Another SC place bans saggy pants, but fad seems to be fading

LeRoy Blackshear couldn’t help but notice their underwear.

The two young men in front of him in the supermarket checkout line were bending over, trying to fish change out of their pockets.

Those pockets were hard to reach — “their foreheads were almost on the floor,” he recalled Thursday — because their pants sagged so low.

That was the memory Blackshear — a former Jasper County councilman — recalled when asked what led him in 2008 to propose a county ordinance that outlawed the wearing of pants more than three inches below the hips and thereby exposing skin or undergarments. In December 2008, the county council passed the ordinance with a 2-1 vote, for which Blackshear was absent.

On Tuesday, the town of Timmonsville passed a similar ordinance.

Some residents of Jasper County say the 7-year-old ordinance there is outliving its purpose as fashions change.

While it’s not ignored by law enforcement, police and county officers say enforcing it is not a priority. And some current county leaders say the rule, which surprised its own advocate — Blackshear — when it passed, wonder about its power to make a difference.

Is saggy trendy?

Hairstylist Latasha Dunham hunched over a customer Thursday at Kut-N-Up Barber and Beauty on Whyte Hardee Boulevard in Hardeeville.

Dunham, who operates the beauty side of the shop, said she was born and raised in the town, and she remembers when Blackshear’s proposed ordinance became law.

“Maybe it was because certain types of kids (who wore saggy pants) were troublemakers,” she said, pondering the origin of the ordinance. “But some of them do it just for the fashion.”

But saggy pants, which Dunham says are popular primarily among teenagers and 20-somethings, might have fallen out of favor in Hardeeville.

“The trends change,” she said. “Now they’re into the skinny jeans.”

Barbara Chalmers, a customer, listened as her stylist talked. She’d seen a similar trend.

“Like she said, it’s much better,” Chalmers said. “They dress a little better. You don’t see as many saggy pants.”

At the time, everybody — whites, blacks, Hispanics — wore saggy pants, Dunham said, explaining that Hardeeville is a small community where people “run into each other.”

Kids see styles on TV and mimic what they like, she said. And if there are less saggy pants in Hardeeville today, it’s not because of the ordinance.

“It didn’t have anything to do with the police or the law coming out,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s strictly enforced.”

‘Not a priority’

Hardeeville Police Department Chief Sam Woodward recently saw a couple of young men with saggy pants walking in town.

“ ‘You know there’s a saggy pants ordinance,’ ” he remembers saying to them. “ ‘You need to pull your pants up.’ ”

Woodward, who’s been chief for the past couple of years, says he can’t recall writing anyone a ticket. And he doesn’t remember Jasper County Sheriff’s Office — which he was with almost 30 years prior to leading the town’s force — ever writing one. The Jasper County Sun Times reported in June 2009 that there hadn’t been a single arrest or ticket for saggy pants in the first six months of the ordinance’s existence.

Neither Dunham nor Chalmers knew of anyone who’d been warned or ticketed for saggy pants.

“I know there have been a couple of cases” where we’ve used the ordinance, Jasper County Sheriff Gregory B. Jenkins said Thursday. However, he said, those cases would have involved a sex offender or someone who exposed himself or herself.

“It’s not going to be ignored, because there’s an ordinance in place,” he said.

Woodward prefers to warn offenders instead of ticketing them, because he worries there’s not enough public awareness of the ordinance.

“It’s not something that we’re actually going out (and looking for) everybody we see with saggy pants,” he said. “It’s something that’s not a priority offense for us.”

But he still sees saggy pants in his day-to-day work, and he’s addressed enforcement of the ordinance with his officers.

He said he hopes they follow his lead and issue warnings.

‘Wishful thinking’

In 2012, there was talk in Beaufort County of an ordinance similar to Blackshear’s, but it was not taken far.

“I recall some comments about Jasper (County’s) ordinance, but I don’t recall anyone indicating they were interested in pursuing such an ordinance in Beaufort County,” Beaufort County Council Chairman Paul Sommerville wrote in an email Thursday.

And not all leaders in Jasper County see the need for the ordinance that came to pass there.

“No, definitely no,” Jasper County Councilwoman Barbara Clark said Thursday when asked if Ordinance 08-15 has made a difference. “Definitely nothing’s changed.”

Clark, who represents Hardeeville on the council and was on the school board when Blackshear’s ordinance passed, said people in her community still wear saggy pants.

“I would just like to see — and I know it’s wishful thinking — that the younger people would take a better interest in themselves and pull their pants up,” she said. “But as far as us making them do it, it seems like that’s impossible.”

Clark said pants-sagging crosses racial lines in her community. She called it a phase, like body piercing or tattoos. When asked why she thought no one had proposed an anti-body-piercing or anti-tattoo ordinance, she said, “I think it was just the people who were sitting on the council at that time who were irritated by it, and they put up an ordinance for it.”

Blackshear said his personal standards led him to propose the ordinance six years ago. He was tired of seeing people “lowering (their) dignity,” and he wouldn’t want his wife or his daughter to be placed in an uncomfortable situation.

Still, he thinks the decision was representative of the county.

He said he was absent from the December 2008 vote because he was on a cruise. A fellow council member called him to let him know the ordinance passed.

He was surprised.

This story was originally published July 10, 2016 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Another SC place bans saggy pants, but fad seems to be fading."