There has been much made of North Carolina’s recent law that asked people to use the public restrooms and public locker rooms corresponding to their sex at birth. The law has since been replaced by a similar law. However, those in favor or making every bathroom or locker room open to anyone according to what sex they identify with at that particular moment have overlooked a few possible negative consequences.
On April 6th, WBTV posted an article about a recent incident at Central Piedmont Community College. The incident itself is disturbing, but the school’s response to the incident is even more disturbing.
The article reports:
A Central Piedmont Community College student was shocked to find a man in the women’s bathroom allegedly trying to take her picture under a stall door. She was equally shocked, she said, when she reported the incident to police and they told her what happened was not a crime.
Catherine Barker said she was in a stall in the first-floor women’s bathroom in the Belk Building on CPCC’s Central Campus when she suddenly noticed something that didn’t feel right.
“I noticed a person come through the vertical crack in the bathroom stall and then bend down, so I jumped up and went out the door and they were headed out the bathroom and I said ‘you look for somebody?’ and the guy started fumbling and mumbling with his phone and trying to get his phone away so I blocked him from the door so he wouldn’t get out,” Barker recalled days later in an interview with WBTV.
Barker said she grabbed the man’s phone and, eventually, led him to a campus security officer to report the incident.
But she said campus security officers told her there was nothing they could do.
“They said that there’s no proof that he has any pictures so they can’t do anything to him,” she said she was told by campus security officers.
The article goes on to describe the lack of action by the college:
Federal law requires colleges and universities to keep a daily log of all crimes—or incidents that could potentially be crimes—that are reported on campus. The requirement is part of a federal law known as the Clery Act, which is aimed at alerting those on colleges campuses about crimes that occur nearby.
Documents provided by CPCC security show Barker reported Monday’s incident in the bathroom to authorities as soon as it happened. But a review of the school’s crime log the next day found campus security had failed to list the incident in its daily crime log.
WBTV obtained access to the crime log after multiple security officials first refused to provide the log and, later, demanded to know why a reporter wanted to see it. The Clery Act requires a crime log be made available upon request to anyone who asks to review it.
Instead, the page for Monday’s crime log was blank with a message that said “no data for daily crime log.”
The article concludes:
Catherine Barker, the student who reported the man she thought was trying to take a picture of her while she was in a bathroom stall, said she no longer feels safe on campus.
“It’s just a really uncomfortable feeling to have somebody take that away – one of the most private parts of the day. And he’s not welcome there,” she said.
Barker said she tried to report this incident to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department but was told CPCC’s contracted police agency, Allied Universal, has primary jurisdiction over the incident.
She said she has one message for college administrators.
“The administrators, first and foremost, made me feel unsafe,” she said.
We have heard a lot of ruckus from various sports groups about not being willing to come to North Carolina because North Carolina wants men in the men’s room and women in the women’s room (and locker rooms). What about the parents who don’t want to send their daughters to college in North Carolina because their daughters may not be protected on campus? The way the college handled this incident is a disgrace. There should have been a warrant to search the man’s phone, and he should have been arrested if the phone had incriminating pictures on it. Does anyone actually believe that this was the first or last time that the person attempting to take pictures in the ladies’ room had done that? Who will protect the students if he decides to go further than pictures? Would you send your daughter to college there?
