Make your presence known

Website Terms of Use

Introduction

This site was established in 2004 with the intention of providing information on ShopWatch to the General Public, Retailers, Store Staff and the Media.

Hosting

For security reasons the site cannot be hosted on servers directly connected to Metropolitan Police networks. It is currently hosted with a 3rd party.

Disclaimer

Whilst the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) endeavours to ensure that the information on this website is correct, it is provided on an 'as is' basis, without warranties of any kind, and no warranty, express or implied, is given as to accuracy or completeness. The MPS does not accept any liability for any error or omission. The MPS shall not be liable for any third party claims or losses of any nature including, but not limited to, loss of profits, direct, indirect, special or consequential damages arising from a third party's use or inability to use this website.

The information on this website does not constitute legal or other professional advice. The Metropolitan Police Service accepts no responsibility for the content on any website to which a hypertext link from this site exists. The links are provided 'as is' with no warranty, express or implied, for the information provided within them.

Copyright

All material on this site is subject to copyright. Unless it is specifically stated that particular material is available for general use then it should not be copied or re-used without the explicit permission of the Metropolitan Police Service or of other copyright holders where material is used under licence.

The only exceptions are those allowed under copyright law, where material can be used without permission or payment for:

ShopWatch is registered at The Patent Office as a trademark. Enquiries relating to use of ShopWatch copyright material should be addressed to:

Trisha Dash-O'Toole Home Office, 6th Floor, Fry Building 2 Marsham Street London, SW1P 4DF

Links

It is not necessary to request permission to link to any pages on this site, however our pages must not be opened within a frameset or any other structure that could lead to Metropolitan Police content being perceived as part of another website.

Privacy

Information provided to ShopWatch by users through the use of this website will be treated in confidence and will not be disclosed to third parties unless we are required to do so by law.

We gather information about site usage in order to assist in the development and improvement of service to the public. At the moment this information consists of: Summary data provided by our ISP, which is derived from server logs.

Information provided voluntarily by users through online forms is collected and used and held on file for the recruitment of retailer and retailer store staff into the ShopWatch scheme, As part of the application process for retailer store staff information is passed on the other departments in the Met.

We do not attempt to monitor the browsing behaviour of individual users through any hidden means.

This privacy statement applies only to web pages within the domain www.shopwatch.info, which are under the control of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Accessibility Statement

The Metropolitan Police Service is committed to ensuring our services are accessible to the community that we serve. In particular, we recognise the need to take reasonable steps to enable access to our website for those with impaired sight or other disabilities.

We face the challenge that the website has a large amount of legacy content dating from times when accessibility was not well recognised as a design issue. We are also working with finite resources. Upgrading the site is therefore a gradual and staged process that will take a considerable time to complete. We apologise for the fact that certain sections of the site are not yet as accessible to users with certain disabilities as we would like.

Work on making this site more accessible has been influenced by the Guidelines for UK Government Websites, which incorporate support for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Where possible, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to separate visual formatting from structural markup. All pages created to our more recent design standards should render in some usable form on a wide range of browsers and, if necessary, should be viewable in a very basic form on browsers which do not recognise CSS or where CSS has been switched off.

We have used the following browsers during testing:

We test pages with the Lynx 'text only' browser to give us an idea of whether they will function with agents such as speech-synthesis browsers and other devices which rely on the text content.

We use the Bobby software tool from the Centre for Applied Special Technology to evaluate and improve our web pages. As some of our legacy content does not yet completely fulfil Bobby criteria we do not claim Bobby approved status for the entire site, however all new pages and many that have been updated have passed the Bobby test.

Links:

There are no links that open new windows without warning the user.

Images:
All content images used on the home page and all other pages include descriptive ALT attributes.

You will notice changes to the site over the coming months to help with navigation, reading text, colour schemes and the use of screen readers.

If you would like further information about our accessibility standards or have problems accessing this website, please email .

Accessibility software:

Accessibility services: