How To Get Involved
As a retailer, your help is vitally important to the success of ShopWatch for your business and staff, and the police and public.
The Met will work with you from the outset, to ensure that your store staff receive as much information about ShopWatch as possible and that they are helped every step of the way to achieve their goal of being a ShopWatch Special Constable and making an effective additional contribution in and around your store.
The Met have now produced ShopWatch: The Complete Retail Toolkit - a CD-ROM containing everything your business needs to set up, promote and run the scheme, including posters, leaflets, draft letters to Store Managers, step-by-step guides, a Quick Start section, and much more. Copies are available when you register your business for ShopWatch.
The process
There are two different ways for staff to be recruited as ShopWatch Special Constables.
Retailer internal recruitment
Basically, your organisation sets up a written understanding with the ShopWatch team and then nominates a ShopWatch co-ordinator to act as a central point of contact (usually someone in the security/loss prevention department) who is then responsible for driving awareness and the recruitment process via store and regional management.
We will provide recruitment packs that include suggested staff briefings, recruitment information for stores, application forms etc, while the co-ordinator collates applications and pass to their dedicated contact at the Met. Your ShopWatch co-ordinator is a vital link in the recruitment process, and combined with the power of your internal communications (via intranet, post or fax) and with local management and staff support, store staff can become ShopWatch Special Constables in a relatively short space of time.
Direct contact
If you want to become a ShopWatch Special Constable, you can contact the Recruitment Line directly. Or store managers may identify a potential recruit and encourage them to call the Recruitment Line to volunteer. This may be because your business has agreed to manage the scheme on a local level, or if you have a small number of outlets and no head office.
Take a look at the FAQs for retailers or contact us if you have any further questions.