I wouldn’t be too spooked. Perhaps he was driving around and needed to use up his free lives on candy crush and just had to get out of traffic so he could do so safely. Or maybe he wanted to do a face time meeting with a relative and wanted a quick place to park and do it. Mind you, if it happens again with the same car, then I’d be concerned.
Or trying to reboot driving directions. Or trying to glom on to someone’s Wi-Fi, not necessarily to harvest their personal information.
Not long ago I was suspicious of someone who stopped near the neighbor’s house across the street and sat there for a longish time. I casually walked over a few feet behind his car to check the license plate. He pulled out in a considerable hurry for someone who was just passing through.
I’ve seen a similar scenario result in a righteous bust on “Cops”. The guy turned out to be a credit card scammer with a trunk full of damning evidence.
Wow. You actually think that is what was taking place in front of my house after reading this whole thread!!! She WAS doing illegal activity in front of my house. That’s why she didn’t want me watching, but she can’t exactly admit that, now can she? Clearly, none of you live in high crime neighborhoods if you think someone doing a drug deal or hooking is going to readily admit what they were up to. If she were only drinking coffee, she wouldn’t have been so insanely nervous that I was in the yard watching. This is why the internet is so obnoxious and why I rarely weigh in on a topic online. My mistake. I shouldn’t have opened the subject up to the bored housewives of Mayberry. Lesson learned. You have all of these situational rubberneckers that weren’t actually there telling you that you are a jerk for wanting to clean up your own neighborhood and make it safe. Nevermind that every single one of my neighbors agree with me. If you were here, which you aren’t, you’d want the neighborhood cleaned up too, and you wouldn’t be touting the rights of strangers to loiter in front of your house, because it is oh so normal to drive quite a long distance from any coffee shop into a random residential neighborhood and spend 20 minutes drinking coffee at a random strangers house for no reason. Nothing weird about that. cue eye roll And to satisfy all of you enlightened young trollers, here is what you are waiting for. Places hand over heart “I am truly sorry. I am wrong for not respecting the rights of criminals to hang out in front of my house while they do drug deals, get high, pick up hookers, and steal my property, because each one of them has a good excuse for being there, like “coffee”. I should assume, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that they are all just innocent lost, citizens who drove all the way to my house to randomly drink coffee in front of my yard. I will never again put two and two together to make four, but will blindly believe whatever doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Forget the children across the street and all of my neighbors who have made a life here, we must protect the rights of loiterers first. They are what matters most.” Happy, now? There. You’re exactly right. How dare I? I’m such a mean, horrible person to be bothering them.
As we speak, one of the drug dealers has driven slowly past my house three times. Oh, oops. I mean one of the local young entrepreneurs.* He must be trying to find that coffee shop that’s nowhere nearby.
I could see something like that being considered “harassment”.
WHAT illegal activity was she engaging in? You’ve been asked multiple times, and so far, you’ve presented nothing.
I don’t get this line of thinking at all. The street is a public space. Parking there is not being rude.
This and this. I find myself surprised to be agreeing with D_Anconia, but I agree on this issue. I don’t get all of you all that are suspicious. There’s all sorts of legitimate reasons someone can park in front of someone else’s reasons that are legitimate. It’s not hard to come up with a long list, including some of which I’ve personally done.
Someone could be a healthcare provider who does house calls (home health nurse, hospice nurse, therapist, doctor, etc.) and having completed their visit with a patient, are now sitting in their car charting on that encounter. I’ve done this, many times and in various locations, including busy urban neighborhoods, quiet suburbs, and out on rural country roads.
Someone could have missed a turn and have now parked to look at Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc. to look at the best way to get to their intended destination. Check again for something I’ve done.
Someone could be playing a game that uses GPS for being at a specific location (Pokemon Go is the most popular, but there are many others). Again, this is something I’ve done.
Someone could be having lunch or dinner. I’ve been known to pull over in front of someone else’s house to have a Big Mac and fries so that my wife wouldn’t see me eating it (I wasn’t supposed to be eating that sort of stuff at the time, having just had a kidney stone).
Someone could be food delivery person looking for the exact house that they’re delivering pizza to.
Someone could have offered to give someone a ride, and they are waiting for that person to be ready so they’re sitting in their car until that person comes out of their house.
A neighbor could be having a party, and one member of a group attending the gathering could be tired and have gone out to their car to rest because they didn’t want to socialize anymore but also didn’t want to leave the people they came with without a ride.
Maybe the house across the street or next door is for sale, and the person in the car is a perspective buyer looking for houses in the neighborhood.
I could go on, but I think the point is obvious.
They could have been doing all of those things, yes, but they weren’t doing any of those things. I am shocked that you all are so worried about the rights of the criminals and don’t give two hoots about the neighborhood kids or the homeowners. I honestly am so sick of the opinions now that I wish I never spoke. I really learned never to post about my life on the internet. What was I thinking Clearly? Clearly you are all right and I am wrong. From now on, I will assume the drug dealers, hookers, and thieves are playing Pokémon. You’re totally right. It’s all my fault. SMH.
