It had taken three months and 11 days to get there - a room in a police station looking at individual mugshots of nine villainous-looking young men on a flat screen computer.

It was Friday 13 January 2012 and the moment of truth was upon us. Could we identify the guy who on 2 October 2011 we had spotted stealing lead from some garage roofs?

The bloke I had seen, and helped the police arrest and charge, had fought with the police officer, spat in his face, swore terrible revenge upon me for getting him nicked and generally behaved like a living-and-breathing lowlife.

My partner, on the other hand, had seen him only for a couple of minutes.

But both of us agreed, when we were allowed to confer after the ID process was completed, that these static mugshots were not what we had been expecting.

They each showed a young man looking straight up at the camera, with the same shaved haircut and no facial whiskers. There were no faces in profile, no voices to recognise, no mannerisms, no sense of height.

It was going to be a tough call. What had happened to the identity parade beloved of television and films, such as The Usual Suspects? The support officer running the ID process had been in the job for more than 20 years and he told me how it used to be done.

They would send a police bus into town to pick up volunteers who were keen to earn a few quid standing in an identity parade. The volunteers would even get fed, the support officer told me, and it sure beat working for a living.

That’s all changed. Police forces now use Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording (VIPER) to run the show. This is a system with a huge database of volunteers willing to be videoed and displayed beside suspects of the same age, weight, ethnicity and gender as them.

Technicians can manipulate the images, where necessary, to add the appropriate hairstyle and hair colouring. They can also pixelate distinguishing features, like scars and tattoos, while ensuring that all the other mugshots have the same pixelation in the same places.

This saves the public purse money in several ways. Identification parades can be conducted anywhere - you can even take the photos on a laptop computer to the victim’s home. Expensive-to-organise parades aren’t cancelled because, as commonly happens, the suspect fails to turn up at the police station. And you don’t have to keep on paying work-shy volunteers to attend the police station, week in and week out.

Great idea all round, you might say, except isn’t the new system, with its characterless static mugshots, making it just a tad too easy for the bad guys to get off?

So how did we get on? My partner was first into the identification suite and, at first, couldn’t decide between photographs number six and seven. She decided on number six.

With no contact between us, I was next into the identification suite. I chose photograph number seven.

We were not told if either of us or neither of us had got the right guy because that could compromise the prosecution. It was an interesting experience and we had done our civic duty, but it had cost us 70 miles in petrol and taken all the morning and half the afternoon of a working day.

One of the benefits of VIPER, we are told, is the id parade can take place anywhere - even the home of the victim. So why did we have to schlep half way across the county? Ho-hum. Let’s just hope one of us identified the right guy.