If & When to call the cops

[BlackHeron]

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.

[dsayers]

I would've called motel management. They could address the situation on their own property. If they would not, you could ask them to be moved (which costs them more in having to clean an extra room) or a refund to go and stay elsewhere.

 

I'm a private investigator that does security patrols and alarm response. I sometimes have to call the police to fill out a report in the event of an actual break in. It's actually a fun experience because I'm in a position of greater and legitimate authority during our interaction. Plus after a lifetime of multiple bad personal experiences with police, there's something rewarding about being armed and police turning their backs to you without hesitation.

 

The last time I called the police for personal reasons was because somebody had broken into the house I was staying at to steal a cheap handgun I had while I wasn't there. I did this not with the expectation of ever recovering my property, but to make sure that if anything happened with that gun, that it wasn't thought to be my responsibility.

[abcqwerty123]

I agree with dsayers on your situation. Hotel management should have been called to deal with the problem on their property. However, no matter how voluntary you are, we don't currently live in a society where you can always avoid calling the police. A good example is with dsayers calling to make sure he wasn't responsible for the stolen gun. When you have government shutting off other routes of actions and placing the blame on an innocent individual who attempted one of those routes, then sometimes you MUST use the government to solve issues to prevent yourself from being imprisoned more then you already are.

 

I have never personally called the police. I have been abused, jumped, threatened and almost killed, and I feel fortunate now that I didn't call the police. The reason for not calling before was because I was young and scared of punishment, but now that I look back, I see that even if I called, everything would have turned out far worse. I have however called for ambulances when I was younger because of my fathers constant attempt at suicide, and police tagged along. Anyways, my point with this was to show that there are some situations like dsayers that require you to use government, but there are also situations where you think you must use government and when you do, you would have a worse result then if you didn't. I think that you must evaluate the situation, find all possible outcomes for each action, and only use government as a last resort, usually to defend you from government.

[BlackHeron]

Thank you for the replies.  I would also like to apologize for plonking this discussion down into the wrong section of this forum.  I'm fairly new here and got a little bit confused as to where I "was" when I wrote this post.  I suppose it should have been in the general discussion section and not here in Economics.  Perhaps it could be the Economics of calling the police versus a DRO. The mods should, of course, feel free to move it anywhere it would better belong.

 

I have called the police once years agao and I lived to regret it.  It became a very expensive day for me although it would have been fairly expensive regardless as my crazy X was raving (reavering?) and tearing the house apart with her bare hands and at the moment.  I didn't know what else to do.  Calling the police was not a good option, but I still don't know what a good option was.  The best option would have been to pick a much better partner.  I can own that error without self-attacking.  I'm in a much better place now.

 

 

There are times today when I think about calling the cops to come roust the drunks/druggies who try and crawl up under my deck off of the alley (I live in Chicago) and pass out just inches outside of my bedroom window.  I usually go out and tell them to leave myself, but very late at night when they wake me up with their steam engine snoring outside my widow I sometimes don't feel like trudging out into the cold dark night to confront some drugged-out crazy person who's passed out and feels cornered because he has nowhere else to go/turn to.  I will often just let them be if knocking on the window and telling them from inside isn't working.   The other neighbors in my building have no compunction to calling the cops on these street folk when they are crawling into and under our condo building and the cops usually just haul them off to detox to sleep it off in a nice warm cell.  The neighbors tell me it's almost impossible to get the cops to come if they tell them it's a homeless guy but if they tell 911 that it is a "suspicious person" lurking around someone's bedroom window it's amazing how much faster they show up.  

[Daniel Unplugged]

I would never call the police for any trivial complaint against another person. Arranging for a gang of armed thugs to coerce and intimate a person over something minor is an overreaction to say the least. The result of this, it that sometimes I have to put up with people being dicks a little bit more often, but that is a small price to pay.