The research came in the same week as a study - High Street Blues – that highlighted that the majority of shops hit by crime in London found the Police unhelpful when they filed a report.
London Assembly Conservatives said a study showed that 64 % of shop owners felt the police had not taken their claim seriously and in future would not bother reporting crimes.
Researchers found there was a “lack of faith” across the capital in the Met’s ability to deliver justice for small businesses.
The report revealed there were 28,889 reported robberies and thefts, including shoplifting, against London’s businesses last year — the equivalent of 80 every day.
Retailers are therefore increasingly looking at alternatives to protect their staff stock and stores.
Whereas undercover store detectives used to provide covert assistance, many retailers feel this approach is ‘too old fashioned’, according to a poll of loss prevention managers.
More than 80% of those surveyed said they had dispensed with the services of store detectives and the remaining 19% said they were only deployed in closely controlled scenarios and in less high-risk environments.
Furthermore, those using store detectives had very stringent service-level agreements to measure effectiveness.
Many argued that measuring store detective performance was harder than guards with one suggesting that using arrest numbers as an effective measurement criteria was dangerous.
“There are inherent risks with store detectives becoming obsessed with arrests, rather than loss prevention and reducing shrink. More often than not this results in false arrests and brand damage,” said one retailer who had used both store detectives and guards.
However, one retailer said the business had delivered better value using covert store detectives.
“In my opinion the store detective delivers far better value for money. For the cost of a single guard we can cover multiple stores. In our experience, the store detective impacts positively on stock loss, which offsets the cost,” he said.
Westminster topped the list of incidents with 3,044, followed by Croydon on 1,247 and Hammersmith and Fulham, with 1,236. The boroughs with the lowest retail crime levels were Richmond on 488, Harrow with 501 and Barking and Dagenham on 573 last year. The Tory research, involving in-depth interviews with 32 small businesses across the capital as well as Met police data, found that 94 per cent of shop owners had been affected by crime in the past year.
Almost half of those interviewed had been victims of severe crimes such as burglary, verbal and physical assault.
In spring 2014, the first Met Business Crime Strategy will be published, which aims to build on and further improve engagement, information sharing and interaction between police and business communities.
Marco Genovesi, 54, has worked at clothes shop Gekko in Camden for 10 years. He said: “We expect shop-lifting and more or less every week something disappears. Sometimes we have gangs of kids coming through the market and causing trouble. There are a few people that have been assaulted but it’s only happened to me once.
“If I manage to catch the person then I do contact the Police but if I don’t then it’s useless. My experience of the Police is that even if you want to report it, you think twice. You spend time reporting the crime and waiting for them to respond but if they’re not going to take any action there’s no point.
“Even when I’ve caught a thief I’ve been told it’s not in the public interest to prosecute them. It would help if the Police were around a bit more. Some months we don’t see a single officer passing by.”
