He somehow got caught in the middle
Two of Oseweldon Mobley’s neighbors had been fighting because one man’s children were playing on the other man’s property. “I just happened to be over there one day when they were screaming, and I tried to act as a referee,” Mobley says. “I should have kept my mouth shut.” Mobley’s longtime neighbor, who was worried about his property being destroyed, is a “buddy” he says, and not too long afterward Mobley’s fig tree was picked clean and his irises were trampled. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with them,” Mobley says of the figs, “They’re green and they’re bitter. They’re about the size of your little fingernail.” No one saw who picked the figs, but “the neighbors saw the kids running through the irises,” Mobley says, so he reported it to police. “I think their father put them up to it, but I have no way of proving that. The police told me to make a report so that I can leave a trail, and that’s the only reason I did,” he says. “I’m not really a victim of a crime-I’m a victim of circumstances.” It’s always a good thing to report vandalism and criminal mischief to police, says Sr. Cpl. Ron Carpenter of the Northeast Division, because each division’s manpower is determined by the number of offenses reported. The police don’t necessarily encourage confronting criminal situations directly with neighbors, but if victims feel comfortable doing so, by all means they should, he says. “That’s great because we’ve got a zillion other things we could be dealing with besides dealing with your neighbors over her kids spray painting your fence or whatever,” Carpenter says. “But if things don’t work out correctly we can step in.” If someone is going to err on one side or the other, Carpenter encourages erring on the side of calling the police even when it may not be necessary to solve a problem. “We don’t make a list of people who make call where it really wasn’t needed,” he says. Plus, Carpenter says, if a situation snowballs into further criminal action and even a lawsuit, police reports would be more likely to stand up in court than simply keeping personal records of offenses. Mobley believes his neighbors will be able to solve the conflict between them without bringing the police or the legal system into it. “I think they’ve both agree to put up a privacy fence-that’ll cool them off,” he says. As for himself, Mobley says he doesn’t expect any future problems with his neighbors “because they’ve both realized I’m not going to be pulled into that.” And he also believes he’ll soon be eating figs. “With all the rain we’ve had, I’ve got figs again,” Mobley says. “They’re still green, and they’ll come in by June.”
