Crimes Against Women Climb in San Diego : Violence: The city, which depends heavily on tourism, has had its image darkened by a serial killer case and three shootings involving estranged lovers.

On the eve of the biggest murder trial in the city’s history, in which a former Navy man is accused of stabbing to death six young women, San Diego has been plagued with an unusually high number of crimes against women.

In three prominent cases, women were gunned down in public by estranged lovers, whom prosecutors say had stalked their victims for months. All three women had repeatedly obtained restraining orders, which proved useless.

The cases have prompted authorities to choose San Diego as the third city in the nation--and the first big city--for a pilot program aimed at deterring stalkers. Chronic violators of restraining orders will be required to wear ankle bracelets that trigger an alarm within 500 yards of a potential victim’s home.

But the spate of crimes against women is hardly limited to stalking incidents.

In another high-profile case with a bizarre twist, a former city councilman was convicted and sent to jail last month for beating up his wife. During the trial, the ex-councilman, a lawyer, cross-examined his wife about the beating.

In the midst of all this, five area clinics, four of which perform abortions, were sprayed with a foul-smelling acid in mid-March, forcing evacuations and sending several people to the hospital.

And authorities have grown concerned about a wave of domestic violence that has hit the migrant labor camps of north San Diego County. Many say the problem has existed for years.

Law-enforcement experts and feminists stop short of calling violence against women a trend but note that it comes at a delicate time in the city’s history, when the economy has put many out of work.

“Anybody who believes there isn’t a link between our rise in domestic violence and bad economic times is just being naive,” said Sgt. Anne O’Dell, coordinator of the domestic violence unit of the San Diego Police Department. “I’m not saying it’s the cause of such violence, but there are clearly tangible links.”

In a city where tourism dollars have never been more important, some believe the violence against women threatens to cut into San Diego’s image.

“Women here have long been used as objects of sexual display, to sell San Diego as an exciting resort in which to visit and play,” said Kathleen Jones, chairwoman of the department of women’s studies at San Diego State University. “But that’s in contrast to the number of recent incidents and to the way many women feel. In other words, for whom is this place so beautiful?”

Jones cited the mood on her campus, where the student newspaper, the Daily Aztec, recently published a letter from a senior undergraduate who wrote in support of the fatal shooting of an abortion doctor in Florida.

“I am rejoicing for Dr. David Gunn, the commandant of a concentration camp for the unborn, who was killed,” wrote Mark Williams. “Michael Griffin, the freedom fighter who shot Commandant Gunn, has set an example that should be emulated and will be emulated. Abortionists are guilty of crimes against humanity. Since the government will not punish these murderers--the people will.”

At the same time, the city’s oldest institution, the military, is mired in a period of re-examination after the Tailhook sex scandal and amid the ongoing debate over the issue of gays in the military. This, experts say, only adds to underlying tension in a city that prides itself on being a Navy town.

In the most recent statistics, the city reported a 20% increase in domestic violence cases from 1991 to 1992, and this year’s figures are apt to climb considerably higher, said Cordelia Ryan, director of battered women’s services for the YWCA.

For a city of San Diego’s size--the sixth largest in the country at 1.1 million people--Ryan called such an increase dramatic.

“Unfortunately, it seems as though San Diego is on the cutting edge of family violence,” said Betty White, community education specialist for the Center for Women’s Studies and Services, which operates a 24-hour hot line for victims of rape and domestic violence.

White and others point to the city’s recent high-profile cases, some of which have made national headlines, and note that most carry a sexual-assault or family-violence connotation.

Later this month, opening arguments are scheduled to begin in the murder trial of Cleophus Prince Jr., a former Navy machinist who is accused of stabbing to death six young women between January and September of 1990, setting off the largest police manhunt in San Diego history.

The so-called Clairemont Killer case, referring to the neighborhood where three of the slayings took place, terrorized the city for almost a year; many women kept guns or baseball bats by their bedsides.

In the meantime, the Metro Homicide Task Force recently disbanded after announcing that it had solved all but 16 of the murders of 43 prostitutes.

“Because this is a tourist town, and one increasingly dependent on tourist dollars, there’s more of a drive here to hide the crime and the violence,” said artist Deborah Small, who recently staged a controversial exhibit about the unsolved prostitute murders. “It’s more image-conscious than most of the cities I know about.”

O’Dell agreed that domestic violence cases have shown a sharp increase in San Diego but what the figures show, in part, she said, is that the Police Department is being more vigilant about stopping such crimes.

San Diego is one of the few cities in the country whose Police Department has its own domestic violence unit, which O’Dell said leads to higher statistics. Such figures are also higher, she said, in Quincy, Mass., and Louisville, Ky., which have similar units.

She admitted, however, that the unit was formed partly because of the high incidence of domestic violence crimes.

Some progress has been made. Although such crimes increased sharply last year, domestic violence homicides declined 54% from 1991 to 1992, said O’Dell, whose unit includes 20 detectives and three sergeants.

“San Diego is hardly unique when it comes to domestic violence,” she said. “It may look that way at times because our officers don’t . . . whitewash it. We don’t look the other way. We write up all of the cases, which our officers are trained to look for.”

Still, O’Dell said the region’s economic woes continue to be a factor in inflaming conditions that lead to such crimes.

“The world is changing, and relatively quickly, and men and women are confused. That couldn’t be more apparent than in a military town,” said Ashley Phillips, executive director of Womancare, a feminist clinic targeted in the recent butyric acid attack. “Whereas women are socialized to be more flexible and negotiate around what they think the rules are, many men feel uncomfortable and lack the resources to discover a nonviolent solution.”

White, of the Center for Women’s Studies and Services, said San Diego, like the rest of California, has a sad distinction.

“Many come here to explore the myth of the Golden West,” she said. “They come here convinced life will be better. And when it isn’t, they’re not only without a job, they don’t have the support group from back home either. I fear San Diego and a lot of other cities in California will have to cope with such problems for a long time to come.”