Drunk 'n' noisy neighbor

So there's this dude, lives across the street from my girlfriend. Every single night, or nearly every single night, and I'm talking late at night, like 2-3 AM or later, he wanders around his yard and the block following his dog, screaming at the top of his lungs. He's probably drunk, but there's a good dose of crazy there do, since he's essentially having long conversations with his dog, sometimes with vaguely disturbing subject matter ("if she wants it, it isn't rape!"). Often he'll just be yelling at the dog to do this or that ("You're not a fucking obedient dog!"). He is always loud, like I-can-hear-you-at-the-end-of-the-block loud.

Tonight I had enough and yelled "Shut up!" at him. Which was a mistake, since it occasioned a few minutes of "Fuck you! F-U-C-K you!," etc.

Anyway, should I call the cops on this dude? And if so, what do I say? At some level, the guy seems like a harmless doofus. On the other hand, maybe not. And either way, it's fucking annoying.

That's not even mentioning the potheads next door who blast music from their front porch 12 hours a day.

In the UK a lot of places have a noise abatement officer connected to the council. I've used these people in the past (once when two guys started putting up a huge illuminated sign at 2am in the morning, with associated welding/hammering/drilling) and they were pretty effective. If you don;t have that kind of thing though I would call the cops. Guy is disturbing the peace at the least.

so he retreated into his house and is now blasting some green day-type pop punk bullshit at mega volumes.

Is he drunk or mentally ill?

Anyway, should I call the cops on this dude? And if so, what do I say?

Call the cops. Bottom line is that he's disturbing the peace.

xpost: the two are not mutually exclusive. rather, its often more a peanut butter/chocolate type symbiosis.

In the UK a lot of places have a noise abatement officer connected to the council.

this made me laff

document his behavior (what time it happened, how long it went on, etc.) to give your complaint more weight.

i had a neighbor at my old place who would yell loudly and abusively at his significant other, sometimes starting early in the morning. someone once told him to stfu and the guy responded "fuck you, fuckin MOVE if you don't like it, asshole."

Definitely call the cops. I have zero tolerance for this kind of thing. First, what he is doing is a public nuisance and illegal. Second, based on your description, this guy should be known to the authorities. He sounds pretty scary.

the thing us, guy has the "look" of a frat-boy drunk doofus (and this _is_ a college town, so he kind of blends in that way), so perhaps i'm underestimating the extent to which he might be genuinely mental.

wouldn't it be great if it was an ILXOR?

Sounds a bit like ned, TBH.

shoot him, it's the american way

A couple of weeks ago someone in the neighbourhood was having a big ole party with some tribal dance musick. Ek. But ah fuck it, only this once is alright with me even though I'm tempted to call the Noiz Kops for my kids who shout in the middle of the night they shat in their pants again. LOL.

("if she wants it, it isn't rape!"). Often he'll just be yelling at the dog to do this or that ("You're not a fucking obedient dog!").

Okay, I can't seem to untangle these two sentences. heehee

ew

That's what sleep deprivation seems to do: wreck my sane brane.

call the cops, but don't let him know it was you

this (sort of) happened to my family; we lived in a rowhouse next to some people who really liked to sing karaoke at midnight. so we politely asked them to stop, they didn't. we wrote them a letter, they didn't. we called the cops, they stopped for a little bit and then resumed again.

more importantly, they figured out which cars in the neighborhood were ours and you know, a window got cracked, paint got scratched, there was a dent from a BB gun pellet (I think). we started to parking our cars two or three blocks down the street in a school parking lot.

In the UK a lot of places have a noise abatement officer connected to the council.

this made me laff

― Cousin Larry Soetoro (jeff), Wednesday, 16 September 2009 07:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Explain please (it's a serious business don't you know).

At some level, the guy seems like a harmless doofus

not on any level that i'd like to live in.

call the cops, but don't let him know it was you

So so so so sooooo fucking true. We had some neighbours from hell until they moved (and she got into a mental hospital again).

