You Can Outsource the Manpower. You Probably Don’t Want to Outsource the Intelligence.

Here’s an open secret in retail: retailers are in the business of selling merchandise — not running police departments.

Yet modern Loss Prevention increasingly comes with a very physical workload: monitoring high-risk locations, targeted deterrence through visible presence, dealing with repeat offenders, supporting apprehensions, and responding to increasingly organized activity.

And the problem itself is changing.

Shoplifting incidents actually fell 12.4% in 2025. Yet 50% of retailers reported an increase in repeat-offender activity, and 40% saw an increase in ORC-related events.

Source: NRF/LPRC, Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2026

Simply adding more people to the internal LP payroll isn’t necessarily the answer.

Recruiting, screening, training, scheduling and supervising security officers across hundreds of locations is a specialized business of its own.

For AP leadership, it can also consume resources better spent on what retailers are uniquely positioned to own:

Intelligence. Investigations. Analytics. Strategy.

That makes outsourcing more of the physical security layer to specialized private security providers a logical move.

But there’s a catch.

You can outsource the manpower. You probably don’t want to outsource the intelligence.

Most traditional video analytics platforms were built for a retailer’s internal security and investigations teams.

They expose sensitive information and provide sophisticated investigative tools that a contract officer standing at a store entrance neither needs — nor should necessarily have access to.

So how do you put the retailer’s intelligence to work on the sales floor without handing over the intelligence itself?

Maybe the frontline officer doesn’t need another enterprise dashboard.

Maybe they just need to know:

“A person requiring additional attention just entered this location.”

Immediately.

What if the tool were that simple?

What if that alert could be generated locally from an existing surveillance camera — or even from the camera on an Android smartphone or Zebra mobile computer already in the store?

No VMS integration.
No access to the retailer’s investigative environment.
No video sent to a vendor cloud.

That question led us to a surprisingly simple architecture: a lightweight Edge AI application running directly on consumer or industrial Android devices.

Local processing. Watchlist synchronization. A simple frontline dashboard. Escalation and watchlist submission requests. RTSP or the device’s own camera.

The goal isn’t to give outsourced security another investigation platform.

It’s to give the person on the ground the right piece of intelligence at the moment it can still prevent a loss.

The retailer owns the intelligence.

The security provider owns the manpower operation.

Technology connects them at the moment it matters.