The same house, repeatedly, and never leaving their vehicle?
During the height of the pandemic I was working from home. Some types of medical papers still need physical signatures, and I would have people come by my house with those papers for my signature. They would stay in their car, I would go out, sign the papers that needed signing, and they would go on their way. Often it would be the same person coming by on different days.
ETA: And yes, I could see a Pokemon player doing the same, if they are battling over a particular gym or trying to capture a rare Pokemon. I think the radius on Pokestops and gyms are something like 50 feet.
Perhaps there can be agreement that this is at least location dependent. If I called the non-emergency number here on the NW side of Chicago because I didn’t recognize the car parked in front of my house I would expect to be scoffed at.
Also, in any neighborhood, I would hope there would be at least be a little something more than “car I don’t recognize parked on a public street in front of my house” before police are called.
First off, this thread is a decade old. Second, regarding the OP, the individual parking on the public street, even at midnight, had every right to park there. Homeowners don’t own the street or the parking on the street even in front of their houses. Paranoia isn’t a legitimate reason to be concerned.
Neighborhood kids and homeowners don’t have the right to prohibit people from parking in front of their houses. If you have some legitimate reason to believe that a crime is taking place, then fine, call the police. But a person parking where you don’t think they belong doesn’t give you or anyone else the right to make them move along. If that is all you have, then yes, I am way more concerned with the rights of the “criminal” than a cranky, nosy person.
I find the age of the thread to be totally irrelevant.
He does not live in an urban environment where a plethora of people park on the streets. He lives in a suburban community with limited access. It is purposely designed so that one has to make an effort to enter a particular subdivision and navigate it. These communities are often called “bedroom communities” because there are no businesses of any kind. They are exclusively homes where people live.
Unless you are visiting someone living there, you aren’t even going to be there unless you’ve made a wrong turn, in which case you will stop for 5 minutes, do the GPS thing, and then drive off. This car arrived in the middle of the night and parked for a long period of time with a person just sitting in the car. The car wasn’t dropping anyone off or picking anyone up.
How can that possibly not concern a person living there?
Again, paranoia isn’t a legitimate reason to be concerned.
Agreed that the age of the thread is irrelevant. None the less, the OP did mention a car door opening and closing, which is how they were alerted to the presence of the vehicle to begin with. To me that implies somebody did get out of the car, likely prior to the OP looking out their window. I admit, in those circumstances (considering the time it happened) I would be just a little suspicious. But not suspicious enough to call the police, and certainly not suspicious enough to go outside with a gun to confront that person (especially since I don’t even own a gun, the best I could muster on short notice is a decorative katana). I could still think of benign reasons, including that they were dropping off someone to visit a neighbor but didn’t want to get down themselves as the most likely explanation.
That’s not the same thing as the same vehicle repeatedly visiting a stranger’s house.
Sure, but add in various people approaching that vehicle, one at a time, speaking with the driver through a slightly open window, and you get a probable drug dealer in the vehicle. At least in this neighborhood.
How so?
I already posted upthread but to Somebody Somewhere - you are not alone in your way of thinking. If something is out of the ordinary (considering your life experience), you have every right to question it and be suspicious. Even if what is unusual is completely legal. The police count on the public to be their eyes and ears and have no issues with taking a call like that. You want to call, they want to be called. They don’t need a reasonable suspicion to approach someone and have a conversation. The person is free to not engage, simply leave or explain their innocent behavior to everyones’ satisfaction. Of course, they could also refuse to speak to the cops and just sit there. But if they were engaged in some illegal activity, they now know that the cops had a good look at them and have the plate number. This is all common sense. Continue keeping an eye on your neighborhood. Its the right thing to do.
MikeF is right.
Many years ago, my husband and I were getting ready for work. On the street in front of our house was parked an unfamiliar car, at 6:30 or so in the morning. In it were two young men, about nineteen or so years old. They were not eating breakfast McSandwiches nor drinking coffee. They were wide awake and alert, and looking in their rear view mirrors.
Down the street behind them, there was some unusual activity at a dodgy house. People were moving stuff in and out of the house, though we couldn’t tell what.
My husband had to leave for work before me. He told me, “If those two guys are still there when you’re ready to leave, don’t leave. I don’t want them to see that we are both gone and that there is no one home. Call the cops if they’re still there.”
They were still there when I was ready to leave for work. I called the cops and apologized for being suspicious, but they said not to feel bad. They arrived in a few minutes and talked to the guys in the car. Both guys got out, and the driver locked the car. The driver then went in the squad car with the police, and the passenger walked off on foot. There weren’t any guns or handcuffs involved at all.
We never did find out what was up.
It definitely depends a lot on the neighborhood. I live next to a public park. so people park here all the time. If it’s 3am, we might keep an eye out, (since overnight parking isn’t allowed) but that’s about it.
I also have a vacation house, if someone so much as stopped in front of that house we’d be on it like white on rice. It would stand out because it’s not a place people park.