About the met police website
Introduction
This site was established in 1995 with the intention of making the workings of the Metropolitan Police Service more accessible.
The Met would use its website to inform the public of changes and developments in policing the capital and to provide an opportunity for the community to help in the task of tackling crime.
The site has constantly evolved over the last seven years and substantial
developments are planned in the near future. The site is currently
maintained by the Directorate of Information e-Communications
Team.
If you do have any queries regarding this site or wish to report
any errors or faults please contact us at web.editor@met.police.uk.
Please do not use this email address to report
or provide any information about crime. If you do have any other
queries, then please visit our email
contacts page for more information.
Hosting
For security reasons the site cannot be hosted on servers directly connected to Metropolitan Police networks.
It is currently hosted by Cable and Wireless
www.cw.com/new/.
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 - The Metropolitan Police Service
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:
- Research or private study
- Legitimate criticism and review
- Education (so long as it does not involve multiple copies)
- In legal proceedings. This is subject to the material being reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context.
The Metropolitan Police logo is registered at The Patent Office as a trademark.
Enquiries relating to use of Metropolitan Police copyright material should be addressed to:
DPA5 Publicity Branch
13th Floor
New Scotland Yard
Broadway
London
SW1H 0BG
This is subject to the material being reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context.
Links
It is not necessary to request permission to link to any pages
on this site. 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 the Metropolitan Police Service 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 using the software package "Analog". We do not receive the server logs themselves nor any related data that could identify individual users.
- Information provided voluntarily by users through online feedback forms. Feedback data cannot be identified with an individual unless they voluntarily supply their name or other identifying details. Comments and identifying information will only be held for as long as is necessary to ensure a proper response to queries and suggestions from users. Data held for long-term analysis is separated from comments so that it does not contain anything to identify individuals.
We do not currently employ cookies nor do we attempt to monitor the browsing behaviour of individual users through any other hidden means.
This privacy statement applies only to web pages under the control of the Metropolitan Police Service website office at New Scotland Yard , in other words pages within the domain "www.met.police.uk".
The Metropolitan Police recruitment website is operated by an external company under contract to the Metropolitan Police Service recruitment branch, which is responsible for policy in that area.
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:
- Microsoft IE5
- Microsoft IE5.5
- Microsoft IE6
- Lynx
- Opera 7.5
- Mozilla 1.7
- Firefox 1.0
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.
Standards compliance:
- This page is Bobby approved.
- This page is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
- This page uses valid CSS 2.0.
- This page meets the requirements of the WAI AAA rating.
Navigation Aids:
- All pages include a standard top bar for easy navigation.
- All pages include a search box.
- A site map is being developed to aid site navigation.
Links:
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in
greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes
the target.
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 contact us at web.editor@met.police.uk.
Accessibility software:
- Jaws, a screen reader for Windows. A trial period demo is available.
- Home page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A trial period downloadable version is available.
- Lynx, a free text only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
- Links, a free text only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
- Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming. A free downloadable version is available.
Accessibility services:
- Bobby, a free service to analyse web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
- HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML Standards.
- Web page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
Content rating:
This website has been rated with the Internet Content Rating Association.
The rating reflects the fact that police publicity material and appeals for information sometimes include descriptions of crime.
This material is always presented in context.
Keyboard access keys
The following table shows keyboard shortcut commands available within the updated areas of this site.
These commands are designed to help users who have difficulty in using pointing devices such as a mouse.
Depending on your browser type use one of the following:
- Microsoft IE4 on Windows PCs - press 'alt' and letter at the same time
- Microsoft IE5 on Windows PCs - press 'alt' and letter then press enter
- Microsoft IE5 on Mac - hold down 'control' key and then press letter
- This WAI initiative is now supported by Netscape 6
These are the shortcut keys to use:
- H - Home
- R - Recruitment
- I - Your Rights to Information
- Z - Crimes
- C - Contacts
- Q - Ask the Met
- N - News
- L - Local Information
- A - About the Met
- Y - Young People
- M - Sitemap
