Teenager who inspired the PM’s crusade against stop and search . . . before gang wars exploded

She saw herself as strong, stable… and enlightened

THERESA MAY has fought to curb the use of police stop and search powers ever since she became Home Secretary eight years ago.

Along with her efforts to tackle modern slavery, the crusade by vicar’s daughter Mrs May played a key part of her attempt to cast herself as a modern compassionate Conservative.

At the 2014 Tory conference, she took the unusual step for a Conservative Cabinet Minister of recruiting a black London teenager to help her. Alexander Paul, 18, from Crystal Palace, told activists of his struggle after being stopped and searched more than 20 times despite having no criminal history.

Mrs May praised ‘inspiring’ Alexander and challenged delegates to imagine the ‘indignity’ of an innocent person being frisked by police over and over again. Her speech won rave reviews, and Alexander said his conference speech had motivated him to become a human rights lawyer and an MP. Tragically, he died of cancer last June.

Six months ago at the Tory conference, Mrs May made a moving tribute to Alexander, praising him for helping her cut the number of black people stopped and searched by two thirds.

The Prime Minister has always bridled at those who seek to compare her with Margaret Thatcher – who was in power when the Brixton and Toxteth riots erupted in 1980, leading to the scrapping of the hated ‘sus’ laws. This was the informal name for the law that enabled police to stop and search individuals suspected of loitering with intent to commit an arrestable offence. It was claimed that police used them to target blacks.

So what better way of distancing yourself from Thatcher than backing calls from black community leaders to curb stop and search?

Mrs May could reassure Tory traditionalists she was ‘strong and stable’ on issues like the economy and international affairs, while sending a message to voters who were not her natural supporters that she was enlightened on social issues.

In 2002, when the Tories were in opposition, she famously railed against them becoming the ‘Nasty Party’. When they won power in 2010 and Mrs May entered the Home Office and took charge of policing, she had the chance to show it was not empty rhetoric.

Weeks after becoming Home Secretary in 2010, Mrs May stripped police of the power to stop and search without any suspicion of wrongdoing, saying they must have ‘reasonable suspicion’ to carry out a search. She said: ‘The first duty of government is to protect the public. But that duty must never be used as a reason to ride roughshod over our civil liberties.’

Within two years, police had got the message: the number of stop and search checks had plummeted. But it was only the start of Mrs May’s battle. It led to a major confrontation with then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who feared any further relaxation in stop and search would wreck Tory claims to be the party of law and order and drive voters into the

FRIGHTENING: A 2ft-long ‘zombie killer’ knife found by police in Hackney last week hands of Ukip. Mrs May, supported by Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, argued it didn’t work – in some areas leading to as few as one arrest from every 30 people searched. After endless wrangling between Mrs May and No 10, she launched the first of several ‘stop and search’ reviews in 2013, warning it was ‘sharply divisive’ among Britain’s black and minority ethnic communities. Intriguingly, she had special concerns over so called ‘Section 60’ searches, which allowed officers to stop and search anyone in any area where they believed violence or disorder was about to take place.

It is precisely these kinds of special powers from the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that are being used in Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick’s crackdown in areas such as Tottenham.

In 2013, Mrs May’s officials highlighted reports suggesting black people were far more likely to be subjected to a Section 60 stop and search than white people. In 2014, after Mr Cameron blocked her bid to include a major stop and search shake-up in the Queen’s Speech, Mrs May unveiled disciplinary action against officers who abused stop and search powers. Those who broke the rules would be trained in ‘ unconscious bias awareness’ to stop ‘prejudice’ and officers considered ‘ unfit’ to use stop and search would be banned from doing so. It was an implicit nod to those who claimed that, for all the claims that ‘institutionalised racism’ in the police had been tackled following the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, it had not been rooted out completely.

Most critical of all, the use of so called ‘no-suspicion stop-and-search’ should be used only when officers believed serious violence WILL,