We had this story in our local paper.

CHESTERTON | Roberta Heuer and other residents of south 18th Street are growing increasingly concerned about a mentally challenged neighbor who has had a number of run-ins with the law.

Police said they have been called at least 10 times in four months in response to neighbors alleging the 23-year-old man has been damaging garage doors in the neighborhood, yelling obscenities, striking a vehicle and most recently, repeatedly striking a neighbor before being taken away for a mental health evaluation.

"It's very upsetting to people in the neighborhood because you don't know what he's going to do," Heuer said.

Heuer said she is concerned about the man's aggression, but is also concerned about his welfare and does not believe he should be in a neighborhood setting.

"It's not fair to us and it's not fair to him either," she said.

Heuer said 30 neighbors have signed a petition seeking to have the young man relocated to a more appropriate setting.

The petition is directed to Globe Star, a Chesterton-based firm that is reportedly overseeing the young man's care. A call to the company for comment was not returned.

Globe Star reportedly provided neighbors with a flier acknowledging the problems, defending the young man and instructing the neighbors on how to keep him calm.

The flier says the young man "needs to know that our hands will never hurt him, our words will never put him down, he needs to know that it is good to be with us, do things with us, for himself and others."

Porter County Prosecutor Brian Gensel said Thursday he had not heard of the complaints.

These types of complaints are best addressed by reporting them to the county's adult protective service case worker Katherine Schmidt, who works out of the LaPorte County prosecutor's office along with two other officers that are responsible for a five-county region, he said.

"All it would take is a phone call," he said.

If the complaint rises to the level of legal action, Gensel said he becomes involved, along with various officials, including a guardian ad litem assigned to represent the interest of the client.

Heuer said she has not contacted protective services and was holding off to see if the problems persist.

A Flier?

i'm kind of getting worried about this dude. i'll make sure my girlfriend is armed with some pepper spray when she walks home.

Call the cops tonight if he does it again.

No, call the cops NOW. Amateurist we live in the same town right? I would call. Our cops are tough but fair.

if we live in madison, we're in the same town.

well yeah

yeah so i'm in the living room and hear something like "fucking fuck, you fucking--" coming from outside. i poke my head out the window, and sure enough, he's out there, screaming his head off, pacing around his lawn as his two beagles wander around.

(he has an odd habit of picking his dogs up and then tossing them back to the ground. i'm told that once he actually threw his dog violently across the lawn, and a neighbor came out and said, in so many words, "if you ever do that again, i will fuck you up.")

also a friend/neighbor met him and said he's real creepy--seems to have a big chip on his shoulder, starts drinking around noon, etc.

i want to wait to call the cops when he's really in a tizzy, so i can be reasonably sure he'll still be out there when they cruise by. otherwise they might think i'm a boy who cried wolf.

Without wishing to make laff again, but you couldn't also call out whatever the US version of the RSPCA is? Although I guess they might bring the cops anyway.

"Without wishing to make jeff laff again"

ugh. my friends and i laugh about it now, but we used to live across from "naked yelling guy" who sounds a lot like your dude here. it sucked, and if i had to do it all over again, i would def go back and call the cops instead of spending 2 years escorting any of our female guests to and from their cars.

i'm a bit paranoid that the cops will tell him who called them.

They won't.

You won't regret it. I've called cops on crazy violent neighbors all the time. The neighbors never track me down or anything. OTOH the cops do nothing either.

naked yelling guy was mostly extremely attached to what he had decided was his parking spot, which meant he spent pretty much all day and all night in an upstairs window, waiting nakedly for the chance to scream violent obscenities at anyone who happened to park there.

this was esp odd because i am pretty sure he didnt have a car.

xposts: yeah they wont tell him, the only thing i would say is make sure he doesnt associate their visit with seeing you or any sort of that evening interaction.

