It Affects Everyone

My upstairs neighbors fight.  A lot.  I’ve called the police multiple times as it’s been very evident that it was a physical domestic.  One time one of them had blood gushing from her head.  Both my husband and I have called and have had to wait for hours for Denver Police to get here.  During this time we are subjected to hearing everything from the one’s verbal abuse to one begging for the fighting to stop, we have been subjected to having things on our walls rattle from things being thrown against the wall upstairs, we have dealt with the ceiling fan above our bed shake from things crashing on the floor up there.  We’ve listened to it for hours on end while waiting for the police to show up.  We have never seen the police take either one of the neighbors away for a domestic.  It doesn’t matter that they fight so loudly it keeps me up at night and has woken me up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night.  The police respond, they take their notes, tell them to keep it down and leave only to have the fight erupt again a few hours later and we start the cycle all over again.  From the time they wake in the morning to the time they go to bed at night or early morning they stomp throughout their apartment which sets me on edge.  You can hear them slamming doors or objects down on counters.  I have left my apartment at times when I should stay home in bed just to avoid having to hear them fight.  I have called Denver Police so many times that I fear they look at the incoming number and roll their eyes and I fear that I might be bordering on harassing my neighbors with each call I make reporting their domestic and/or noise complaint even though management has told us to call the police each time there’s an incident.  Management does nothing about the noise complaints on these residents, the police don’t do anything about the domestic violence happening in that home (and might I point out that their physical fights have spilled out into the courtyard in front of children).  I have sat in my room for hours waiting for the police to show up, rocking back and forth fighting the flashbacks from when I was assaulted by my ex.  I’ve called the police and begged them as a survivor of domestic violence to do something because this is affecting my mental health and my physical health.  I can’t sleep, I’m triggered in such a way that there has been times we have had to decide if I needed to get medical attention for myself.  What good is calling Denver Police when nothing is ever done?  What good is it to complain to management about the noise when they don’t do anything about anything in this complex at all?  (that’s an entirely different post about the shit in this complex that we put up with).

Domestic violence affects everyone.  Not just the people involved in the relationship, but the neighbors as well.  We have to listen to it.  We are awoken by the screaming, the yelling, the slamming, the stomping, the pleading.  It causes survivors to relive their own hellish nightmare feeling every punch, feeling every slap, feeling every kick.  The nightmare never ends.