Dear PoPville – What Would You Do?

“Dear, PoPville

What would you do?

I’d like to start this out by saying I have lived relatively peacefully in DC for the last 14 years and when I purchased my LeDroit Park home in June I received an enthusiastic and warm welcome from all my neighbors- some long time DC families and some new. I purchased a former college party house and have over the past year spent most of my time and money restoring it to the beauty it once was. Anyway, neighbors have recently witnessed kids (12ish years old) stealing Amazon packages off my front porch and some plants and landscaping have occasionally, and seemingly intentionally, gotten trampled. Yesterday, I was leaving the house with my boyfriend and three young boys (maybe in the 12 year old range) called us f@ggots as they passed. I thought to myself, “No, I must have misheard them” until one of the boys said, “He just called you a f@ggot, especially the one on the bike (me).”

Now I honestly didn’t know how to react because it’s pretty obvious I spend a lot of time at the gym and any 20-40 year old would never think to say that to me knowing I’d beat the living #$&! out of them. But what are you supposed to do with kids?! If it was me growing up, someone would have dragged me to my mother’s house by my ear and she would have publically beaten the fear of a thousand deaths into me… but right or wrong, times have changed.

Well, we let it go and kept walking till a minute or two later we realized we forgot something at home. We returned to the house to find the small fence in my tree box kicked over, bent, and trampled, along with some of the plants. Now we technically didn’t see the kids do it and I guess any random adult could have passed by and vandalized my property in those 120 seconds but let’s be real

Now, honestly I could care less what these kids are doing with their time and frankly I’ve got more important things to be doing with mine- but I’m not going anywhere and I don’t want to start a long annoying tradition of annoying neighborhood kids messing with my stuff.

So aside from maybe taking a photo of them, starting a police report, and/or trying to find the kids’ parents, what would you do? Try and talk some sense into them then come home to a brick thrown into my front window? Ignore them and hope they’ll stop stealing my stuff?”