Thefts Near School Bring Students Heat : Crime: The police and some neighbors want Mark Keppel High School students kept on campus during lunchtime. But school officials are reluctant to close the campus.

It’s 12:12 p.m., three minutes into lunch hour at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra.

Teen-agers, crowds of them, are streaming out of classrooms onto the lawn. Many leave campus, jaywalk across Hellman Avenue and wander through the neighborhood of apartments, condominiums and modest single-family homes. Others pile into shiny sports cars and cruise.

The nearest hangout, a 7-Eleven on Garvey Avenue south of the high school, quickly fills up as kids grab Cokes, bags of potato chips and cookies off the shelves. Outside the store, groups of surly-looking teen-agers, their dark hair slicked back, lean against the railing. A couple of them light cigarettes.

School officials call it “open campus.” Police call it their biggest daytime headache.

Police officials in Monterey Park, which borders the Mark Keppel campus, say they believe some of the students leaving campus don’t go home to eat peanut butter sandwiches or trot over to the market to play video games. They believe that some of the youngsters commit crimes.

In March, the latest month for which statistics are available, there were 15 residential burglaries in the 1.5-square-mile area bounded by Hellman Avenue, New Avenue, Atlantic Boulevard and Garvey Avenue. The area, known to police as Beat 2, lies just south of Mark Keppel High School.

It had the highest concentration of burglaries among the city’s four beats in March, Deputy Police Chief Dan Cross said.

Last month, the department beefed up lunchtime patrols after more than 200 residents--mostly from the Mark Keppel neighborhood--signed a petition urging the city to do something about the crime rate. Now, three black-and-whites roll through the area around noon, up from one car previously.

Despite complaints from police and neighbors, school officials are reluctant to do away with open campus, in which students are allowed to go anywhere they please for lunch, as long as they return.

For one thing, administrators said, the school does not have the facilities to offer lunch to all of its students. Mark Keppel Principal Rudy Chavez estimates that half of the 2,700 students leave school during the 51-minute period.

“It’s a tradition to have an open campus at Mark Keppel,” Chavez said. “We don’t have a fenced-in campus, and we don’t want one. Going off campus allows (students) to have interaction with the community. They have a right to be there. They live there.”

In addition to burglaries, police link the open campus to crime problems at the neighborhood’s graffiti-marked Sierra Vista Park, which is claimed as the turf of one of the city’s gangs.

But the department’s main neighborhood priority these days is stopping the burglaries.

Police say the area--with narrow alleys running between clusters of low-rise apartments and condos--is attractive prey to burglars, who typically enter through an open window or pry open a door when no one is home.

The crimes are unrelated to a spate of residential robberies that have plagued other sections of Monterey Park, in which victims were bound and gagged while their residences were ransacked for cash and valuables. Asian gangs have been linked to many of these robberies, which target upper-middle class Chinese and Vietnamese families living in the western part of Monterey Park.

In the case of the Mark Keppel neighborhood burglaries, many residents near the high school work during the day and can’t afford security systems, Cross said. Instead, they install wrought iron bars in their front windows--a cheaper, but less-reliable crime deterrent. A large number are new immigrants, unfamiliar with the neighborhood and consequently less inclined to spot prowlers, Cross said.

And some residents are vulnerable simply because of cultural differences: Asians, especially recent immigrants, are more reluctant to report crime or join Neighborhood Watch programs, police and residents say.

“They’re supposed to mind their own business,” said Mei-lin Leung, who lives in a condominium complex on North Alhambra Avenue near the school. “They’re not used to looking after each other. They’d feel they’re too nosy.”

Leung said she is surrounded by neighbors who have been hit once, twice, even three times by burglars over the past year. Leung’s own condo has been vandalized three times. Several months ago, someone shot a marble through the front window, shattering the glass, and passers-by hurled rocks through the window on two other occasions.

Another resident down the street, Mimi Lim, said at least five of the 11 units in her condominium complex, including one belonging to a Los Angeles police officer, have been burglarized. Last year, some youths set fire to a large tree outside her building, Lim said.

Males between the ages of 10 and 19 committed a higher number of burglaries in 1989 than any other age category, said Charlotte Rhea, a research analyst with the state Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics. Out of a total of 81,342 burglary arrests made that year, 28,566 were male teen-agers, she said.

To be sure, Cross said, teen-agers aren’t believed responsible for all the burglaries around Mark Keppel. But noisy throngs of students milling around the neighborhood can easily act as camouflage for any potential burglar--student or not--and make it nearly impossible for police to spot and nab burglars.

“Here goes three girls,” Lt. Jim Burks said on a recent school day, pointing to a group of students entering an apartment complex. “Do they live here or what? Are they going to see their boyfriends? Or going to steal?”