Its city government is about to approve an ordinance that would mean six months in the can and/or a $500 fine for anyone who appears in public in the town wearing the black urban-inspired baggy pants way-down-low garb. The irony is that you can be sent to the same kind of institution where that style of garb was inspired to begin with.
They ought to heed the lessons of another town in Louisiana, that being Covington. Sometimes, you want people like that to be wearing clothing styles like that, as uncouth as it appears.
UPDATE 6/14: Depending on the wording of this city ordinance, I think they will have trouble enforcing it, even if it survives Constitutional challenges.
First and most obvious is the disparate racial impact concern. There are white men that adopt this clothing fashion, but it’s mostly a black thing, and I can just see ACLU or NAACP lawyer arguing that the law has a disparate impact on young black men, even if it’s lettered and enforced in a non-discriminatory way.
Second, there are constitutional issues with this ordinance even beyond race.
If MSM reports are accurate, then the ordinance prohibits the wearing of pants so low below the waist that exposes one’s underwear or certain private parts of one’s anatomy.
There isn’t a man in America who hasn’t appeared in public at least once in his life without at least a little bit of his underwear exposed above his pants. But taken literally, the ordinance would apply to everyone who anyone who does this, even accidentally. This would net just about every man in Delcambre at least once during his life.
At that point, then you’ll have the city’s cops having to make value judgments about the law, about what it means to “expose” underwear, as enforcing it literally would be enforcing it against too many people. Then those that actually are cited will have a legit beef about selective enforcement.
And neither the law nor the way it’s enforced can be subjective, i.e. you can’t have the law itself literally say that “you can’t wear your pants too low to expose too much of your underwear,” nor can you have cops enforce the law as if it did, leaving it up to their discretion what “too low” and “too much” mean, because it violates substantive due process protections of the Federal and (presumably) Louisiana Constitutions, protections against overly broad and subjective laws.
At that point, the city would have to go back and amend the law to say in absolute terms how much underwear is exposed before a crime is being committed. That would mean that, along with pistol, mace, baton and radio, Delcambre’s cops will have to carry around rulers, and when they see a man with exposed underwear, they’ll have to order him to freeze, hope that he doesn’t pull up his pants in earnest (else arrest him for destroying evidence), then measure the length from the top of the pants to to the top of the underwear at the point around his waist where the differential seems greatest, and arrest or cite him if it’s greater than legally permitted. Yeah, sure, I can see the cops in that town would be really thrilled to have to do that sort of thing, especially in this day and age of lawsuits, that the cop could face if he or she touches the low-riding suspect in the wrong place in the wrong way.
What if you’re wearing nothing between your ankles and waist but underwear? You’re not wearing any pants, so by definition you can’t wear what you’re not wearing anyway too low to expose your underwear, though all of your underwear is exposed.
And finally, what is the definition of underwear or undergarments? What if you’re not wearing briefs or boxers, but wearing Speedos or a jockstrap under your pants, and you’re wearing your pants so low as to expose the top few inches of your Speedos or jockstrap. If you’re cited, you as a defendant could make the case that neither Speedos nor a jockstrap fit the definition of “undergarments,” as Speedos are usually worn in situations when that is the only article of clothing a man is wearing, and a jockstrap isn’t a typical undergarment.
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