Straw's man stopped 44 times

A SENIOR black race adviser to Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, has been stopped and searched by the police 44 times, it was revealed yesterday.

Trevor Hall, a member of the Home Office's race equality unit and adviser to Mr Straw on racial issues and ethnicity, was named during a hearing by the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee into why black people are far more likely to be stopped by police than white.

In the past 17 years, Mr Hall, a career civil servant in his late fifties, has been stopped on 39 occasions by the Metropolitan Police, once by the City of London Police, and four times by other forces. Several of the incidents involved officers doing anti-terrorist checks.

Mr Hall, who declined to comment on the issue yesterday, was born in Barbados and came to Britain in 1962. He is understood to have kept a mental note every time he was stopped and searched by the police.

The issue of black people being discriminated against by police officers who carry out a disproportionate number of street searches was most recently highlighted in the final report of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Nationally black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than are white people, according to a recent study.

But even in the wake of the Macpherson inquiry, Robin Corbett, the Labour MP who is a member of the select committee, said that the black boyfriend of a family friend had been stopped and searched five times in five days. He added that Mr Hall, a senior civil servant, had been stopped dozens of times by the police.

Assistant Commissioner Denis O'Connor of the Metropolitan Police, who was answering questions from the committee, said at present in London black people were 4.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.

He said that in pilot areas, where police were being given extra training, this dropped to two to one.