Neighbors Call Police Multiple Times On Little Iowa Girl – For Selling Cookies

Neighbors called the police three times in five days on a little Iowa girl for the heinous crime of selling homemade cookies, KDSM-TV (Des Moines) is reporting. It’s just the latest incident this summer of people calling the police on other people for exhaustingly minor “crimes.”

Savannah Watters just wanted to raise some money for school clothes. The 10-year-old Cedar Falls girl figured the best way to do that would be to bake homemade cookies with her mom then and sell them in front of her home.

It worked – too well, apparently. So popular was her cookie stand that it started bringing some extra traffic to her neighborhood. That became a problem for her neighbors, as the following 911 call demonstrates.

“Well we’ve had a little girl that’s been selling cookies and water for four weeks and the traffic is getting to the point that they’re using our driveway to turn around…which is fine…but they almost hit my daughter. I mean it’s just getting…it’s getting out of control.”

Cedar Falls Police Chief Jeff Olson said that another caller was concerned about how close Savannah’s stand was to a busy street, according to WKRN-TV (Nashville).

“On the third call, she was set up close enough to the 45 miles per hour speed zone street. That kind of concern, the officer asked her to maybe go further back from the curb or maybe go into the driveway of her home.”

At first, she took the cops’ advice and moved her business closer to her house. But that cost her business, so she moved back curb-side.

Neighbor Melissa Winberg isn’t sympathetic in the slightest, according to Fox News.

“To be honest, if her mom wants to open a cookie shop, there are other ways of doing it than making her 10-year-old daughter sit on the corner for seven hours a day.”

For now, Savannah is still selling the cookies, inconvenienced neighbors be darned. She hopes to one day open a bakery.

“I enjoyed it a lot, so then I wanted to have a cookie shop with my mom ’cause it’s always been my dream to do that.”

Savannah’s story is just the latest in an ever-growing list of people who have had the cops called on them for exceptionally minor “crimes.” It all began in Oakland when a woman called the police on a group of African American families for barbecuing in the wrong place. Since then, people have called the cops on a little girl for selling water without a permit, for two men sitting in Starbucks and not drinking coffee, and for a woman napping in a college common room, among other “crimes.”