Susan Lorincz was the neighborhood wicked witch. She lived alone in a rented house in Ocala, Florida, on a street full of young working-class families. Kids were often outside on bikes and scooters and roller skates, playing tag or touch football, turning cartwheels on the lawns, being noisy. The children were predominantly Black, and Lorincz, a white woman then in her late fifties, interpreted their ordinary play as an ongoing crime, or a conspiracy to drive her insane. She was always yelling at the kids in her vicinity, who ranged in age from toddler to tween. Over and over, Lorincz called the cops on them. “They shouldn’t be screaming and, you know, running around,” she complained to a responding officer one evening in August, 2022. A few months later, on another 911 call, she pleaded,
The Lessons of “The Perfect Neighbor”

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