Met police solve six crimes a day with the help of CCTV

The officer, who heads the Met's identification unit, said the number of suspects identified by his team has risen by a quarter to 2,512. The majority of suspected villains are named by officers and informants but some are passed on for public appeals.

He said: "The key to our success is that images, unidentified images, are treated as a forensic discipline.

"They are treated like fingerprints and DNA. When we get them we make sure that every effort is made to identify them.

"It is not the technology, it is more about managing it in a way that produces the best results. That is why we have got police forces from around the world coming to see how we do it. We had officers from Sweden and Holland over in the last week."

The Met identified 2,512 wanted people in 2010, compared with 1,970 the previous year. The figures included four suspected murderers, 23 rapists and sex attackers and five wanted gunmen.

Among them was Andrew Hawkes, who was jailed for 40 months in October for attacking and racially abusing a man in Tower Bridge Road. He was identified from a CCTV still put on a wanted board.

Mr Neville said the Hawkes case illustrated the kind of success they have enjoyed but he said trained officers are increasingly needed to access and store CCTV because much of it is now stored digitally.

He said: "One of the things that has changed, even in the last few years, is the move from VHS to digital. Ninety to 95 per cent of the footage we get is now digital and it is a double-edged sword.

"Firstly, we get high-quality images that are easily searchable but they are often not held as long. With VHS people held 31 tapes, one for each day of the month, and it did not require specialist officers to get hold of the stuff.

"People are now being confronted by computers and hard drives and told to get those images and it is not as easy."

Mr Neville said police must help challenge public scepticism about the increase in the number of CCTV cameras and the "surveillance state".

He added: "It is also about public confidence because there isa lot of bad publicity about CCTV and traffic enforcement. We put a lot of images on posters and in the media, including Crimewatch, so the public can see we are using them against criminals. Most of our identifications come from officers or criminal informants but we put a lot of stuff out in public to get something around the public confidence issue."