2 YEARS????????

I hate my town. Call the cops on the neighbor who is clearly beating his wife & kids every night, they come & peek in the window & walk away. Neighbor calls the INS on fucking Christmas and they come & pull a family from their home at dinnertime.

I think maybe I would give naked yelling guy two strikes, because hypothetically there might be one random occasion where being naked and yelling at people is actually the correct response to a situation, like say if said person was on fire and didn't realize it, but TWO YEARS? Fuck that. </sagat>

yah 2 years. this is when i lived on the rocking east side tho and peeps (including cops) were getting shot and killed over there regularly, so i didnt think the cops would basically give a flying fuck so i never bothered calling

maybe they would have enjoyed wrestling a naked yelling guy to the ground as a respite from catching bullets left and right, did you ever consider that

Protip: if any of you ever consider moving to the MPLS/STPL, do not be lured in by the incredibly cheap housing on the Saint Paul East Side - when we were buying our house, our realtor wouldn't even let us look at houses over there. when i protested and said i was a big toughy and could handle it he informed me that 78% of the houses (not just the ones for sale, but like all houses of any kind) were either vacant or in foreclosure proceedings o_O the area is basically unrepairable at this point, at least for many years

xpost you raise a good point tho

i'm a bit paranoid that the cops will tell him who called them.

They'll even escort the guy to your gf's house and have a big ole wrestling match. J/K Seriously,they will not tell.

I definitely think the OP should call the cops, but I won't say for 100% that the cops won't tell them. Like any other occupation, cops have some real dummies in their ranks. When we called the cops on the neighbors after a particularly brutal fistfight that started in our front yard, the cops came to talk to them and one of them actually said "your next door neighbors called us about a fight" while GESTURING at our house (it was summer so we had the windows open and could see/hear the whole thing) Thankfully nothing ever came of it, but WTF?

Just give the address of the offending party and say there's a disturbance. They have your phone # on record for ID purposes, which they are unable to give out.

Yeah, typically what I would have done, but since the fight had actually spilled over into our yard I had to kinda explain that to the cops.

Called the police twice on the neighbors two doors over on the weekend; first, a long overdue call for five years' worth of general late-night idiocy, then again for a not-very-veiled physical threat from the father the next day. Today, as the son's friends often do, there was a car parked in front of my house for 24+ hours. I put on note on the windshield asking that they park in front of whatever house they're visiting. Found the note crumpled up on my front porch. Put it back, found it crumpled in the street after the car sped off. This is not headed for a good place...as Newman said on Seinfeld, if I turn up murdered one day, tell the world my story!

so my girlfriend and i finally call the cops on this guy, when he's out at midnight on a weeknight screaming to his dogs (sample dialogue: "yeah, you guys had a good pee! that's AMAZING! thanks! so for once you're a good dog, yeah!"). of course he's back inside the house when the cops arrive, but is soon back outside, shirt off, screaming about how his tax dollars are going to the cops so that his neighbors can call them on him. he also says something about "burning it fucking down!" etc. so we call the cops again. this time, they enter the (unlocked!) building, and -- I imagine -- talk to the guy for a few minutes. once they leave, he reappears outside, arms folded, but doesn't make a sound.

tonight his downstairs neighbors, who are annoying but seemingly not mental, are outside blasting the grateful dead and singing along tunelessly. more garden-variety annoying. hopefully crazy dude takes the hint and shuts the fuck up. if not, we've spoken to a number of neighbors and all have agreed to call the cops the minute he starts yelling again.

still at it

have you or the neighbors made follow up calls to the cops? you should probably..

how hard is it to get your hands on a tranquilizer gun in the states?

we did make follow up calls, and the police spoke to him. but he's still out there almost every night.

waiting nakedly

something sinister about that phrase.

i think i have a new pen name.

I went for a walk today, it is unseasonably warm. Anyway, I was alarmed by an ambulance down the block.

