Shreveport’s ridiculous sagging pants law must be repealed
11th June 2019 · 0 Comments
Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Allen Iverson and all celebrities who sag their pants should steer clear of Shreveport, and other Louisiana towns that have laws against sagging pants because they may end up in jail or dead.
On June 11, the Shreveport City Council will vote on whether to keep or repeal a frivolous 2007 law that bans sagging pants or droopy drawers, as some call the practice of wearing pants below the hips.
According to an article in the Shreveport Times, 726 people have been arrested for sagging their pants since the law passed and of those 96 percent have been African Americans.
However, it is the February 5, 2019, shooting death of Anthony Childs, 31, that has catapulted the law into the national spotlight, again.
News reports say Childs, who wore sagging pants, was approached by Shreveport police for the fashion statement violation. Childs allegedly ran from police, shot himself in the chest but also allegedly sustained three non-lethal gunshot wounds by the Shreveport police. Childs’ sister told reporters that her brother was shot while lying on the ground. It’s safe to say that Childs might be alive today, were it not for this frivolous law.
In Louisiana, cities such as Mansfield, and Delcambre and Jefferson Davis Parish have banned sagging pants. Most of these laws carry hefty fines for those who sag their pants. Elsewhere, like in Florida, such laws have been struck down as unconstitutional.
Initially, violators of the Shreveport ban were supposed to be given a $100 citation and community services for breaking the sagging pants law. How the enforcement of the law degenerated into hundreds of people going to jail is a mystery. Or is the city profiting from citations, bench warrants and eventual court costs, when violators fail to pay the citation? And why should people be charged $100 for wearing their pants the way they see fit?
The excessive fees are reminiscent of the controversy in St. Louis, which arose after Michael Brown was murdered by a cop. An Investigation of the St. Louis Police Department showed the African-American community being used as a piggy bank for the department. Frivolous citations and tickets were overwhelming issued in the African-American community; like the woman citied for an expired vehicle registration, while her inoperable vehicle sat in her driveway.
But jailing people in Shreveport for wearing sagging pants. Shreveport’s Police Department’s public information officer told reporters she didn’t know if those jailed were being jailed for wearing sagging pants; inferring they may be put in shackles for criminal behavior.
However, it’s obvious that the sagging pants law was used to stop the alleged violators in the first place. It’s ludicrous to suggest that more than seven hundred people, wearing sagging pants, are criminal. Is the stereotype of African-American men being guilty before being presumed innocent at work here?
The debate over what can be viewed as moral indignation legislation versus indecent exposure laws, has been roiling since hip-hop artist popularized the style in the 1990s.
President Obama weighed in on the debate in 2008: “Any public official who is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there,” Obama told MTV in 2008. “Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants,” he added.
Clearly, the wearing of pants below the butt is off-putting. But so is the government overreach by politicians who purport to set decency standards, while clearly trampling over people’s constitutional rights.
What is most insidious about these noxious laws is that politicians, like the segregationists and slave-owners in past centuries are legislating how African Americans should express themselves. Last time we checked, freedom of expression is a First Amendment right. These laws “criminalize dress codes and suggest that the police are now responsible in some ways for how people are dressed on the streets,” one attorney opined.
Sagging pants may be offensive to some to look at but there are no laws for other offensive clothing like KKK robes or swastikas or confederate flag apparel.
In Shreveport, Councilwoman LeVette Fuller, an African-American woman, is leading the charge to overturn the law.
However, the most egregious fact about the sagging pants ordinance is that in the majority Black city of Shreveport, among city council members who supported the 2007 law, three of the four were African Americans. Then-Mayor Cedric Glover, the city’s first African-American mayor, also supported the ordinance.
The African-American lawmakers, who put in place a law that has led to the death of a citizen, and the African-American police chiefs who have enforced this stupid law, brings to mind a quote from Carter Godwin Woodson, who wrote in “The Miseducation of the Negro:” “Educated Negroes have the attitude of contempt toward their own people…”
We’ve seen it all before. Just as the house Negro betrayed his or her own to placate the master, so to have we witnessed today’s African-Americans leaders support detrimental laws that injure their own. The Shreveport ban against sagging pants is such a case.
We urge the Shreveport City Council to repeal this slave mentality law and find other ways to convince young people to pull up their pants.
This article originally published in the June 10, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
