If she lived in a duplex she might have known for near certain which apartment the call came from.
When I lived in a duplex, my fellow upstairs neighbor called the cops for the neighbors playing loud music in the 8pm hour. I got home from work an hour or two after it happened and he showed me the form the police filled out. He was black and so were the other neighbors, so it was like the weight of the world off my shoulders I didn’t have to ever worry of them thinking I might have been the one who called. Ultimately when it came to their noise I guess they weren’t doing anything prohibited in the lease. My neighbor moved shortly after that. I think he was mentally ill or disturbed, and from his paranoid behavior I’m not surprised he would call the police rather than knock on their door.
That’s what you said, you changed it when you quoted yourself.
That’s the point of the article. Race is mentioned multiple times, both that people playing ‘African American’ music attracts more attention and if she had been playing ‘Caucasian’ music no one would have cared.
However, if you’re going to disagree with the premise that a white person called the police on her, there’s not a whole lot of point in even reading the article. There’s plenty of opinions in there, but you have to at least believe the things that are presented as fact.
I added in brackets to clarify who I meant by “they”. I gave the example of myself not knowing who was playing music in my previous apartments. But, sure, whatever if you want to insist that I had no idea on the race of the people playing the music in a column about how some black woman had the cops called on her, supposedly because her racist neighbors hate her hip-hop.
No, I disagree with the certainty that the people who called the police knew who they were calling the police on.
Avoiding confrontation is easy. You write a note, go to the door, knock loudly, and then move out of sight and see if they get the note. If you don’t know which apartment is the problem, then you can’t call in a noise complaint, either.
Police very much are that polite where I live, and I’m part of the “upper South.” I would expect North Carolina to be similar. That the police officer was not seems wrong to me. If it was just that he was ill-trained in proper manners, fine. But, given the totality of the situation, it makes sense to wonder about other issues.
The woman in the article did not at any point assume racism. She indicated ambiguity about it possibly being racism. She was bringing up something that she can’t pin down whether it was racist or not.
And the fact that she did this does not in any fucking way imply she is racist herself.
And, remember, Shodan covers up for lack of intelligence or knowledge with snark. When he’s snarking, it means he doesn’t have anything of value to say. Granted, sometimes it can be funny, but it’s still fluff. (and that is the only reason I don’t put him on ignore).
Don’t think I didn’t notice how he just repeated something else I had said in my comment, but just in a more biased way. Because he thinks snark makes it seem more likely to be true. And, yes, I noticed what he did to you guys, BPC and ywtf. Like I said, no real argument.
If in fact the neighbors did call without ever making any attempt to knock on her door and ask her to turn it down, then they are cowards and are in the wrong.
Hell, I had a long running fight with one of my neighbors over their 9 year old kid running up and down the halls after midnight screaming and stomping around. I called the police, I reported them to management, the whole ball of wax.
Then someone said something about them being afraid to make any noise because I was angry at them and I straight out told them and management that if they’re doing that at noon or 8pm, I have fuck all to say about it and will never complain. I start complaining when it is the middle of the fucking night, every goddamned night.
In the end, they got moved to another area of the building, had the same complaints and police calls from their new neighbors and the police posted the city curfews in the lobby and warned them that children running around unattended in the middle of the night would result in them being cited if it didn’t stop. After a ton of warnings and police calls.
Shodan genuinely believes that everyone deserves to be exactly where they are in life and everything that comes to them, good and bad.
Reminds me of a former boss who once said, after I’d had a minor car accident that was entirely the other person’s fault (as I was not moving at the time); “There must be something terribly wrong with you as a human being, because bad things only happen to people who deserve it!” :mad::smack:
Sure you can. “I live in the apartment at 123 Overthere Street, Building A and someone on the first floor is playing their music so loud it’s rattling my dishes here on the second floor.”
Then the cops come, figure out which door has the most noise coming from behind it and do their thing.
This is all secondary anyway to the main point that there’s no story here aside from “Someone didn’t want 200dBA of hip-hop coming through their walls so they must be racist because why else would anyone want to interrupt my baby-celebration? And the cop sorta had his hand maybe near his gun and then left with a mild warning so, you know, racism!”
But having worked armed security for a couple of years, your hand is always going to be somewhere near it and some people will always see that as a threat, even when your arm is just hanging loosely at your side.
Nah - if everyone got what they deserved, my wife would leave me, federal marshalls would show up to give BigT a wedgie everytime he goes into his white knight act, and people who play hip-hop too loud and annoy their neighbors get thirty days of solitary confinement with “You Light Up My Life” on continuous rotation on the PA system.
Which wouldn’t have occurred if her neighbors hadn’t called the police as a first resort.
:dubious: “seriously misrepresented”? I explicitly clarified my situation in literally the next sentence. And I never claimed I was arrested for a noise complaint. I was, however, certainly arrested as the direct result of a noise complaint.
