I don’t want the “bad guys” sent to jail at the expense of my own liberties being eroded.

If the police had more power, do you honestly think you’d be better protected? Ha.

As if the police were paragons of humanity, instead of just regular humans.

While this fashion of wearing baggy jeans way too low may be popular with some wannabes, it’s also popular with gangs. This is very clever profiling – it isn’t based on race or age or anything else, just the voluntary act of wearing a certain kind of clothing a certain way. So you can rest assured that this is less about protecting the public decency, or fashion policing, as it is about fighting gangs. As the Flint resident points out, there’s bigger problems in that town than butt crack – like gangs. It’s easy to look at this law and say it’s absurd, but you have to remember that it’s part of a larger context.

I’d guess this is what you could call an excuse for a police officer to search. Just as highway patrols look for speeders and people without seatbelts for the primary purpose of getting the opportunity to get close enough to people and their vehicles to sniff for alcohol, which is a much greater crime, so do I suspect that officers in Flint will, with just a look, have the reasonable suspicion to stop a person and begin questioning (Terry stop). Notice that the crime is punishable by 93 days to a year in jail *OR UP TO* $500 in fines. The officer isn’t obliged to arrest anyone. This is just a way for the officer to get in close enough, and to sniff around, to see if a person is a real gangland threat or just a suburban wannabe. They don’t have any interest in jailing the wannabe for wearing his pants too low – as everyone’s noticed, that’s wasteful, ridiculous, and just plain stupid.

But what if it’s not just some suburban wannabe? This is how it goes: the officer approaches suspect, initiates stop. Maybe he’ll say something nice and respectful to start out with, practically idle conversation, just to guess whether the person is drunk or high or just plain dangerous. Then he’ll ask for identification. But before you reach into your pocket, he wants to know whether you have anything dangerous in there, like a gun or a knife. So, based on his training and experience, he’s already formed enough reasonable suspicion to frisk the person. But he’s not just frisking for a weapon – he’s also keenly but subtly looking for clues to drug possession, like small plastic bags, pipes, whatever. And within thirty to sixty seconds, the officer will already know whether this person is someone he wants to cuff and bring in, or whether it’s just a fashionably retarded individual who happens to dress in an awful manner. If it’s the wannabe, they get a stern warning meant to scare the bejeezus out of them and told to go put on a belt. But if it’s a real bad guy, the cop has just made an arrest – with a story that will hold up to a defense attorney’s challenge.

So no, sorry to burst your bubble, it’s not about fashion policing. It’s about making sure that the bad guys that everyone wants behind bars aren’t getting off on a technicality.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080708/NEWS06/307080009

I don’t care for the fashion itself, but I also don’t like the fact that someone wearing their pants this way could be subject to search, seizure, and arrest.