At what point do you call the cops with nothing but a vauge suspicion?

Add me to those who think the OP is being paranoid.

I don’t understand the whole “look-out” thing. Looking out for what? What do they do when they spot something? Call the house on a cell phone? Run inside? Make secret bird calls? I think you’ve been watching too many cops & robbers movies.

Horn honking is part of no drug dealing that i’ve ever heard of. Dealers and their clients like to be at least somewhat discreet. Either you’re way off base, or these are the dumbest drug dealers on Earth.

Back in my younger days, there were many houses where groups of teens and young adults hung out, usually at the house of a popular kid with lenient parents. Kids don’t hang out in public places, such as nice parks, because cops are constantly harassing groups of teens that do that, and force them to move on.

Lots of times we would hang around outside and do something vaguely physical while shooting the shit. For us, it was hackey-sack, but i could see half-hearted basketball being another option.

Sometimes drugs would be involved, mostly weed, but weed-smokers are pretty laid back, and don’t like to get involved in major situations … i’d be more worried if they were drinking over there. Weed dealing happened, not because they were drug houses, but because that’s where everybody happened to be. And the drug deals were between friends, it wasn’t as if strangers would drive up and buy a bag.

And here’s a novel idea that no one has mentioned yet. Why don’t you go over and TALK to them? Bake a plate of cookies and bring it over. Introduce yourself and, if they’re friendly, get to know them a little better. Then politely ask them if they could get the horn honking to stop. Some people are rude because they just don’t know they are being rude.

If you live in a neighborhood where you have to call the cops before you go over and talk to a neighbor directly, then you’re living in the wrong neighborhood. I think you’re being rude in immediately appealing to a higher authority rather than making an ATTEMPT to work out your differences with the offending party.

They’re bothering Zsofia. Ergo, she has the entire right to call the cops.

Regards,
Shodan

Well, she’s worried that IF they are dealing drugs she doesn’t want them to even have the slightest notion that she’s on to them. If she gets to know them, then figures out everyone in the house is high all the time and then calls the cops they may figure she dropped the dime on them.
I vote that she talks to the other neighbors first and sort of feel them out as to the possible goings on in that house. (if she hasn’t already, I didn’t read the entire thread)

No they aren’t.

[Ned Flanders]Okily-dokilee.[/Ned Flanders]

“Oh, please don’t deal drugs in our neighborhood! I’m afraid of what this’ll do to the community, and I don’t want to get caught in any crossfire.”

Yeah. That’ll work. Not.

Oops. Sorry, Czarcasm. As soon as I posted that, I realized it was over the top for this forum. My mistake.

I’m glad you called, ZSofia. You did the right thing.

I’m in favor of being proactive and calling in your suspicions, even if you haven’t seen enough to make an open-and-shut case, because even if your suspicions are well-founded you wouldn’t necessarily be able to discern it, and if the worst-case scenario is being borne out, you want the cops to nip their operation in the bud, and shut them down before things get totally out of hand. I have three personal anecdotes to relate:

When I was a very little kid, we had next-door neighbors, a pair of redneck brothers, who were suspected by my parents of dealing drugs or firearms or both, although we never saw any exchanges. Suspected customers would drive up their driveway at all hours of the day and night and whatever business which might’ve been going on was apparently conducted indoors. I know that my parents had reported their observations to the police, but they were more furious about the ways that these neighbors were endangering our safety than about drug dealing per se. (In all likelihood, other neighbors were lodging their complaints and suspicions as well.) These idiots were a general nuisance on a good day and a deadly menace on a bad one. It had gotten to a point where my brother and I were forbidden to play in our own yard, because these neighbors were so unstable and reckless (and because their livestock, including one bull, was neither legal in the 'burbs, nor safe to be around, nor securely confined to their yard). These neighbors were eventually arrested, though not necessarily for drug offenses (there were plenty of other obvious infractions going on, including cruelty/causing malicious harm to animals), and I never learned the details of their arrests and the outcome.
Also, in my childhood neighborhood, a meth lab blew up, blowing the roof off the house and killing the three adults inside the house at the time. Fortunately, no one else was killed or seriously hurt, even though a lot of the meth lab’s neighbors had to replace their windows. A junior-high-school friend of mine was a same-street neighbor of the drug manufacturers.

I have a friend who lived right next door to a crack house, for several years, and all she’d noticed was a lot of traffic in and out. She had never met the owners of the property and knew nothing about who lived there (it was a three-story estate which had been subdivided into separate apartments). Again, no apparent dealing… but it was there. She wasn’t even aware the dealers were eventually busted, until the property changed hands and she struck up a conversation with the new owner, and he informed her of what she’d been living next to!

There’s a difference between a vague suspicion and a real suspicion.

For instance, a kid playing basketball til 11pm in the middle of the summer isn’t that suspicious, IMO. A kid playing basketball til 11pm during the school year, in the middle of the winter, may be more suspicious.

Cars pulling in and out of driveways before 10pm may mean nothing. Cars pulling in and out of driveways at 2am, and passing stuff back and forth, sounds more suspicious.

I’d keep an eye on the place, but I wouldn’t call the cops unless I had something more concrete. Calling over a “vague suspicion” is too Mrs. Kravitz, IMO. There was something odd about the Stephens, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t anything illegal.

Well stated, Martin. Well stated, indeed.

[Moderator Underoos on]Official Warning-If you think playing the “I won’t go over the top personally-I’ll just agree with someone else who does it” game is some sort of “out”, guess again. I told you to cut out the vitriol in IMHO, and I damn well meant it.[/Moderator Underoos on]

I get the feeling that most of the people who are crying that Zsofia should mind her own business have never lived in an urban neighborhood where a house full of drug dealers is a very real possibility. We had a house on our street that we suspected of being drug dealers, but instead of basketball we had bike runners. We observed loads of suspicious activity, and yes we did call the cops. Guess what? They certainly were drug dealers. They are gone now and they whole neighborhood has changed for the better.

Point of irony (kind of) regarding the whole basketball-in-the-street thing:

When I was a kid, we played in the streets (and the alleys) all the time. Volleyball, jumprope, footraces, bike races, tag, basketball, and baseball, too. Kids still play in the street. There’s a park about 3 or 4 blocks away from the house. SO why not go there? Because that’s where the drug-dealers hang out! Our parents would rather have us playing in the street near the house where we could be watched by neighbors or older siblings, than at the park with the gang members. I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods, and yeah, there’s drug dealing and gang activity. But there’s also a lot of people coming and going at strange hours in the spring and summer, and it’s not necessarily drug-related. A lot of people were just relatives and various friends stopping by to say “what’s up”.

The point is, the activities described by ZSofia may be associated with drug dealing, but they could just as easily be completely innocent. I’d be loathe to call the cops without much more concrete evidence of a threat or of wrongdoing.

What she said was “There’s a whole lot of people who seem to be living/staying there, for one thing. They’re kinda loud. There’s cars driving up at all hours of the day or night, and nobody really seems to get out of their car - they honk the horn (GRR!) or maybe call on a cel or something, because people sort of come out of the house and they talk and then the other people drive off.”

She didn’t say “50 or 60 different cars”. Maybe you’re reading too much into it. The facts we received do not indicate drug dealing. They indicate rude neighbors and a lack of supervision, but not drug dealing.

Short conversations? Maybe they’re making plans to meet somewhere else. Maybe the drivers were looking for something interesting to do and didn’t find it there. There could be a million reasons. In a nice neighborhood, dealers aren’t going to bring that kind of attention to themselves.

Yes, I played street ball all the time. And sometimes we played in the intersection.

Ummmm…What the hell have YOU been smoking?