Statistically, confronting a Harley rider who guns their bike in their neighbourhood at 3 am, tends to have a negative return on investment. Given the ops description as "they also shot another neighbour's cat", I feel it likely they will fall well within the normal bell curve.
I agree in general that approaching your neighbours first is the theoretically right thing to do before escalating. That works out well far far less likely than I'd like it to.
In our neighborhood, there is a family in the same vein whose kid insisted on honking the horn whenever he rounded a corner, no matter what time of day or night. Nice requests via email by the two nearest homeowners did nothing. Showing up at his house after one of the incidents antagonized the father. The only thing that got the kid to stop was exposing him (describing the car, which is unique) on the neighborhood FB group, and the father only reluctantly stopped his son after angrily criticizing the affected family and condemning the issue coming out on Facebook.
