Calling the police to check on a crying baby

They won't know whether it is necessary or not until they attend the incident.

How many times have we read child murder reports in newspapers where it says that opportunities to safeguard the child were missed?

The OP specifically mentioned car doors though so presumably she can see it

👋

retired police officer here. Child protection unit for 8 years. I investigated child abuse and then I was a trainer teaching officers and social workers how to investigate and how to interview children who have been abused. There’s not much point in me adding anything else because the response will just be “ you could say anything “. The main issues with the “ arm chair experts” (of which there are so many on this thread ) is that they have extensive experience of babies who cry for a long periods but presumably DONT have any experience of babies who are neglected or abused. Apparently a great many of them cannot put aside their own experiences in order see that these enquiries need a neutral response. We don’t know what the issue is and the only way we’re going to know is to make a few enquiries. Check the intelligence on the address firstly as they may already be known to police. This baby may already be on a plan and known to all the services which is why the police decided to go. The mother may be estranged from the father. There may be a myriad of information not known to the OP or any of you which supports the decision to go. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe there was just one call in but they felt uneasy enough about it to go and check. It’s not a personal attack on your parenting if someone turns up at your door asking questions. If you had the responsibility for keeping children safe… if it was your job. If you were going to be devastated for the rest of your life. If you were going to face a huge enquiry and public backlash because a child known to you was murdered or allowed to starve to death because the mother was dead on the floor, would you go or would you write on the report “ probably colic “

That assumes that they are not very busy and that the unnecessary calls weren't taking resources away from the necessary calls.

I don't mean to sound harsh here, however the reality of being a police 999 call handler is far from your straight forward rationale.
I did the job for years and it was not uncommon to have a murder, a couple of burglary in progress incidents and a stranger rape in a 12 hour shift.
And then the priority incidents have to wait on the active queue until frontline officers become available. This was a priority incident and not graded as immediate.
The amount of times i've taken 999 calls about 2 adults fighting that have ended in murder is a lot higher than I would have liked.
I'm going to stop making myself sound patronising now, it wasn't my intention. x

I'm sure the police would rather have umpteen child safeguarding calls that were unnecessary than not receive the one when it was.

OP, you did absolutely the right thing.

Obviously windows are not shut at the moment!!! Things are different this week. That is the point.

You 100% did the right thing @summermumma2021 like you said, safe guarding is everyone’s business.
Better to do something and be wrong than to ignore it.

Hmm if only the neighbours of Leiland Corkill and Finley Bevan had called police when they heard a baby continuously screaming. In both those cases they admitted they heard what sounded like abuse and did nothing.

I don't really understand this as you said both you and your husband were in the house. In that case I would have just asked him to walk by their house to see if everything seemed ok. This is partly because I would assume that the police would turn up (if at all) 3 hours after any inciden- from experience!) I also don't get how you know that the noise of a crying baby and other noises were from the same household anyway. Unless you could see stuff happening.

Anyway, my dd in particular had a blood curdling cry - whether being cuddled or not- and both of mine were born in heatwaves so the wondow were always open. My poor neighbours!

What happened?

Or be sceptical rather than blindly assuming people are telling the truth.

At night in a heatwave? You think everyone’s got their windows shut at night?

Or something awful could be happening.
And everyone would say how terrible that neighbors heard and did nothing.
sometimes you have to err on the side of caution for a baby or child’s sake.
If nothings happened then it’s no issue

She said car doors - generally they aren't kept behind house windows.

You keep saying you couldn't go to the house because your own children were asleep - but your husband was at home too, so one of you could have gone. I'm not saying that you necessarily should have, but the fact that your own children were at home is irrelevant surely?

Yea? When you were a baby you cried so much the police turned up at our house? I would tell that to them when they got older, it's a story if they aren't doing anything wrong.

Well generally people don't have their windows open much in the UK so wouldn't even hear doors slamming from 100 m away. So she won't be in contact with the police every other night

We've had that too! I need to buy doorstops.

If you don't own/don't want doorstops, anything heavy works just the same - packs of tins, boxes of stuff etc.

Equally, how would you know they're not from the same house? Either the layout of the neighborhood is such OP could tell, or she's going to be on to the police every other night when random doors slam and I'm sure they'll instruct her on using common sense.

Yes, there have certainly been a few doors slamming in my house due to DH's idea that there must be airflow through the house to cool it down.

Yes.
Best to stay off MN then.

How could she tell the door slamming shouting was even in the same house. She is 100 m away apparently snd presumably there are plenty of other houses around. Maybe it's because I live in a city where neighbour's actually know each other but I can't imagine phoning the police if I heard a baby crying for half an hour. My first response would be to ask my neighbour if all was well.

My neighbours once mentioned that our child's crying was disturbing them at night - detached house, but hot weather and windows open. The attempts to "settle them" (like singing lullabies to them) would generally have been far quieter than the distressed crying because we tried to keep our noise down. Door slamming could be a breeze and raised voices when you are sleep deprived are not that unusual. If the police had turned up they might have been given the baby with a "you try settling them" or "will you please speak to our gp and tell them this isnt normal."