Miss. town rolls out ‘pull up your pants’ signs

Local authorities in Laurel, Mississippi, are putting up signs in their community asking young people to pull up their baggy pants when they are out in public.

Police and city officials purchased 50 signs to put up around Laurel and say they are trying to educate young people about how to dress themselves professionally and appropriately, a local NBC affiliate reported.

“We’re trying to bring awareness to our young people to pull up your pants,” police Chief Tyrone Stewart said. “No one wants to see your underwear.”

Chief Stewart put up the first sign outside of the municipal court building Tuesday morning.

“When you come here to our facilities, we want you to act right,” he said, NBC reported. “On a weekly basis, you see these young people coming to court, and the way they’re dressed with their pants hanging below their buttocks, and you have to have one of the personnel here to tell them to ’pull up your pants before you come in the courtroom.’ That’s disturbing because that’s something these young people should have learned at home.”

Mr. Stewart said his department is trying to step in and be honest with young men about their appearance. He said he believes most of the offenders probably don’t have someone in their lives to tell them the truth about how they look when they sag their pants.

Laurel Mayor Johnny Magee said he want’s citizens’ minds to be on this issue.

“You open doors going into stores now, and you’ve got ’please pull up your pants before you come in. If you don’t pull up your pants, don’t come in.’ It shouldn’t be that way,” Mr. Magee said.

The city currently does not have any kind of ordinance against baggy pants, but Chief Stewart told NBC that he and Mr. Magee are working with city attorney Deidra Bassi to draft one.

“She has some concerns about the constitutionality of it if somebody chose to challenge it, but we’re going to get there,” Mr. Magee said. “We’ll see what happens there. There are other cities that have done it in Mississippi and in other states, so we’ll be looking closely at that to see what we can come up with.”

So far, eight towns in Mississippi have already banned saggy pants in public. Three parishes in Louisiana have also invoked similar ordinances.

“I grew up in an era where we were taught to dress neatly. We were taught to put our shirt in out pants, have a belt on, have your jeans clean, and it’s a different era now,” Mr. Magee said. “Now everybody wants to be able to walk around anyway they want to, and they say it’s their freedom. And that is true, but the people that fought and died, the revolutionary fathers, those are not the freedoms they were talking about. They were talking about things like freedom of religion, freedom of the press freedom of assembly. Those kinds of things, not freedom to be half-naked in public.”