The “I want a peaceful resolution” one, Jesus.

You can't even fix this on your own because your neighbors will assume your efforts to reach out are danger.

I opened a package I was expecting once and saw some shoes instead my order, and realized the label had an address a few blocks away, so I texted the number on the box explaining and asking if they wanted me to drop it off somewhere so they didn't have to go through a lost package dance. They called me a creep and accused me of stealing their package so I had to toss it in the garbage.

Ever since then I have no interest in reaching out to my neighbors here for fear of getting similar reactions. I just try to be kind whenever anyone does reach out to me instead, which rarely happens.

Tom Waits wrote a song in 1999 called "What's He Building?" about this exact phenomenon: https://youtu.be/04qPdGNA_KM

When I was a kid my grandma had a bad reaction to some medication and our phones weren't working so I had to run door to door asking for help until someone was home and able to call an ambulance. I think about that sometimes whenever "nextdoor culture" pops up, and what that means for people who need help in emergency situations and need to rely on their neighbors to be able to get them to a hospital or help them until someone can get there that can help. When people feel like they can't turn to anybody that's when they are at their most vulnerable, and when people are scared to interact it just ends up causing long-term harm.

A friend's mom got a ring camera and her quality of life has never been worse. She got it because she was scared in the first place but instead of making her feel safer, it just made her all the more terrified.

And she's experiencing the same amount of crime as before she got the camera: none.

We got an alarm system and a camera installed back in 2017, because around Christmas, when all three of us left our home for 30 minutes to go get Chinese food, someone broke in through an open window and stole a bunch of stuff, including a briefcase full of documents, which we kept that way because some "helpful hints" newspaper column said to keep that sort of stuff ready to grab and vacate at a moment's notice in case of emergencies.

As far as I know, this camera doesn't automatically report anything to the police (Alarm dot com), and the alarm system makes it so when we set it at night, we can't open any of the windows or doors until the alarm is disarmed in the morning.

Our cats also became somewhat flightier after that incident, too, since they had to find places to hide while our house was being rummaged through. Funny enough, they took a PS3 slim, and tried to log into PSN with it a few days later, and also a cheap HP Pavilion laptop, but didn't take any of the Apple hardware that was present, not even my 15" MBP that may have been worth something back then.

As a bonus, months later, the police did find someone trying to sell the documents they stole, but they expected us to come to the main LAPD office from our house in Riverside to pick them up, rather than ship them to us.

Such bullcrap that we can be scared into this sort of thing, though. It's not like we actively watch the camera, and the alarm has never been tripped by anyone since we had it installed, and we've had more occasions of the stupid touch interface panel accidentally double tapping and setting the "arm away" mode, because the "away" button is right under the button to "arm" it in the first place, causing a slight panic as we have to disarm it before it times out and enables the motion sensor inside to set off the alarm.

Come to think of it, I never really knew most of my neighbors in the 1990s either. Maybe that's mostly a white thing.