You say that. But then a few posts later, you also say this:
So, let me see if I get this straight. If I’m the kind of neighbor who’s prone to make a scene or even pursue illegal retaliation against a neighbor who complains directly to me before calling the police, I’m somehow less likely to cause them problems after they’ve called the cops on me without even attempting to talk to me first? Color me dubious…
I think this is a more justifiable (though also more cowardly and less neighborly) rationale for your proposed behavior.
Regarding the bolded - yes, black people are mistreated disproportionately by police, I don’t think there should be any doubt about that. But is the actual rate of black people being mistreated by police that high on an absolute basis, relative to the overall # of police-to-persons interactions? It would be good to know, because if the number is low (even if disproportionate), then I would say black people shouldn’t be worried with an encounter with the police, if 99% of the time the interaction would go smoothly. If there was a high % chance on an absolute basis, not a relative basis to white people, that any given black person will be mistreated, then they would be justified in worrying.
Otherwise, would you say a police officer would be justified in being wary around a black person, because they have disproportionately more bad experiences with black people than white? Their implicit bias is just another form of pattern recognition, after all.
Fully agree. There’s a chance the cop was rude because he was racist, but it’s also quite possible that he is just naturally gruff.
??? People of every race listen to hip hop - how could you possibly know the race of the person playing the music? Do you think if she was playing loud death metal that the neighbour would be more likely to come over and speak with them directly? As other people in the thread have mentioned, a lot of people just don’t like confrontation.
I feel like this idea of assuming racism when the only evidence of it is that other people have been racist before is not a healthy attitude to have - yes, a lot of people are racist, but why assume any particular ambiguous interaction was due to racism? There doesn’t seem to be any specific evidence that racism was a driving factor behind any behaviour in the article. It’s like, if you were a server, would you not give good service to a random group of black, Asian, or Australian people because a lot of people in those groups don’t tip well?
I’m with the posters who asked why neighbor didn’t just come and knock. It was 3pm for fucks sake not midnight! Yes it takes some nerve and yes you might get flak, and THEN you can escalate to police or building management. I think that loud rap is a signifier for “potentially violent” same as death metal music might be. Of course some jerk could be blasting Mozart and act belligerent, too.
I experienced this firsthand the first month in a new apartment, next door neighbor blasted rap at 2am without any warning at all. Nightclub levels, my windows and dishes were rattling. I was in a dead sleep and at first thought it was an earthquake, a bomb, or a gas pipeline explosion. And I did get up, disoriented and frightened and go knocking, knowing full well I could get stabbed. This was possibly dumb, well, OK. I did a lot of “reasoning” about it and decided that was the best path of action. My BF was over and I told him, if I’m not back in 10, call the cops and assume the worst.
What actually happened was I got a lot of shade. A LOT of shade. This situation went on for like 3 years and I almost lost my mind. However… eventually it stopped, after numerous escalations on my part to building management plus a lot of acoustical research. And then even more eventually, things got smoothed over by other circumstances that required all the tenants in my building to band together to defend against mass evictions by a new owner.
I didn’t tell the entire story. It took numerous escalations to building management and a lot of documentation. I had to describe the volume level (couldn’t hold a conversation, couldn’t read or study, windows rattled in their frames) and persistence (went on for hours, never knew when it would start up, interrupted sleep), frequency (when, how long), why remediations like earplugs were ineffective (too loud, shook the building, came up through the framing) to show the impact. The mental impact was it was an intrusion. Airborne sound from far away doesn’t signify that someone’s actually inside your house, but vibrations of the walls and floor mean there’s either an earthquake or some other pressing reason to evacuate the building right that instant.
Had to research noise ordinances which among other things state that residents have the right to “quiet enjoyment” of their homes. In short it was not an annoyance, it was a disturbance! And a form of bullying and intimidation, too. When I complained I’d get texts that said things like “the vibe is alive” or “who needs sleep anyway?”.
Why didn’t I just move out? Well… housing’s expensive where I live and why should I have to leave because someone else was being a dick?
I’m not buying this story, because I’ve lived in Chapel Hill, and the police there are not like cops in big cities. They are in general kind and respectful, and they really don’t deserve to have unmerited accusations of racism thrown at them. The race of the cop isn’t mentioned in the story, so that leads me to believe that he probably is not white.
This woman was playing her music loud enough to bother her neighbors. I have heard that she may have been living in an apartment in a nice neighborhood at the time, so there might be a bit less tolerance for loud music there than in the neighborhoods where more students live. She was uncomfortable with her interaction with the police, but she should be uncomfortable. It shouldn’t be a happy, fun time, because then there’s no incentive to not do it again.
I totally disagree with everyone who’s said the neighbor should have talked to her first. There are many reasons why the neighbor called the police instead–maybe the neighbor was sick, or was wearing holey pajamas and didn’t feel like getting dressed. Maybe they have social anxiety, or they don’t like confrontation, or maybe they knew this person and didn’t feel comfortable talking to her, or they knew her and didn’t want to damage their relationship by asking her to turn the music down. It’s not anybody’s business. It’s totally fine to call the police if you’re not comfortable asking your neighbor to turn their music down. I’ve done it before, and I would do it again.