Police enforcing fashion law against low-riding pants
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Albert Graham was wearing red boxer shorts. Kenneth Smith's boxers were blue and white. Morrius Bleau's undergarments weren't described in the police affidavit of his arrest.
But they all landed in county jail in recent weeks for violating the newest law on Riviera Beach's books: wearing pants so low that undergarments or skin are exposed.
Since the saggy pants law went into effect in mid-July, arrest records show that city police have made at least four arrests for the violation. And despite controversy over the constitutionality of fashion policing, which Mayor Thomas Masters touted as a move toward decency, the city and its police are making no apologies.
"Prior to implementation of this ordinance, our officers were providing warnings to people ... and an educational period," said Lt. Alex Freeman. "It is now time to act and let the community know that we are now serious about this ordinance."
Bleau's arrest was on a Sunday. The 18-year-old, who has a felony arrest record, said he was on his way home from church on Aug. 24.
"I ain't doing nothing," he told the officer aggressively after ignoring orders to stop, his arrest affidavit said. He was charged not only for his low-hanging pants but for resisting arrest.
"How can you stop somebody for following a fashion? I don't think we should get punished for the way we dress," Bleau said this week. "I feel this is just another way to harass black men. It's just an easier way for police to have probable cause to mess with somebody."
Jose Eisenberg, 20, of West Palm Beach was the first arrest, showing 3 inches of his purple boxers on July 31. The image was caught on the police cruiser's video recorder as he was being cited, his arrest report said.
Graham, 20, was caught on Aug. 23 wearing his shorts in what's often called hip-hop style. He too faced off with the officer, shouting he'd done nothing wrong, and was outside his mother's house, the arrest affidavit said.
He fought the handcuffs and was charged with resisting arrest.
Smith, 29, was at the end of his driveway Tuesday when he got busted with his pants too low. Police said they were responding to a call about a drug sale. They found Smith talking to someone in a car. He wasn't wearing a shirt and his pants were hanging low, the officer wrote in the report.
Smith, who has a record of multiple felonies, was "loud and uncooperative," the officer wrote. Smith was also charged with disorderly conduct.
Each man faces a possible fine of up to $150 for a first offense, $300 for a second offense, while repeated offenses can bring up to 60 days in jail.
The arrests renewed objections that the law violates civil rights. The American Civil Liberties Union said it will support any challenge to the law if someone is arrested.
"I can understand people don't like underwear showing over pants. I don't like it. But ... it is constitutionally protected," said John Pauly, ACLU Palm Beach County chairman. "It's not illegal to walk down the street in a pair of boxers provided nothing is exposed. So how can it be illegal for someone to put pants on top of those shorts?"
Smith's family charge the Police Department is targeting them and the saggy pants arrest is just the latest incident.
"There was no cocaine or drugs. They had to think of something to cite him with," said Dora March, Smith's mother. "It wasn't about the baggy pants. A lot of people stop by and say it's wrong, very wrong."
Smith's lawyer Nicole Sauvola said the law is "designed to be pretextural, to stop somebody for some other reason, to shake that person down." She added, sarcastically: "Because everybody who wears saggy pants deals drugs."
Freeman said police are simply doing their jobs, and it will take time for people to accept the law.
"Our officers are enforcing the ordinance because now it is the law," he said. "There is no way our officers are attacking anyone or singling anyone out.
"This type of response is expected," Freeman added. "We will face that as it comes. But we expect our officer to enforce the ordinance."
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Re: Police enforcing fashion law against low-riding pants
IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY THESE ASS CLOWNS ARE A HUGE DISGRACE TO US!!!!
Re: Police enforcing fashion law against low-riding pants
DNA Discoverer: Blacks Less Intelligent Than Whites
One of the world's most eminent scientists has created a racial firestorm in Britain.
James D. Watson, 79, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine, told the Sunday Times of London that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."
He recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
• Click here to read the full Sunday Times of London profile.
Acknowledging that the issue was a "hot potato," the lifelong Democrat and avowed secular humanist nonetheless said his beliefs were not an excuse to discriminate against blacks.
"There are many people of color who are very talented," said Watson, "but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level."
He told the interviewer, a former student of his, that he had recently inaugurated a DNA learning center near Harlem, and would like to have more black researchers at his lab, "but there's no one to recruit."
Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University in Britain, was quick to dismiss Watson's comments.
"This is Watson at his most scandalous, " Rose told the Times of London. "If he knew the literature in the subject, he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."
Watson is the former director and current chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory biological-research institution on New York's Long Island, and both admired and infamous for bluntly speaking his mind.
In a British television documentary in 2003, Watson advised eliminating low intelligence through gene therapy.
"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," said Watson, according to New Scientist magazine . "The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it?
"A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't," he added. "So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent."
He also touched upon sexual attraction in the same TV program.
"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty," Watson said. "I think it would be great."
In 2000, he told a lecture audience at U.C. Berkeley that there was a correlation between a population's exposure to sunlight and its sex drive.
"That's why you have Latin lovers," Watson said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle . "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."
The notion that intelligence tests and other scientific evidence shows that racial groups differ in intelligence, at least statistically, is not a new one.
It last gained popular attention in 1994 with "The Bell Curve," a best-selling book written by Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein (who died before publication) and political scientist Charles Murray, which argued that intelligence was more important than socio-economic background or education in achieving success in American life.
The book does not explicitly ascribe a genetic, racial connection to intelligence, but Murray in his publicity tour to promote the book cited studies that human intelligence could be ranked by ancestry, with East Asians and European Jews leading the way.
That view was more clearly stated in 1995 by British-Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, whose "Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective" quantified dozens of differences between blacks, whites and Asians.
In the 1970s, electronics pioneer William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, said that the human race would suffer as less intelligent people outbred more intelligent ones, with the greatest damage to occur in the black American population.
Most sociologists, geneticists and psychologists reject the notion of racial differences in intelligence, pointing out that economic and social factors clearly influence IQ test scores.
The issue of race itself is scientifically controversial, with some arguing that it is a meaningless term and others saying that consistent traits occur among individuals of shared ancestry.
Watson is currently in Britain promoting his just-published new volume of memoirs, "Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science."
"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically," he writes. "Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
Re: Police enforcing fashion law against low-riding pants
