Liberal Forum

We Asked Cops How They Plan to Enforce North Carolina’s Bathroom Law

How will the state try to enforce its new law, which is the first of its kind to be enacted in the United States?

I picked up the phone and started calling some North Carolina police departments to find out.

"That's a very interesting question. We don't have police officers sitting at public bathrooms all day long," a spokesman at the Raleigh Police Department told me with a laugh.

Over in Greensboro, the state's third-most-populous city, I received a similar answer. "We would respond if we received a complaint. It's not like we would be standing guard at bathrooms," said Susan Danielsen, a spokeswoman for the local police department, also suppressing a laugh.

At the Wilmington Police Department, spokeswoman Linda Rawley said the law struck her as strange. "So that means people have to go to the bathroom with birth certificates? Yeah, that was curious to me."

At the Asheville Police Department, spokeswoman Christina Hallingse noted, "We're not checking birth certificates. We just don't have the police power to be able to do that in bathrooms."

Since the law was enacted March 23, police departments across the state have been working to determine how they will enforce it. In addition to restricting bathroom use, it bans anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation.

"Our staff, particularly our attorney's office, is trying to figure out what it all means," says Damien Graham, another spokesman for the Raleigh Police Department. "We haven't mobilized our police force in any kind of different way. We're still digesting."

Public universities like Western Carolina University and the University of North Carolina are also assessing the law to determine how it will affect university policies, spokespeople from both universities said.

Can police patrol public restrooms? Can they demand birth certificates, or some other form of identification, from those accused of violations? In the law, "these are all completely open questions," says Cathryn Oakley, a senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group.

And critics of the law say police officers and universities may struggle to find answers within the text of the legislation.

"The bill was passed by the state legislature in less than 10 hours and then signed by the governor that very same night with very little debate," Oakley says. "And so it's incredibly poorly drafted, leading to all kinds of consequences."

The lack of enforcement guidance in the legislation also suggests "it's not motivated by solving a real problem," she says. "If it was, they would have spent more time understanding and actually addressing a problem. Instead they passed a law that is a political statement."