Police will be able to check the identities of people in the street using mobile fingerprint scanners.
The hand-held devices, no bigger than a BlackBerry smartphone, are being issued to every police force in the UK under a scheme called Mobile Identification At Scene (Midas), according to The Guardian.
They will enable officers to scan suspects' fingerprints on the spot and compare them against records on the police national biometric database, Ident1.
It is claimed the scanners will save police time and cut the number of wrongful arrests.
Currently, officers have to take suspects to custody suites to check their fingerprints - a procedure that takes an average 67 minutes.
The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) estimates that on a national level this would be equivalent to having an extra 336 officers on the beat.
But campaigners, concerned about the new technology being used to increase surveillance and random checks of individuals, said the law required all fingerprints taken by the scanners to be deleted after use and not added to databases.
Gareth Crossman, policy director of campaign group Liberty, told The Guardian: "Saving time with new technology could help police performance but officers must make absolutely certain that they take fingerprints only when they suspect an individual of an offence and can't establish his identity."
In a trial of similar mobile fingerprint scanners, called Project Lantern, officers used the technology alongside automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems to check the identities of people in vehicles flagged up as stolen, uninsured, or with no MoTs.
The devices are being designed to be able receive pictures of suspects so officers on the ground can use the images to help verify identities.
