• Boots is one of the retailers working in partnership with government and the police to fund a team of specialist officers to tackle retail crime.
• Boots Director of Retail Operations and Loss Jane Rumens joined representatives from the retail industry and the police at a meeting at 10 Downing Street chaired by Crime and Policing Minister Chris Philp MP and Sussex Police & Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne to launch the partnership.

Boots has joined other retailers and industry partners to launch a major national partnership to tackle retail crime at 10 Downing Street today alongside senior police representatives and Crime and Policing Minister Chris Philp MP.

The partnership, led by the Sussex Police & Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne, is called Operation Pegasus and is supported and endorsed by the Home Office.

Boots is among a group of 13 UK retailers that will collectively fund a team of specialist police officers and intelligence analysts. The new team will work within policing in a structure called OPAL, a national team that oversees serious organised acquisitive crime, run by North Wales Police Chief Constable Amanda Blakeman.

Through detailed analysis, information and intelligence sharing, the group will combine industry knowledge with law enforcement to collate, for the first time, a national intelligence picture of the organised crime groups driving some of the higher impact crimes taking place in retail stores.

This initiative will help to establish and maintain an effective process for retailers to develop and disseminate intelligence to policing and industry partners. It will also help the police to enhance their visibility of the true scale of the serious organised acquisitive retail crime threat.

Jane Rumens, Director of Retail Operations and Loss at Boots, said: “At Boots we are glad to play our part in supporting this initiative to tackle the growing problem of organised crime in stores. Through closer partnership working with government and the police and by harnessing new technology we can prevent and disrupt criminal activity so that our stores continue to be safe places for people to work and shop.”

This is just one of ways that Boots is working to deter and disrupt criminal activity in its stores and to protect team members.

In recent years Boots has invested in a state-of-the-art CCTV monitoring centre at its head office site in Nottingham, which is connected centrally to its stores. It has also deployed body worn video cameras in stores since 2021 and has since rolled them out to over 360 stores.

Because a growing proportion of theft in stores is being committed by organised criminal groups, Boots is working in close partnership with the police to identify persistent offenders and build the evidence base of higher impact cases to support police investigations and criminal prosecutions.