‘Incognito’ Stop & Frisk law repealed in Shreveport

The Shreveport City Council voted 6-1 last Tuesday to abolish a 2007 Sagging Pants Law that banned people from wearing pants below their butts.

Last month, Shreveport City Councilwoman LeVette Fuller proposed that the law be scrapped. Her request came on the heels of community blowback over the suspicious February 2019, shooting death of Anthony Childs, 31, by police. Shreveport’s coroner ruled the death a suicide, after police claimed Childs shot himself in the chest. Three other bullet wounds, shots fired by police, were allegedly nonfatal, according to news reports.

Black men made up 96 percent of the 726 arrests for sagging pants in Shreveport since the law passed in 2007, according to Shreveport Police Department data. A total of 699 Black men were arrested for sagging as compared to the 12 white men that were arrested for sagging since the law passed more than a decade ago. Several women were also arrested for wearing the style that was popularized by hip hop artists.

Fuller told The Louisiana Weekly, a week before the vote, that the Council was guilty of government overreach and that she was getting push back for proposing to overturn a law that was supported by an “older, frustrated, Black community.” One policewoman told her that the law helped them get drugs off of the street, inferring that wearers of sagging pants are drug dealers or worse.

A brief investigation resulted in two of the New Orleans’ (and the nation’s) leading civil rights attorneys, William P. Quigley and Ronald Wilson, enlisting the aid of the ACLU to support the repeal of the law.

In a letter sent to Shreveport City Council members, one day before the vote, Attorney Katie Schwartzmann, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana and Attorney Bill Quigley said the law violated citizens’ constitutional rights and that it criminalized the way people wear their clothes. Further, the lawyers wrote that there is no legitimate reason for the law “beyond racially motivated animus.”

Most galling, from our perspective, is that many of the sagging laws around the state of Louisiana, specifically, have been supported by African Americans. Some have attributed the fashion statement to prison culture, while others say racial hatred during slavery caused overseers and slave owners to denigrate belligerent male slaves by exposing their buttocks and/or raping them to demoralize them. There are photos of Black men being lynched with their pants down, exposing their behind. Some were even castrated.

Many opponents of sagging pants believe the trend is disrespectful and a matter of indecent exposure. Those who embrace the fashion look at it as a statement of defiance and a way to express first amendment rights.

In reality, bans against sagging pants have become an incognito stop and frisk law that allows police to use the fashion restriction to stop people, search them, cite them, fine them, and/or arrest them. Clearly, the bans unfairly target African Americans who emulate the fashion of hip-hop culture icons like Lil Wayne and sports celebrities, who sag their pants.

Civil Rights Attorney Ron Wilson, an African American, is taking on the unconstitutional laws. He is mounting an investigation of other cities that have banned saggy pants.

Several cities in Louisiana and elsewhere still have ‘droopy drawers’ laws on their books, including Mansfield and Delcambre in Louisiana, Jefferson Davis and Terrebonne Parishes, Dublin and Jonesboro in Georgia, Columbus City and Kosciusko in Mississippi, Timmonsville in South Carolina, and Wildwood, New Jersey. Sagging pants laws in Riviera Beach and Ocala in Florida have been repealed.

We agree with the civil rights attorneys: “The government does not belong in the business of telling people what to wear; nor does it have the right to use clothing as a pretext to engage in otherwise unlawful stops of innocent people; especially when it is being enforced in a blatantly racially discriminatory manner.”

Or as Councilwoman Fuller advised, ‘If you don’t like it, don’t look.’

This article originally published in the June 17, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.