British Police are developing the first national database, storing CCTV images for facial recognition.
The government believe a national database will be a technological revolution to help beat crime.
The scheme has been trialled by Lancashire, Yorkshire and Merseyside police who between them have added more than 750,000 images of offenders to the database over the past 18 months.
Although still in an early stage of development the system is already proving a success and plans for the future will see all street police carrying a handheld console that can access data in their area of policing from the database for on the spot identification.
These handheld systems should be in operation in time for the 2012 Olympic games.
