In the 1970s, police officers often wielded a section of the then archaic 1824 Vagrancy Act. The section in question gave the police the power to stop, search and arrest anyone they suspected might commit a crime. This Vagrancy Act came to be known as ‘sus laws’ (taken from wording of the Act that described a ‘suspected person’). Because the police didn’t keep statistics on those they were stopping under the Act, it’s difficult to know just how many people were bothered by the police for the crime of not looking respectable.
