A man has opened up about his encounters with the police as he suggested he was stopped by the authorities over 300 times because of his race.
33-year-old Nathaniel James is a youth worker from Birmingham, England, who was allegedly involved in around one hundred police searchers during which he was ordered to remove his shoes and socks.
“I’d say altogether in my lifetime I’ve been stopped and searched probably about 100 times without exaggerating,” Mr. James said in an interview with Birmingham Live.
“I’ve been on the receiving end of a stop and account probably over 200 times easily.”
Following his many encounters with the authorities, the 33-year-old has become a Stop and Search Youth Trainer dedicated to training young individuals how to act and what to do when stopped and questioned by the police.
As James added, he was just 12 when he allegedly got stopped by cops up to four times per day.
“They put me in the back of the riot van. They told me to take my trainers off. They were searching my trainers and socks. This was a traumatic time,” he said as he recalled the first time he was stopped.
“When I was about 12 I felt like I was targeted by the police. I would get stopped and searched three, even four times a day.”
After James had collected a “drawer full” of yellow slips that come along with searches in the country, his mother decided to take all of the papers to the local police station and demand answers as to why her son was being targeted. The complaint, however, did not fix their problems.
“If it takes the police to search 50 people and one knife comes off the street it is a good thing. I wouldn’t say it’s fair,” James added.
While the 33-year-old slammed the authorities over ‘unfair’ searches, the West Midlands Police insisted “stop and search is a powerful tool in our fight against crime.”
“We’re constantly reviewing how we use these powers to ensure they are fair and proportionate. The data, including a breakdown of ethnicity, is regularly published in reports to the Police and Crime Commissioner and this is regularly scrutinized by community-led panels,” the spokesperson said.
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