Neighborly disturbance.
Sep. 16th, 2006 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI thought about making this post last night. If I had, it would've been very different.
Here's what I would have written then:
Something needs to be done about our downstairs neighbors. They've just had a screaming, door-slamming fight at the tops of their lungs - sounds like they're moving back and forth from their apartment to the sidewalk in front of the house. I'd like to say that this is an isolated incident, but the only real difference from the status quo is that this time they're louder. We hear them fighting almost every day - usually early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes loud sex, too, but it's the fighting that bothers me.
About a year ago, I guess, I called the cops on them. It was early on a Saturday morning. I heard angry yelling, and then the unmistakable sound of a body falling heavily against furniture. I dialed 911 and told them I thought I was hearing domestic violence downstairs, and then sat around shaking, waiting for the fallout. An hour or so later, one of the downstairs neighbors came up to apologize. She told me that they had some friends visiting, and had been out all night partying. One of their friends was "drunk and stupid," and while they were trying to get him calmed down he fell over some boxes. She talked about neighborly respect and sounded as though she thought I had made a glorified noise complaint; I explained that I didn't care if they got loud, and only intervened because I thought someone was being hurt. At the time, the whole conversation seemed plausible enough.
But the fighting is getting worse and worse. It's very audible from our house. (We have the three-story main house, and the basement is a separate studio apartment.) I've never had to deal with neighbor noise like this before - parties or loud music, sure, but not vicious shouting, day after day. It's really upsetting me. And I don't want Alex exposed to it, either.
I'm not sure what can be done about it, though. We really don't know them at all - just in a "here, this letter got delivered to the wrong box" sort of way. In the midst of the door slamming last night, I wanted to go out and tell them to shut the hell up, but I was afraid. I've thought about leaving a letter in their mailbox, letting them know how much they're disturbing us. I've thought about complaining to the landlord. Calling the police again doesn't seem likely to do any good. I don't want to keep living like this, but I don't know how to make it stop.
What happened today:
The worst fight yet. I heard them clearly from the second floor, two floors away from them. Michael and Alex were driven in from playing in the backyard - it must have been practically like being right there in the basement apartment with them. All three of us fled the house together, and once we were outside, Michael told me that he'd heard one of them screaming that she didn't intend to let herself be hit anymore.
Shit.
We don't know which one of them it was. They're both women, so we can't go by either the voice or the statistical probabilities. If we did know who it was, our course would be simple: find a way to tell the victim that we know what's happening, and offer our help if she wants to leave or needs a safe place quickly during an argument. Call the cops the next time we hear anything. But we don't know, and making contact with the wrong person could have negative consequences for the victim.
We can still call the police if we hear anything suggestive - or just on general principles, when the fights get loud. But if the cops get there and our neighbors insist that everything's fine, they can't do anything.
I feel like I have the responsibility to do something to make it stop. I just don't know what that thing could be. In the meantime, of course it make hearing them fight much, much more awful. What a nightmare.
Here's what I would have written then:
Something needs to be done about our downstairs neighbors. They've just had a screaming, door-slamming fight at the tops of their lungs - sounds like they're moving back and forth from their apartment to the sidewalk in front of the house. I'd like to say that this is an isolated incident, but the only real difference from the status quo is that this time they're louder. We hear them fighting almost every day - usually early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes loud sex, too, but it's the fighting that bothers me.
About a year ago, I guess, I called the cops on them. It was early on a Saturday morning. I heard angry yelling, and then the unmistakable sound of a body falling heavily against furniture. I dialed 911 and told them I thought I was hearing domestic violence downstairs, and then sat around shaking, waiting for the fallout. An hour or so later, one of the downstairs neighbors came up to apologize. She told me that they had some friends visiting, and had been out all night partying. One of their friends was "drunk and stupid," and while they were trying to get him calmed down he fell over some boxes. She talked about neighborly respect and sounded as though she thought I had made a glorified noise complaint; I explained that I didn't care if they got loud, and only intervened because I thought someone was being hurt. At the time, the whole conversation seemed plausible enough.
But the fighting is getting worse and worse. It's very audible from our house. (We have the three-story main house, and the basement is a separate studio apartment.) I've never had to deal with neighbor noise like this before - parties or loud music, sure, but not vicious shouting, day after day. It's really upsetting me. And I don't want Alex exposed to it, either.
I'm not sure what can be done about it, though. We really don't know them at all - just in a "here, this letter got delivered to the wrong box" sort of way. In the midst of the door slamming last night, I wanted to go out and tell them to shut the hell up, but I was afraid. I've thought about leaving a letter in their mailbox, letting them know how much they're disturbing us. I've thought about complaining to the landlord. Calling the police again doesn't seem likely to do any good. I don't want to keep living like this, but I don't know how to make it stop.
What happened today:
The worst fight yet. I heard them clearly from the second floor, two floors away from them. Michael and Alex were driven in from playing in the backyard - it must have been practically like being right there in the basement apartment with them. All three of us fled the house together, and once we were outside, Michael told me that he'd heard one of them screaming that she didn't intend to let herself be hit anymore.
Shit.
We don't know which one of them it was. They're both women, so we can't go by either the voice or the statistical probabilities. If we did know who it was, our course would be simple: find a way to tell the victim that we know what's happening, and offer our help if she wants to leave or needs a safe place quickly during an argument. Call the cops the next time we hear anything. But we don't know, and making contact with the wrong person could have negative consequences for the victim.
We can still call the police if we hear anything suggestive - or just on general principles, when the fights get loud. But if the cops get there and our neighbors insist that everything's fine, they can't do anything.
I feel like I have the responsibility to do something to make it stop. I just don't know what that thing could be. In the meantime, of course it make hearing them fight much, much more awful. What a nightmare.
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Date: 2006-09-17 01:34 am (UTC)In a different situation, where I was pretty sure that someone in the neighbouring apartment had gotten thrown against the wall where my bed was, along with a lot of shouting and swearing and someone saying zie wished zie was dead, I didn't call the police at the time. But I went the next morning to alert the apartment office (this was a co-op). It turned out that my neighbour the lease-holder in a wheelchair wasn't in fact trapped in the apartment with these crazy people -- she had sublet to them while in the hospital, and my information helped the office to intervene.
So it turned out that ratting them out was good. But telling the office might have made things worse in that whoever was a victim might also become homeless.