Folks in Cabot Concerned about Safety and Door-to-Door Sales

"Do you answer the door do you not answer the door?" she asked with her three-year-old daughter sitting beside her. "If I don't answer the door, will they be casing my house?"

When sales crews come knocking, Stephanie Inderrieden doesn't have all the answers.

You're home by yourself with a young child. Some of them are kind of scary looking," she said. "The things they say can put you on edge."

Over the past three days, she's had two magazine sales crews show up at her door, a total of half a dozen salespeople have shown up in the past year.

She's one of several people voicing concern, evident on a community Facebook page.

"It's something we've been dealing with for quite some time," said Sergeant Keith Graham of Cabot Police. "They'll hit one city at a time and just hit that for a few weeks and then go somewhere else."

The police get daily calls about the issue, but the city doesn't have any laws against door to door sales.

"We had an ordinance in place which expired in 2010, which was found to be unonstitutional," Graham said. "City leaders are working on a new ordinance but we're having to make sure it's constitutional."

While police can patrol an area if a caller feels uncomfortable, officers are restricted in how they can respond otherwise.

"We run them through the system and find out if they have any warrants. If they don't we can't do too much," Graham said.

Inderrieden isn't sure she wants to call the cops on what she describes as teens working in tough conditions on the streets.

"I feel bad for them because they probably have really bad working conditions," she said. "It may be the company they work for is kind of shady."

"There was a girl who was Russian during the summer," she said. "We saw her get dropped off at 8 o'clock in the morning in the 100 degree heat. She had one water bottle and that was it. She was out there at 8 o'clock at night, and when we asked why she was still there, she told us her transportation had just left her."

Most of the sales crews Sgt. Graham has run into have 18 or 19 year old workers making the hard sells. According to him, because they're adults and they say they are working of their own free will, that's difficult for them to do anything about.

"But if people do feel uncomfortable, if they're not answering the door and they feel like they're being harrassed, we do want them to give us a call," he said.

That way moms like Inderrieden feel safer while at home.