It’s a game theory situation in the context of not being acquainted with your neighbors.
If you go to them directly and they aren’t receptive, you lose goodwill (or stay at par, at best).
If you then call the cops, you lose at lot more goodwill, probably into the negative, possibly with more adverse consequences to you if someone decides you are discriminating against the partiers for some reason other than “I am disturbed by the noise”.
If you call the cops first, and they don’t know it was you, you win (if the cops shut it down).
The optimal solution is, of course, to get to know your neighbors and establish goodwill before any of this.
Absent that, I don’t think law enforcement ignoring complaints is a good solution, because many people aren’t going to be content with “there is literally nothing you can do if your neighbors are making your home unlivable.” Those people, if they can’t move, will resort to rash actions or non-state “settlers of questions”
I think that some people have either had bad enough experiences themselves, or have heard of incidents, where they fear confrontation. By talking to someone who is engaging in an annoying (to you) or antisocial behavior, you are opening yourself up to retaliation by that person. If you just call the police anonymously then the target doesn't know who to retaliate against.
Of course, a much better strategy is to go out of your way to be neighborly, get to know the people around you. That way if someone is having a party a few houses down, instead of calling the cops you can grab a couple six packs and head on down and join them.
This might work if you live in a decent neighborhood. I lived in a shitty part of town in my teens and both of the neighbors on either side of us were total degenerates. One dealt drugs out of his house and the other had zero respect for people’s sleep - played loude music at 2 am and had druggies hang around the house. Talking to ether one was pointless. I usually just called cops right away and for the most part it worked well.
It can be pretty risky to knock on a door to tell someone to keep it down. You have no idea how they might react. Knocking on random doors can be very unsafe in typical urban environments, unless it’s someone you already know.
Having spent a lot of my adult living in pretty impoverished urban environments, and having knocked on a lot of doors for both personal and professional reasons (as a neighbor, and as a social worker) - I think the risks are pretty overblown.
Talk to your neighbors.
Definitely talk to your neighbors instead of calling highly armed and confrontational people who can kill someone or toss them in a cage because of something affecting your quality of life.
I don't particularly want someone who has already proven themselves to be rude and inconsiderate to know my name, face and address. The kind of people who don't care about how their actions impact other people are precisely the kind of people I always strive to avoid - not get to know on a first name basis.
Not every culture is the same in what they consider rude; not every socioeconomic group is the same in what they consider rude; not every person is the same in what they consider rude.
Consider talking to people and trying to understand them before you cast judgement on them. Cultural relativism really isn't that hard.
Honestly, I might if I think it's just women, but for crying out loud does anyone anywhere want to go confront any man about something like this? No one wants to go tell some big guy to stop begin an inconsiderate prick. And if his cultural background leads him to truly believe he is not being a prick, that just makes the situation FAR more frightening.
There really is no risk at all. This is such an unfounded fear.
It's more risky to call a group of armed individuals with a violent history to go to your neighbor's door. Why would you ever put that sort of risk on your neighbor? The most important political relationships we can form are those with our neighbors, why would you damage those relationships by leveraging state aggression against them for something as trivial as a noise complaint?
Should people talk more to their neighbors and try to hash things out? Sure. Personally I would very rarely ever call the police.
But at least see the point of view of someone who might very legitably not feel comfortable knocking on someones door. A single person, with no family now has to run the risk of retribution with no help. Live with that fear everyday their neighbor might attack them directly or indirectly.
this is the exact paranoia the creator of the thread was talking about. If knocking on a neighbours door causes anxiety we might as well all wrap ourselves in styrofoam and never leave our apartments.
I've spent time in very impoverished (aka high-crime) areas and never once did it occur to me to be scared of knocking on my neighbor's door.
In fact, that's one of the first things I will do when moving into a new place, not only to socialize and build goodwill but to ascertain any potential threats and establish that I am not afraid to unload shells onto anyone breaking into my home.
In the most ghetto of ghetto places, your neighbor is the only person you fuck with. Neighborhood gangs are no joke. Only in Whiteville, America are we afraid of our own neighbors.
Decades of creating distrust in impoverished minority communities, and the government's still done a better job at keeping the affluent disunited than the poor.
