Last year, while trying to get into a bar in Nottingham with his friends, Nick Glynn was pulled aside by bouncers. “The door staff grabbed hold of my arm and said, ‘The police wanna talk to you,’” he recalls. “Then two sergeants took me to the other side of the road and stopped and searched me in front of the crowd of people queuing.”

For Glynn, it wasn’t anything unusual. He estimates he’s been stopped and searched more than 30 times. “It might be even more,” he admits. “I’ve lost count, to be fair.”

In this case, he was detained for 10 minutes or so. “I’d shown them ID to prove I was over 21,” says the 47-year-old. “But they thought it was fake.”

It’s an experience that many people have been through. But in Glynn’s case, there’s a twist. The ID he was trying to show them wasn’t his driving licence, but his police ID. Indeed, Glynn isn’t just a police officer – he’s the head of the stop and search programme at the College of Policing.

Across Britain, police officers hold the power to stop, search, and question anyone if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect they are carrying a weapon, illegal drugs, stolen property, or something which could be used to commit a crime. You can also be searched without “reasonable grounds” with the approval of a senior police officer, for example if it is suspected that serious violence could take place or you’re in a particular trouble spot.

There are a host of rules about how such searches are meant to be carried out: Officers should tell you their name, their police station, what they expect to find, the reason they want to search you, and the legal rationale, and give you a record of the search. But these rules are often ignored. “In many of these cases, I certainly haven’t been given the right paperwork or had my rights explained to me,” says Glynn.

Take that night in Nottingham. “It was a really bad experience,” he says. “It was in front of loads of people. It’s difficult to stay calm but I did stay calm. While I made it very clear that I was unhappy, I didn’t shout or swear or do anything that would mean that all of a sudden it turned into something horrible.”

In the end, to prove he was a police officer, “I actually gave them the phone number of the patrol room in the force where I work in Leicester. Although, to be fair, if they’d have just googled me, they’d have been able to see, but no, no.”

Even once he was released, the officers didn’t say sorry. “One of the things that many people who have been detained or inconvenienced by use of police powers want is a simple apology for having taken your time. But yeah, there was none of that. So that was pretty poor.”