The way they searched me was dehumanising

The main time I remember getting stopped and searched, I was with a group of friends on my local estate near school. We didn’t know at the time but apparently there were reports that someone had a firearm or gas gun or something like that. About five of us in our school uniforms just coming out of school, out of nowhere these police run around the corner, grab us, start slamming us against fences, telling us not to move, telling us to keep our hands where they can see them..

Literally within seconds there was two bullyvans [police van], a couple of other police cars there, everyone was getting searched. My friend was giving them attitude so they pulled his trousers down, obviously he had his shorts on but they left his trousers down on the main road. Every time he tried to pull them up they slapped his hands away, told him to shut up otherwise he’d get arrested. They just searched us differently, the way they searched us was dehumanising. When they searched me they had no problem going down searching my groin and all that area. They were rough, they were aggressive, we hadn’t even done anything, we didn’t even know what had happened. Afterwards when they realised we hadn’t been involved they said there were reports that someone’s got a gun. We said “we just came from school, why would we have a gun?”. They didn’t have nothing to say. They didn’t give us no slips, they didn’t apologise. People’s stuff went missing, we didn’t even realise, it all happened so quick. By the time we realised what happened we didn’t have a chance to get angry, because we were just in shock. We’ve never seen police behaving like that before. At the time I felt shock and embarrassment, afterwards I just felt angry because it was unjust. I just felt I got stereotyped.