Criminals are having their collars felt in double quick time as West Yorkshire Police officers push back the boundaries of hi-tech policing.

West Yorkshire is the first force in the country to use biometric technology to identify, at the push of a button, suspects whose images are captured on CCTV close to a crime.

It means officers can know the person they are looking for within minutes and move in to detain them.

Previously police had to go through the process of circulating images of suspects throughout the force or put out appeals through the media or on posters.

The new Automatic Facial Recognition system checks for identifying points, like the distance between the eyes, on the CCTV image of the suspect and matches them to existing pictures of prisoners from the tens of thousands of mug-shots on the police database. Expert operators then whittle down the possible matches to produce the most likely suspect.

The system also uses criteria to narrow down the search, like the area where a known offender lives and the types of offences they have been convicted of. Already the AFR technology is proving its worth with its use leading to a number of criminals being arrested, including rape, robbery and drug dealing suspects in the first three weeks of a trial run.

Senior officers expect the technology to lead to two or three arrests a day when it is launched across the force this week. The cutting edge technology has been developed by the force's Scientific Support Unit. Detective Superintendent Mick Fickling, head of the unit, said: "Now we are able to narrow down likely suspects in a very short space of time."

He added: "Seventy per cent of burglars live within a two-mile radius of the properties they target. Our AFR system can include this sort of criteria in the search, along with age range and other things. Instead of having to wade through the whole encyclopaedia, we are now taken to the chapter, or even the page, we need very quickly.

"The use of images is rapidly becoming the third forensic science alongside fingerprints and DNA. The development of this ground-breaking system shows West Yorkshire Police is continuing to make a real name for itself nationally as a force that is committed to using the latest science can offer to become even more effective at tackling crime."

The Scientific Support Unit also masterminded the creation of the VIPER video identification parade system, which electronically lines up images of suspects alongside other faces drawn from a database.

The unit also spearheaded Operation Converter, which has seen fingerprints, DNA, shoe-marks or images recovered during investigations into high-volume crimes, such as burglary and car theft, whisked to the unit by courier for expert analysis.

As soon as the scientific results are known they are then fed back to the relevant division to be followed up by a team of officers specialising solely in investigating and making arrests on the basis of this evidence.