Kemi Badenoch tells police leaders who once jeered Theresa May they can trust the Tories again, saying her team’s ‘bad players’ have gone

Kemi Badenoch urged police leaders to trust the Conservatives again, saying the party had changed under her leadership and that “bad players” had left. She acknowledged that cutting police numbers during austerity was wrong, while arguing that crime falling should not have been treated as a reason to reduce officers.

Speaking to the Police Federation, Badenoch said she had supported stop and search and rejected claims that the police were institutionally racist. She noted that officers had since been restored to more than their earlier numbers, but said they were stretched so thinly that some people saw the service as a “ghost service”; she also cited failures in the handling of Henry Nowak, a student who was dying from a stabbing.