I was travelling across the country by auto with my wife this past week and one night we stayed in a Motel in rural Colorado.
We checked in at nearly Midnight and even at that hour the neighbors were making a lot of noise in their room beside us. They were loud, laughing, banging, clinking bottles, and were generally clomping & stamping around inside their room. Alcohol was obviously involved.
I chalked it up to general cluelessness/rudeness and drunkenness and we turned on the very loud room AC/heater unit and went to bed.
As the night progressed the noises got louder and louder. They were sporadically having a dragged-out screaming row that would go on for hours, with one extremely drunk and obstreperously strong-lunged male bellowing and cursing at the top of his lungs while banging and crashing around. There were 2 or 3 other people in the room. I didn't hear any children's voices or crying though. It seemed that these were all 20 or 30-something "adults." The others were alternately yelling at him to STFU, egging him on, laughing, and berating each other; saying things like, "Well, you are the idiot who gave him all the booze!"
By the voices there was at least one adult female in the room but it didn't seem to me that she or any of the others were calling for help or in immediate distress, although the very loud dude was constantly screaming profanities at the others, the world in general, and making empty threats. The others were all laughing at him and nobody else in the room seemed concerned. I think perhaps the blusterous fellow had a room-temperature IQ as well as way too much to drink and the room wasn't very warm.
I wasn't completely sure if everyone was OK but I didn't hear anyone calling for help either -not even the super loud one. I really hate involving the state so calling the cops is pretty much out of the question in my book except for extreme circumstances and this didn't seem to be that extreme. All I really wanted to do was get some sleep after many hours of driving that day. I was a bit surprised that nobody else in the row of motel rooms called the po-po either. I don't remember them ever coming or breaking up the fracas. It all went on in spurts for hours, nearly until dawn.
I've always maintained that there are not many situations where adding a cop to it can't make things much worse. But I did consider calling the motel office and warning them that these folks were probably doing some property damage to the room next door from all the banging and crashing into the walls. But the office was only 75 feet away across the parking lot and there is no way that they couldn't hear the brouhaha themselves unless they were completely deaf.
I consider myself a "pure" voluntaryist and was at a bit of a loss as to what I needed to do, what exactly my "responsibility" was at the time. I could have knocked and involved myself but didn't wish to deal with drunk a-holes at 2AM-ish. We were so tired after a long day of driving. I could simply turn up the very loud room AC/heater unit and drown out most of their noises and I was tired enough to sleep through the majority of their antics although part of me was always awake enough to monitor the situation in case someone would yell for help or they crashed through the wall into our unit.
What would you do? When would you call the cops when others were having a semi-public hubbub? I suppose many folks would have called way before this.
