I’m curious about this due to an episode of Granada TV’s Life Begins… that I watched on Showtime the other night. I haven’t watched the show that long so I don’t even know the names of most of the characters, but at the end of the show, the people next door were having a loud party with thumping music playing. So the man goes over to the neighbors’ house. He walks in, and tries to be heard as he asks them to turn it down. Nobody hears him, so he stops the stereo. Everything stops. He repeats his request, only to be knocked down, beaten and kicked by several partygoers. In the end, ironically enough, he is thrown into the sound equipment, more or less making a hash of it.
Does this sort of thing happen IRL, very much? I know some neighbors can be surly when you complain about noise, but this is the first time I saw this, even in a movie or TV show.
Well, a couple of months ago, a fellow from the apartment building went across the street to ask the partiers over there to quiet down and wound up in a fight. Don’t know if he gave as good as he got but the police apparently got involved. Since the partiers over there seem to think the word “fight” is synonymous with “party,” I doubt the neighbor had thrown the first punch.
That’s really my only knowledge of situations like that.
Usually people that are being obnoxious and loud aren’t going to take too kindly to you trying to tell them what to do. If they were nice people, they wouldn’t be intentionally irritating their neighbors.
If a person goes over by himself, he deserves what’s coming to him. We pay taxes to pay the salaries of the cops just for situations like this.
Well, it sounds like it could happen. One of my former neighbours was of the “brutal” kind…
He (and his wife) had a dog who would yell/jap (?) all day long because they weren’t at home. Coming home from work, it was always quite hard to stand for me because I like to have some silence when I’m at home. So one day I told the woman if she could close the door of the corridor so I wouldn’t hear it so much. It was alright for a few days, then once again, the dog yelling non stop during 3-4 hours. I wrote them about it and left the word under their door as they were not at home. Then one or two hours later, the man came back, and rang at my door. He was very angry and asked me : “what is it, you leaving messages under the door ?? couldn’t you come and talk to me ??” I explained him he was not there, and then he started getting angrier and angrier, saying he wouldn’t lock up his poooor dog, and he started insulting me (some sexual insults were quite disturbing). Seeing there was no point in going on, I ended the conversation (being quite angry myself at the moment) and closed the door. He then knocked at the door very loudly several times, so I was quite afraid. Then for a while, nothing, and suddenly, two big “bam !” : as I discovered later, he had knocked at my shutters very violently, so violently it could be seen on the shutters.
I think he was drunk at the time, but it was quite frightening, and was one of the reasons I left this apartment (did it earlier than I wanted because of that)
I suppose it depends on your neighbors, the neighborhood you live in and how you ask them to keep it down. In most parts of the US, beating someone would be considered assult and battery.
Generally if you go into someone’s party uninvited and shut down their music, it will start an argument at the very least.
I think that the odds of ending up in a fight depend largely on how you approach the partiers (Disclaimer: I have never asked my neighbors to keep it down, but I have been at many parties which are broken up by either the neighbors or the police) and what sort of rapport you have with them. Storming in, turning off the music and screaming at everybody for being a bunch of insensitive assholes is much more likely to end in violence than saying, “Hey, not to be rude, but I need to get to sleep and you guys are a bit noisy. I figured it would be easier for me to ask than for the cops to do it.” Of course, if the neighbors really ARE insensitive assholes, asking nicely might not work…
On a side note, within the first two weeks of moving in to my current place we gave the neighbors our phone numbers and let them know that if we were ever being too loud to give us a call and we’d take care of it. They don’t call often, but when they do we listen. So far, no fights or police involvement has occured.
I want to be sure I understand your position: if a person in a civilized society goes over to a neighbor’s house or apartment to ask them turn down their music, rather than escalating the situation by calling the cops, the requester should expect, in fact deserves, to be beaten up?
A few years back, when we were living in a townhouse community, our next-door neighbors (renters, and fairly new to the area) were being very loud and obnoxious out on their deck. I called out the back window that people were trying to sleep (this was around midnight).
This was almost immediately followed by screaming “I’ll teach YOU to call in a fucking NOISE COMPLAINT!” (we hadn’t, at that point), and a minute or two later by some extremely loud banging against the shared wall, so hard that we were nearly knocked out of bed. At that point, we called the police (and it turns out others had as well, though the police were not there yet). Had we actually been outdoors when the people got miffed, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d been attacked.
I was composing a letter to the homeowners’ association the next morning, to be forwarded to the landlord (absentee, we had no idea who owned the place, so that was the best we could do) when two of the tenants stopped by to abjectly apologize for their roommate and his guests (the other two weren’t there when all this happened). It never happened again, so we wound up not complaining to the landlord.