AITAH for calling the police on kids who kept ding-dong-ditching my house?
For context, I’m a 22-year-old woman and I live alone. These kids had been doing this basically every day during the summer, but once school started, they stopped—or at least I thought they had.
I was honestly trying to give them some grace because they’re kids. It really wasn’t that long ago that I was their age, and I understand that kids are going to play outside, be loud, run around, scream, etc. I genuinely don’t care about any of that. I was a kid once too. Although, for the record, I never once thought about terrorizing my neighbors for fun.
What I do care about is when they decide it’s funny to bang on my door so hard that it sounds like they’re trying to knock it off its hinges.
This has happened multiple times, and I’ve mostly ignored it. Sometimes I’ve gone outside to see who it was, but they always run away before I can actually see them.
Today, though, a kid wearing a bright neon orange shirt banged on my door so freaking loud that I genuinely thought a man was trying to break into my house. Since I live alone, I was actually shaking for a little while because I was scared. I saw him run away, but by that point I was already having an absolutely awful day, and this was the final straw.
I called the police and made a report.
Their parents are apparently nowhere to be seen, and unfortunately for this kid, he decided to mess with me on the wrong day.
Hopefully this scares him off enough to stop doing it, and maybe his parents will keep a better eye on him.
I really don’t want to be that neighbor who calls the police on kids for simply playing outside. I’ve been deliberately ignoring a lot because I know they’re children. But there’s a difference between kids being kids and repeatedly slamming on someone’s door so hard that it sounds like someone is trying to break in.
I gave them plenty of grace. Today I just ran out of it.
Update: They did it again 30 minutes after I posted this so I called the police again. They’re sending out a couple of deputies. It’s dark outside and they are still running around terrorizing neighbors. It’s insane.