LaRocca discussing the challenges associated with e-receipts.