Poet and playwright Lemn Sissay has issued a passionate denunciation of the way police use their stop and search powers. Sissay, who was official poet of the 2012 London Olympics and was awarded an MBE in 2010, said in his blog on Tuesday that he had been stopped by the police over 50 times between the ages of 20 and 40, an average of once every 134 days. “It is traumatic.” He goes on to describe a recent encounter and adds: “Now I’m in dangerous territory, stopped by an officer of the law whose raison d’etre is to find a law being broken.” Sissay said he had been angered by hearing something on the radio. “What was that on Radio 4 I heard today: “If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear.’ Really? White police officers don’t experience this state threat. Nothing to fear?  The reason he stopped me is hidden inside his childhood.”

Sissay is a regular contributor to Radio 4’s Saturday Live. The home secretary, Theresa May, told MPs today that police stop and search powers are to be reviewed, following a more “intelligence-led” approach in a pilot scheme in five police forces. May acknowledged in the Commons that there was "widespread public concern" about stop and search, and she questioned whether it was "always used appropriately".   

Sissay says in his blog: “For most people in England, and by ‘most people’ I probably mean white people, driving your first car is an exciting  rites of passage into adulthood.  A black man in England soon learns that his rites of passage comes with overtly racist conditioning  (there is nothing covert about being stopped regularly by the police).”