Should I file a police report?
Our neighbor and my husband got into a verbal dispute after our neighbor received our Amazon package and threw it into the middle of our yard. My husband asked why he did that and the neighbor escalated quickly by screaming, cussing and using hate slurs. (Brief backstory - apparently he had been holding a grudge for over a year after I called the police when him and his wife were doing loud construction at 1am-4am on a weeknight and that’s what he was screaming about). I called the police again during this altercation and an officer came out and basically just told him to go back inside. After we went inside, the neighbor proceeded to his backyard and began tearing down our SHARED backyard fence all while laughing maniacally and yelling “that cop didn’t give a single fuck!!!!”. I called that same officer back and said the neighbor was destroying the fence but the cop said it was a civil matter…. The neighbor left the broken panels laying in our yard for months until we eventually picked them up and then we built our own fence on our own side of the property line. We left whatever broken fence was still left standing exactly as it is and didn’t have it taken down. He will never pick up the broken fence and we have a pile of the panels on the side of our house where we stacked them up. I feel like he should face some sort of consequences for this and from what I’ve researched, it would be considered criminal destruction of property or something similar. My husband thinks it is a bad idea to file a criminal report because he doesn’t think it will do anything except possibly cause the neighbor to do something worse and then our safety would be compromised. I have video of the entire thing from the argument to him tearing down the fence. In another state this could have been filed as a hate crime due to what he was calling us but not in our state unfortunately.
Should I file a report or just leave it alone and clean up the panels ourselves??