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Susan Lorincz was viewed as the local menace. In Ocala, Florida, she occupied a rented dwelling on a street populated by youthful, working-class families. Children frequently gathered outside, riding bikes, scooters, and roller skates, participating in games of tag or touch football, doing cartwheels on the lawns, and creating noise. The youngsters were predominantly Black, and Lorincz, a Caucasian woman in her late fifties at the time, considered their typical play as a persistent transgression, or a scheme designed to make her lose her sanity. She consistently shouted at the children nearby, whose ages varied from toddler to pre-teen. Repeatedly, Lorincz contacted the police regarding them. “They shouldn’t be yelling and, you know, running about,” she expressed to a responding officer one evening in August, 2022. A few months afterward, on another call to 911, she implored, “Is there something I can do regarding these individuals?”
These interactions, simultaneously absurd and foreboding, are portrayed in Geeta Gandbhir’s uncomfortably captivating documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which is constructed almost entirely from footage captured by police body cameras. (The movie debuted at Sundance and is now heading to Netflix; the moniker is derived from how Lorincz once depicted herself to the local authorities.) The subsequent year, on the evening of June 2, 2023, Lorincz—as was her custom—engaged with some kids. She hurled roller skates at a nine-year-old boy named Israel, who resided across the street; she might have also seized his tablet, and eyewitnesses observed her brandishing an umbrella. Lorincz phoned the police, lamenting that children were “leaving toys everywhere, just screaming, yelling, simply being completely obnoxious. . . . I’m fearing for my safety. . . . I’m simply tired of these kids.” Concurrently, Israel informed his mother, Ajike Owens, about the disagreement; Owens, understandably incensed, crossed the street to knock forcefully on Lorincz’s door and request a conversation. Shortly thereafter, Lorincz fatally shot Owens through the locked metal door. Owens was thirty-five years of age and a mother of four.
Four days elapsed before law enforcement apprehended Lorincz and charged her with manslaughter. (She was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years of incarceration.) The delay—and the reason Lorincz wasn’t charged with second-degree murder—was partially attributed to Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, which greatly permits the employment of deadly force if an assailant asserts self-defense. Race may have also played a role—Owens was Black, as are her children. Stand Your Ground laws tend to favor white individuals who shoot Black individuals; a study from 2013 indicated that “White-on-Black homicides were more apt to be deemed justified (11.4 percent) while Black-on-White homicides were least apt to be deemed justified (1.2 percent).” Furthermore, Lorincz’s laughable claims that she felt mortally afraid of the local kids are indicative of research into the “adultification” of Black boys and girls, who are generally viewed as older and more accountable for their actions than their white counterparts, leading to heightened examination and penalties from educators, police officers, and other responsible adults.
“The Perfect Neighbor” details how Lorincz, in her attempts to incite law enforcement against members of her own community, only succeeded in uniting the two factions in mutual revulsion. (I haven’t encountered such deep and intensely gender-specific disdain for a documentary shrew since “Dear Zachary.”) One officer, proceeding to his vehicle following a response to another of Lorincz’s 911 calls, mumbles, “Psycho.” However, despite Lorincz’s marginalized and despised state, she also embodied an extreme representation of our national post-COVID psychological state, manifested by the informants, snitches, and paranoiacs of Nextdoor and local Facebook groups. These are the eccentrics sharing Ring-camera recordings of the suspicious-looking Cub Scout who dared to ring their doorbell; they’re questioning whether their neighbor’s sunflowers are spying on them; they’re contemplating contacting the police about the teenager who merely used their driveway to turn his vehicle around, under the pretense of trespassing. Statistically, a significant number of these individuals possess firearms.
When children engage in collective play, it “necessitates resolving some type of social conundrum,” as pediatrics professors Hillary L. Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker once penned. The children must determine “what to play, who is permitted to participate, when to commence, when to conclude, and the governing rules.” The collaboration and reciprocity inherent in play can aid in “fostering a spectrum of social and emotional aptitudes like empathy, adaptability, self-awareness, and self-regulation.” These constitute the fundamental elements, the authors continue, of emotional acumen. Nevertheless, for the children featured in “The Perfect Neighbor,” the primary social issue was Susan Lorincz. And, within the surveillance state of twenty-first-century America, she is ubiquitous.
While Lorincz may seem alarmingly typical, the neighborhood depicted in “The Perfect Neighbor” feels progressively scarce. Unstructured outdoor play among children has been diminishing since the early nineteen-eighties, notwithstanding substantial evidence supporting its benefits for children’s physical well-being, executive functioning, and socialization. The reasons for this decline are multifaceted and well-established; they encompass parents’ statistically unsupported anxieties regarding kidnapping, amplified social detachment, privatization of community spaces, urban planning that favors vehicular traffic and velocity over pedestrian accessibility and safety, and the growth of organized athletics. The spectacle of unsupervised children playing, walking, or cycling gradually became conspicuous and, frequently, prompted intervention from law enforcement or child-welfare agencies. Anxious parents further curtailed their children’s freedom.
Peter Gray, a retired psychology professor at Boston College, has identified a compelling link between the reduction in unstructured outdoor play—defined as play that is “freely elected and managed by the participants and undertaken for intrinsic enjoyment”—and a decline in children’s psychological health. Children who consistently participate in unstructured play, Gray has stated, cultivate self-assurance and a feeling of competence by making decisions and navigating conflicts amongst themselves, absent the involvement or assessment of adults. These children are more inclined to develop a robust internal sense of control, rendering them less susceptible to anxiety and depression later in life. Gray emphasized that genuine free play is devoid of external objectives, such as achieving a favorable grade from an instructor or impressing a soccer coach. The children dictate their desires and maintain some degree of influence over achieving them.
A 2021 study revealed, unsurprisingly, that “heightened parental perceptions of neighborhood social unity also portended increased duration of outdoor play.” This social unity is poignantly apparent in “The Perfect Neighbor.” The footage showcases the effortless trust and solidarity among the various parents, who seemed to share an unspoken understanding that the neighborhood essentially belonged to the children. They enjoyed a freedom to engage in play and discovery that many of their counterparts in more affluent neighborhoods severely lacked—or, more accurately, they would have possessed that freedom, had Lorincz not perceived it as a violent invasion.
During Lorincz’s sentencing hearing in November, her sister provided credible testimony that Lorincz endured severe abuse during childhood. Observing her sister’s testimony, I started to contemplate whether Lorincz was undone not only by prejudice or mental illness but by an intense sense of envy and disenfranchisement—if her ultimate source of madness regarding her community stemmed from its communal nature, from the neighbors’ mutual care and supervision of each other’s children. At one juncture in Gandbhir’s documentary, a law enforcement officer, while interviewing some of Lorincz’s young neighbors, momentarily pauses to inquire of a woman which of the gathered children are her own. Although none of the children’s parents are physically present at that time, the woman responds without hesitation: “They’re all mine.” She speaks in jest, but her meaning is genuine. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
