Wouldn't it be nice if we could earn money just by looking in the mirror?

There is a way of doing just that. To earn £10, all you need to do is sit around drinking coffee before standing up and admiring your own reflection for a few minutes.

Police Identification (ID) parades are a vital tool in the fight against crime, but for them to work volunteers are needed.

Visiting the ID suite at St Aldates police station, in Oxford, it is easy to see why forces struggle to find people to take part.

After negotiating the maze of corridors, the first thing that becomes clear is why the ID staff are the envy of every other department -- they are closest to the canteen.

It is probably the only reason, though. A team of three handles 500 ID parade requests a year. Of these, about 300 actually take place.

The team is headed by Insp Dave Hill. He said: "Getting the volunteers is always an issue. There are financial incentives but there are also financial constraints involved when paying for the line-ups."

A typical ID parade can cost about £750, and the logistics involved are complicated.

First, all the witnesses and suspects have to be contacted to make sure they are available at the same time. Then the process of gathering volunteers begins. There must be at least eight people in a line-up.

Insp Hill said: "We have 2,000 people on the database that we can match up but the trouble is they are mostly students.

"We went to the freshers' fair last September and got about 1,000 signatures there alone.

"The times we struggle are out of term times because most of the students go home. We also find it difficult when we have older suspects because the majority of students are young."

The police use ID parades more and more as an evidence-gathering tool, which puts more pressure on Insp Hill, Pc Bob Keylock and civilian support co-ordinator, Trevor House.

Insp Hill said: "We're getting more and more requests. The parades are entirely voluntary on the part of the suspect and we have to get their agreement about the volunteers used in the line-ups.

"However, if they don't agree to be involved in a parade, that can be used as evidence against them."

Three ID suites serve Thames Valley Police, based in Oxford, Reading and Milton Keynes.

But the Oxford team gets requests for help from all over the country because it recently introduced a revolutionary video ID system to speed up its work.

Thames Valley Police is the second force in the country to use the Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording (Viper).

It holds photographs of more than 6,000 volunteers, which are studied with the suspect to find eight matches with whom he or she is happy to be paraded.

These images are then put on a video tape and shown to witnesses.

Insp Hill, said: "This new system is great because we already have the volunteers to hand and we don't even have to co-ordinate the suspects and the witnesses to come here at the same time.

"It's also useful in cases where the witnesses are vulnerable, elderly or infirm."

However, he said Viper would never be able to take over completely from the traditional, physical parade.

He said: "If a suspect comes in who has a scar on their face then we cover it up with a plaster and put plasters in the same place on the volunteers.

"Make-up artist Sam Sayer comes in if we need her to mark scars on people's faces. A favourite that she has been busy with recently is giving people goatee beards.

"At the moment, creating scars and beards on the Viper system is not possible."

So not only can you earn a little cash by taking part in ID parades, you also get to see what you might look like with a beard.

For more information about taking part in identity parades, contact your local police station.