WebProNews

British police have turned to social networking site Facebook to help them solve crimes.

The Greater Manchester Police have added an application on Facebook that sends police news to users and also asks for information about unsolved crimes.

A "Submit Intelligence" link takes users to the police Web site where they can anonymously leave a tip. Another link takes users to YouTube where they can find information about the police force, ongoing investigations and other news.

"Greater Manchester Police is proud to be the first force in the country to use this new technology and it demonstrates our commitment to exploring all avenues available to us to help fight and detect crime," Assistant chief constable Rob Taylor told IDG.

"Facebook has 59 million users, seven million of which live in the U.K., so we realized that this was an excellent way of raising awareness of incidents taking place within our local communities in a bid to gain more intelligence and bring offenders to justice," he added.