Flint police can arrest people who “sag” or wear their pants below the hips.

[COMMENTARY] Earlier this month, the new interim Flint police chief, David Dicks, announced that police would start arresting people for wearing their pants “sagging” or below the waist and butt. Dicks believes sagging is “indecent exposure” and thus is punishable by a $500 fine or 93 days in jail.

The American Civil Liberties Union is researching whether this policy is a violation of the First Amendment. Other opponents argue that it will give police another reason to harass young men and is a road to racial profiling since sagging is largely (but certainly not exclusively) practiced by African-American youth, and this policy now gives automatic probable cause for a complete police search.

But Dicks is himself a black man. So can he be racist?

 It’s possible. But more likely he has an ax to grind with men in the streets since his son, Jaquan Dudley, 24, was shot dead in a drive-by shooting in June, minutes after Dicks accepted his new position as police chief. With his promotion coming simultaneously with the murder of his son, in a warped way it may explain his strict ideas concerning men in the streets — to get more possible shooters behind bars, he needs a way to identify them. You know, basic profiling. So enraged by his son’s death to the point of obsession, he has targeted a certain style that he has associated with thugs — sagging pants — and thus crossed lines of basic freedoms.

This is also an age-sensitive issue. Dicks is 41 years old, a generation away from the fads of young men today, and perhaps has forgotten what it was like to be young, hip, following trends wherever they lead. So it is an issue of ageism as much as it would be racism or classism. For instance — long hair, bell-bottoms, jerry curls, short basketball shorts – all past fads that ticked off a good number of people in their time. One day sagging pants will join them in the ranks of fashion infamy.

Does sagging really translate to indecent exposure, as Dicks suggests? Not really. Men who sag also wear long shirts that by comparison are about as oversized as their pants. The shirts go way past the waist, and the young men are usually wearing boxers, so you don’t see anything “indecent.” So how do officers know when to pull out the handcuffs? It’s a tough call and opens the door for a lot of interpretation, giving officers more of a reason to harass people. I wonder how common it is to really see someone with their whole butt showing? I see a lot of guys in the street sagging, but no bare behind. In fact I’ve seen more of girls’ behinds peeking out from low-rise jeans than I have from men who are sagging.

When did falling pants become cool? One Flint resident, Kwame Everett, who is the president of the Association of Black Students at Oakland University and who studies African-American culture, put it this way:

Belts were banned in the prisons because individuals would hang themselves or others with them. Since some prisoners were given over-sized clothing with no belts they were forced to sag (which still is as degraded as the clothing conditions of slaves during slavery).

Many people who would sag on the streets did it because they had no belt. [Either that] or they were “flooding” [wearing pants that are too small] — if you were poor and you had small old pants it was common to flood, happened to me a lot when I was younger. [Being forced to “flood”] would be an easy reason for someone to want to sag. The practical street version of flooding and no belt suggest that sagging is not a style but a common reality for poor individuals. Of course, the fashion only hit mainstream when rappers like Ice T and Too Short began to sag in the 80s.

The argument against sagging is that it looks ridiculous, it is a part of prison culture, and it hinders these men from getting the respect they need to be successful. Or as Dicks wrote in a memo to his officers, “This immoral self expression goes beyond freedom of expression.”

It just seems to me that Flint police officers have other things to worry about — domestic abuse, theft, murder, etc. — that should take priority over fashion choices. The Flint Police Department just laid off 48 officers and closed the city jail. What police remain need to be focusing on real public safety issues, not style trends.