Being arrested in England is no small matter anymore There was a time when being arrested in England  did not matter very much.  Before digital technology  came of age your fingerprints  and mug shot might be taken,  but if  no charges were laid or, if you were brought to trial,  a conviction was not obtained  for the alleged offence which had caused your arrest, the chances of the ordinary law abiding person being inconvenienced in the future by the fact that those details were held by the police  were small. There was no Police National Computer (PNC)  until 1974 -- which was a very rudimentary system  in the beginning and for a long period of time afterwards laughably underpowered with what we have now  -  and the widespread use of personal computers  was almost two decades after that.   DNA identification did not come into play until the 1980s and was very cumbersome procedure for years afterwards. Before computers arrived police had to rely on their  knowledge of the "usual suspects", modus operandi and informers to hunt down the guilty. They would look at the records of those suggested by such avenues of inquiry,  but had no ready way of searching large numbers of records  on spec or of moving their search to the records of other police forces.  On spec  searches of criminal  records for the entire country were out of the question. Today not only are fingerprints and mug shots taken but DNA samples as well if some is