A retail loss prevention program that runs on a shared folder of PDF alerts has a shelf life of about three months before the records become contradictory, the status updates get lost, and floor staff are working from alerts that should have been closed two incidents ago.
The Four-State Status System
Status — ACTIVE, Inactive, Arrested, Trespassed — creates a lifecycle that governs how floor staff interact with the record.
ACTIVE is the operational state: staff are instructed to observe and contact LP if the subject enters the store. Inactive is a de-escalation state — the subject is still in the system but the current instruction is to monitor, not act. Arrested means the civil and criminal process has initiated; LP's role in actively surveilling this individual at the door has shifted to preserving documentation for prosecution. Trespassed is the administrative closure state — a no-trespass notice has been served, and any re-entry is a criminal trespass rather than a civil shoplifting event.
The Instructions field makes the status actionable at the individual level. A status of ACTIVE might have very different instructions depending on the subject's known behavior pattern — "Contact LP immediately, do not approach" for a known violent subject versus "Observe and note MO" for an organized retail crime subject where arrest is secondary to pattern documentation. Instructions that live in the record travel with the record; instructions that exist only in a manager's memory don't.
Two Image Fields, One Physical Profile
The dual image slots allow a front and side profile, or two separate surveillance captures from different incidents. A subject who has appeared on two different dates at two different store locations may have different clothing in each image; both images in the same record let floor staff recognize the subject across appearance changes.
Physical descriptors — Age, Ethnicity/Gender, Height, Weight — are text fields rather than structured choices. This accommodates the imprecise nature of surveillance-based identification where "late 30s, possibly 40s" is more accurate than forcing a year-of-birth entry from a recording where you can't see a date of birth.
Vehicle as a Linked Library
The Vehicle field is an entries link to a separate vehicle library. This is the correct architecture for a shoplifter database that supports organized retail crime tracking.
A single subject may use multiple vehicles. Multiple subjects may share a single vehicle. If vehicle data is embedded inside the subject record, querying "which subjects have accessed this specific vehicle" requires opening and reading every individual record. A linked library means the vehicle entry exists as its own record with its own fields — plate, make, model, color — and multiple subjects can be linked to the same vehicle record while multiple vehicles can be linked to the same subject. The relationship is many-to-many, which is exactly what organized retail crime patterns look like when you start mapping them.
The TCM INC field (likely a reference to a loss prevention incident management system, "Theft Case Management Incident Number") and Alert Subject Number both serve as cross-reference identifiers — linking the Memento record to whichever enterprise LP system the store operates. The Memento database provides the mobile, searchable, image-bearing front-end; the case management system holds the formal chain of custody documentation.