Police stopped people on the streets almost 1.9 million times last year to ask them to account for their movements – and black people were more than twice as likely to have been stopped than whites.

The figures were released as the innocent Oxford graduate who was pictured in The Times yesterday being stopped at gunpoint by police at Bournemouth station said that he was “shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed” by the incident.

Writing on his blog, Nzube Udezue, 21, said: “When I woke up this Saturday morning, I could happily say that I’d managed to get through (almost) 22 years of my life without any real incident with the police. I could also say that I’d never had a gun pointed at me. Little did I know that by 6.10pm I’d be lying face down on the ground, handcuffed, with several sub-machine-guns pointed at me.”

The computer science graduate, a budding musician whose rap video is being screened on satellite television, said that he had spent the day in Southampton promoting his music. “[At] 5.24pm, I hop on to the train back to Bournemouth, looking forward to a hardcore gym session. 6.09pm, the train pulls into Bournemouth station and all hell is about to break loose. The next 30 seconds was like a blur.”

Armed officers shouted at him to “get down”. He said: “It took me a couple of seconds to realise that it was me that all those guns were aimed at. Are they seriously talking to me? I honestly felt like I’d stepped off the train and into a really bad dream.”

Mr Udezue, who will join Accenture, the consultancy, next month, said he was told to lie down and put his hands out. “I oblige. I’m shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed all at the same time,” he wrote. “Most of the bystanders have vacated the platform by now, by police order. And I’m not talking about normal police either. This is the Specialist Firearms Unit, about eight of them, machineguns, bulletproof vests, police dogs and all.”

He added: “It appears that someone whose description I matched (a black male wearing a dark T-shirt with bright orange writing) was involved in an altercation in Basingstoke and had threatened someone with a handgun.

“The description was passed through Hampshire, Dorset and the British Transport Police and boom – a plainclothes officer sees me sitting on the train (happily listening to my iPod and unaware of my impending doom), alerts HQ that ‘the gunman is on the train’ (the GUNMAN??) and the Firearms Unit is deployed to Bournemouth train station to confront me. I’ve never been so trauma-tised in my life.”

Mr Udezue lives in Bournemouth with his father, Emmanuel, an eminent doctor and fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and his mother, Chika, a journalist.

Dorset Police have apologised and referred the case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for investigation.

In the official figures, all but six police forces in England and Wales recorded increases in their use of “stop and account” powers. The Metropolitan Police recorded the highest, followed by Merseyside and the West Midlands. London also recorded the highest number of black people stopped, followed by the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.

Separate figures showed that black people were seven times more likely to be stopped by police than white people last year, slightly higher than in the previous 12 months.

Overall, 955,000 stop-and-searches were conducted last year, the highest figure for seven years. This was in addition to the 1.87 million stop-and-account operations.

In London black people were just under 4½ times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. Only 12 per cent of stop-and-searches resulted in an arrest.

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