Police chief apologizes to woman cited for crop top, cutoffs

On a recent boiling day, she donned a crop top and cutoff shorts — the first time Casey LaCaze-Lachney had ever worn such revealing attire, she said in a viral video about a police encounter.

As she sat on the curb with her family listening to music at a street festival in Winnfield, La., LaCaze-Lachney noticed three female cops coming toward her. They singled her out, called her over and charged her with indecent exposure.

LaCaze-Lachney offered to go down the street to her house less than a mile away and change.

The officers said she could not. They insisted on writing her up for indecent exposure.

“We’re going to give you a citation,” one of the cops said, according to a video account LaCaze-Lachney posted on TikTok that went viral, topping 2 million hits.

When her ex- and current husbands, who were attending the festival with her and her kids, tried to intervene, the officers told them to back off.

The citation was no small thing, since indecent exposure can be a felony in Louisiana.

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Determined to fight the charge, LaCaze-Lachney hired a lawyer and requested body-cam footage. The cops had none. Luckily a bystander had taken a video snippet of the encounter, showing “all my bits” covered, as LaCaze-Lachney put it.

On June 15 the Winnfield Police Department responded on Facebook to what it said was pressure from social media and complaining that an “unnamed citizen” was “blasting police officers.”

The posting cited the ordinance LaCaze-Lachney had supposedly violated.

“It shall be unlawful for any person to wear pants, trousers, shorts, skirts, dresses, or skorts in any public place or places open to the public which either intentionally exposes undergarments or intentionally exposes any portion of the pubic hair, cleft of buttocks, or genitals,” the police posting said, noting that it’s punishable by fines ranging from $25 to $300, plus up to 40 hours of community service.

On Tuesday, LaCaze-Lachney and her attorney, Randall Hayes, met with Winnfield police chief Johnny Ray Carpenter and Winnfield City Attorney Herman Castete, who both admitted she had not violated the ordinance and had been wrongly cited, the Shreveport Times reported.

“Mr. Castete said that he will have the citation officially dismissed,” Hayes told the Shreveport Times.

Carpenter apologized, dropped the charges and told her she never should have been put through that, LaCaze-Lachney said in a TikTok update.