Record Deletion After
Acquittal Or Discontinued Prosecution

Charged But Not Convicted? The Record Doesn’t Delete Itself

If your case was thrown out, discontinued, or ended in a not guilty verdict, you could be forgiven for assuming the record died with it. It didn’t. The Police National Computer retains the full event history of your prosecution – the arrest, the charge and the outcome – regardless of how the case ended. Local police systems hold the crime report, custody record and investigation file on top.

Here is what most people don’t realise: an acquittal is not, on its own, a ground for deletion. The decision sits with the Chief Officer of the force that owns the record, and forces can and do refuse – sometimes taking the view that a crime was committed and the acquittal changes nothing. A successful application has to be built on specific recognised grounds and supported by the right evidence. Identifying the grounds that fit your case, and presenting them properly, is where these applications are won or lost.

That is exactly the kind of application we prepare. We obtain your records, assess your case against the grounds, and put the application in terms a Chief Officer has to engage with properly. Not every record can be deleted, and we will tell you honestly whether yours can. But where the allegation should never have led to a prosecution, or the continued retention of the record cannot be justified, deletion is achievable – and we have secured it many times.

We deal with both systems: the national records held on the PNC, through the ACRO Record Deletion Process, and the local records held by the force itself, which are governed by different rules and need a separate application. A complete result usually means addressing both. For more on the process, see our guide to the Record Deletion Process. If you were arrested but never charged, see our Arrest Record Deletion service; for records held on force systems, see our Local Police Record Deletion service.