My alcoholic neighbor died. We're surprised he hung on this long but we're really sad. He's been a drunk for about twenty years.

I have a dilemma which may be none of my business.

My downstairs neighbour is drunk whenever I see him. Fairly sure that part's none of my business, though it is pretty sad cz he doesn't look in good health at all. (So I can't really tell his age but older than me, at least 50s.)

But he often goes driving while drunk. Once I saw him at the shop, very drunk and buying more alcohol. When I got home I saw him driving back into his space. NB the shop is just across the road, at most two minutes' walk away.

I rarely see him actually driving in or out but his car moves round every day or two and is always at a funny angle or sticking out or on the kerb or half in the hedge. If the rest of his driving is like that he's dangerous. And not to be all "what about the children" but we do live right next to a school and he seems to do this at all times of day.

So: is this any of my business? And if it is, is there even anything I can do? I've never said more than hi to this guy and the one time I knocked on his door he ignored it. We think he had an "intervention" at one point because there was a woman staying with him and he seemed much better but she's gone now and we don't know who she was.

Police.

I was thinking that I'd have to see him actually in the car and leaving to do that, which I almost never do. Car parked badly = can't prove anything, and if he's getting out he'd be safely at home and able to deny everything when the police arrive, no? Plus it's easier to tell he's drunk when he screeches around our twisty cul-de-sac at 30mph and slams on the brakes just short of the wall than when he reverses out from cold.

I also would feel kind of busybodyish, and wondered if there was a gentler way. But it may be the only option, yeah.

Dont wait to catch him in the act imo just let them know you have concerns, 'busybody' be damned

if he went out waving his gun around when he was drunk busybodying would be low on your list of worries

You don't want to hear about the guy from your cul-de-sac who knocked someone over and killed them from a neighbour do you? Best let the police know, it's 1 phone call.

omg SHUT UP WITH THE SHITTY MUSIC ALL DAY AND NIGHT

i knocked on his door, no answer. i sent a polite email, since i figure there's no reason to be mean straight away. but he has to know we're hearing everything. about two weeks ago our downstairs neighbor suddenly started playing loud horrible music all day, from (seemingly) 9 AM to 4 AM. he also sings along, tunelessly, also loudly.

no he's playing Uptown Funk REALLY LOUD

is he just having parties all the time? i hear a bunch of different voices all the time.

is this the yelling guy?

downstairs neighbor frequently comes home (after bar closing time) with a bunch of friends ca. 2:45 AM, commences carrying on (loud music, yelling, door slamming, table tennis!) until well after 5:00 AM. last night around 3:00 AM i went downstairs to ask him to keep it down. i tried knocking. no response. tried ringing the doorbell. it didn't work. finally, since the door was wide open, i took a step into the vestibule, waved until he saw me, and asked him to turn it down. today i get a passive-aggressive email indicating i should not be entering his apartment. how about not coming home in the dead of night and starting a party downstairs?

ugh.

I live on a steep incline so my bedroom window is only a few feet above next door's side garden. When the inevitable fights kick off during their "party Season" it is really disconcerting if the window is open, because it literally sounds like it is happening right next to the bed. Not that it doesn't have comedy value sometimes, but generally it is pretty fucking grim and annoying. I have had words with them before on other issues but when there are 20+ people in there you need to do a risk assessment :p

yeah i'm generally kind of reluctant to bother neighbors. it usually takes a specific circumstance for me to get involve (in this case i needed to get up early to get a bus). it also is especially annoying that the noise only /starts/ after 2:00 AM. it's one thing to have a party start at a reasonable hour and it just kind of carries on. i've been there. but to come home at 2:00 or 3:00 AM and only then start blasting music? it'd be easier to just... not.

Yeah sorry if that was me and it was happening on weeknights on the reg, I'd just be phoning the cops every time it happened. A weekend party every month or 2 is fine, but thats just taking the piss.