The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it comes one of the busiest retail periods of the year. For retailers, communities, and law-enforcement alike, this means the stakes are even higher in the fight against organized retail crime/theft (ORC/ORT). What was once seen as “just” shoplifting is now a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar challenge with amplified impact during peak shopping months.

Unlike single-person shoplifting, ORC is structured, coordinated, and mobile. Crews move across stores, cities, even states, targeting high-value merchandise to resell through online marketplaces or through fencing operations. During the holidays, when inventory is abundant, high-demand items (electronics, toys, gift-worthy goods) are on display and new foot traffic surges, the opportunity for ORC actors grows markedly. That means loss of inventory and revenue for retailers, and for communities, higher prices and even safety risks.

The Silo Problem: Why It’s Especially Dangerous During the Holidays

Retailers have systems to track in-store incidents; law-enforcement has call and arrest logs, CAD and RMS data, license-plate captures, and camera footage. But these rarely connect seamlessly. When you layer on the holiday rush, stores open longer hours, increased amounts of merchandise in motion, and more complex logistics, the risk of multiple incidents looking like isolated events skyrockets. 

A crew could hit several stores in a multi-state chain across a single weekend, and unless someone connects the dots, each case appears as “just another theft.” By the time patterns are recognized, thousands of dollars in goods are gone, fences are working overtime, and law-enforcement is already in catch-up mode.

Why Shared Wins Matter, and Why Holiday Timing Intensifies the Need

Fighting organized retail theft is about more than just arresting thieves, it’s about disrupting entire networks so that the holiday surge doesn’t fuel deeper criminal infrastructure and retailers aren’t taking a financial hit. Success means reduced repeat offenses, fewer call-outs, safer store teams, and less shrink. During holidays, the volume of transactions and store traffic means the margin for error is much smaller. A failure to act now can mean a season of elevated risk, and elevated cost.

The ForceMetrics Approach to Holiday-Ready

ForceMetrics was built to help agencies move from siloed reports to actionable insights. With Network Graph analytics, search, and pivoting capabilities, retailers and law enforcement can finally see ORC not as scattered incidents, but as connected networks of people, vehicles, and locations.

Here is how it works in practice:

1. Linking Repeat Offenders and Criminal Networks
2. • Connect suspects across multiple incidents, retailers, and jurisdictions, even when identifiers are inconsistent.
   • Detect individuals who appear repeatedly in different stores or with different crews.
   • Identify larger networks of criminals working across multiple jurisdictions.
2. Connecting Vehicles and Locations
3. • Map vehicles used by ORC crews, linking parking lot video, vehicle types, license plates and police reports.
   • Identify common stash houses, handlers, drop-off points, or pawn shops where stolen goods flow.
3. Distinguishing Petty Theft from Organized Crime
4. • Pivot through incidents to spot offenders appearing in coordinated patterns, separating shoplifting from ORC.
   • Give agencies a way to prioritize investigations that warrant organized crime unit resources.
4. Measuring Impact Together
5. • Shared metrics can track cases linked across jurisdictions, goods recovered, offenders disrupted, and reductions in repeat calls for service.
   • Both sides see progress in real time, not just individual wins but cumulative disruption of criminal networks.

Building Trust with the Right Controls

Collaboration between retailers and law enforcement must respect privacy, compliance and data-control standards. During the holidays, when the pressure is on, having role-aware access, partitioned sharing, and audit trails ensures that data sharing is safe and effective, not a liability.

• Role-aware access: Retailers share case data into a secure and compliant environment where only relevant fields are visible.
• Partitioned sharing: Agencies filter out unnecessary personal identifiers while still connecting meaningful data points like vehicles, crime types, times, and locations.
• Audit trails: Every query and action is logged, giving both sides confidence that data is being used responsibly and within agreed boundaries.
  

These safeguards transform collaboration from a liability risk into a trusted partnership.

Measuring Disruption, Not Just Arrests

When both sides measure impact through a shared lens, the benefits become clear:

• Cases linked across multiple agencies and retailers.
• Networks dismantled rather than individuals arrested.
• Goods recovered before they are fenced.
• Fewer repeat incidents, fewer calls for service, safer communities.

Especially during the holiday season, measuring success by only arrests or shrink reduction doesn’t fully capture the impact. Real success is when networks are interrupted, when stolen goods don’t make it to market, when fewer repeat incidents occur, and staff feel safer. 

The Bigger Picture

Organized retail theft is more than just a financial drain, it erodes community trust, fuels underground economies, and in a busy season like this, carries added risk. Holiday shoppers expect a safe, smooth experience; store employees are under higher workload; supply chains are more stressed. ORC exploitation during this window can ripple through the season’s performance and brand perception. Tackling it now means seeing past silos, aligning on shared goals, and measuring success in terms of disruption and prevention, not just incident counts.

For this Holiday Season…

As we gear up for the holidays, the time to act is now. By sharing data, aligning measures, and deploying the right tools and partnerships, retailers and law-enforcement can turn what could be a peak season of loss into a peak season of protection.