Read This Inwood Man's Blistering Response To Neighbor's 'Mind Your Manners' Note

Brookshire's neighborhood. (Google Maps)

Noise disputes are not news in NYC, but every once in a while an angry tiff between neighbors catches fire in the wider world of social media, especially when the situation inflames tensions over race and gentrification. An Inwood man's impassioned letter responding to his neighbor's noise complaint has done just that, and it's lighting up Facebook brighter than the great "I don't care give me $5,500" noise complaint story of 2015.

Richard Brookshire received a note from his downstairs neighbor on Thursday morning chastising him for "scream[ing] and stomp[ing] around" late at night. It concluded: "Next time, this will go straight to the police. Please learn your manners."

The note Brookshire received from his downstairs neighbors. (Richard Brookshire)

Brookshire, who said in a phone interview that he is the only black tenant in his Inwood building, responded with a letter of his own, which he shared on Facebook.

"As a Black man, I take these overt actions as a direct threat to my physical and psychological well-being and as an act of violence upon me (see attached list of the 821 black men, women, and children killed by police or in police custody to date in 2016," he wrote. "This threat cannot be taken lightly."

Brookshire told Gothamist he didn't think his neighbor, who is white, understood the implications of threatening to call the police on a black man.

"I don't think I was being too loud, but we could've had a conversation about that," Brookshire said. He admits that he had stayed up "pretty late," talking on the phone with a friend who needed help drafting a resignation letter, but that he's lived in the building for a year without issue.

"I was so upset that someone would call the police on me for talking on the phone, knowing that cops are out there killing black folk. They don't even need a reason—they can come into your home, say you made a sudden movement, and shoot you," Brookshire said.

He added that his building's super told him that other tenants have filed their fair share of noise complaints against Brookshire's downstairs neighbors.

"He tells me this same couple is the one that plays piano at all hours of the damn day," Brookshire wrote in a recent Facebook update. But in rapidly-gentrifying neighborhoods like Inwood, noise complaints are often more than a quality of life issue.

"I think it's worth reminding you that you currently reside in Northern Manhattan, an enclave of ethnic and racial diversity that existed in community well before your gentrifying arrival," Brookshire, who works for the Council of Urban Professionals, wrote.

Earlier this year, a Midwestern transplant to Inwood penned an op-ed in the Daily News complaining about "Dyckman's deafening daily drumbeat," in which she called a kid playing dancehall on a speaker a "possible criminal." (The Daily News later edited that bit out of the post, but the internet is forever).

Last year, sociologists Dr. Joscha Legewie and Dr. Merlin Schaffer combed through 311 records and found that neighborhoods with "fuzzy" ill-defined boundaries between racial groups tend to have more conflicts between neighbors than more homogenous areas.

The researchers cross-referenced the data with complaints on citydata.com, a forum where New Yorkers complain about their neighbors, and found that "you clearly get the impression" that there's a trend of white residents issuing noise complaints against their neighbors of color.

A map released by CityLab earlier this year showing the frequency of 311 by neighborhood similarly suggests that noise complaints become more common as gentrification happens.

Brookshire says his neighbor has not yet responded to his letter, but that he does plan to make good on his promise to submit formal complaints with the NYPD, ACLU, and the local community board today.

"He'll probably say it wasn't a racial thing. And maybe it wasn't, at least not intentionally," Brookshire said. "But he wasn't taking his biases and prejudices and the greater political context into account at all."