East County Tries to Explain Recent Violence : Crime: Some officials say events in Thousand Oaks and Simi are aberrant. Others say the cities are no longer as safe as they once were.

Four Thousand Oaks teen-agers are booked on charges that they stabbed another boy to death, and several others find themselves in trouble for beating up a classmate who stabbed one of their friends.

In Simi Valley, a father marks the arrival of Father’s Day by shooting his young son and daughter in the head, then killing himself. That follows the fatal shooting of a young Simi Valley bicyclist by a rival teen-ager.

And even the Los Angeles Police Department gets into the act, with 13 undercover officers cruising into eastern Ventura County, watching two gunmen rob a Newbury Park liquor store, then engaging in a shootout that wounds one robber and kills the other.

What’s wrong with this picture of an area that takes so much pride in the safety of its streets?

Statistically, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley are the second- and third-safest large cities in the United States. So why so much recent violence?

Opinions differ.

Some say the Ventura County border is no longer proof against Los Angeles-strength crime that is increasingly imported by freeway.

Some blame TV, movies, music videos and pop tunes for glamorizing the cult of knife and gun.

And some say recent violence in the east county is just a symptom of life in America, where random, sporadic explosions bloody the otherwise quiet streets.

“I think most of them are unique occurrences,” said Simi Valley acting Police Chief Richard Wright. “If there’s any trend, it would probably relate to a general increase in violence in society. . . . We are still one of the safest cities in the country, and there hasn’t been any change in that.”

Ventura County Supervisor Frank Schillo agreed.

While Monday’s bloody Newbury Park shootout between armed robbers from the San Fernando Valley and LAPD officers was freeway-imported crime, Schillo said, May’s teen-age assaults were unrelated youth violence.

But numbers, Schillo warned, can lull.

“Thousand Oaks sometimes gets smug about the fact that it’s No. 1 and has a low crime rate, but there’s still a lot of crime,” said Schillo, who represents Thousand Oaks. “We have to be more and more careful because those numbers are creeping up.”

And while explanations for the spate of deaths vary, civic leaders, police commanders and academics agreed last week that violent crime is coming increasingly from one virulent source: young people, ages 14 to 20.

“This is something that’s going to occur more frequently as time goes on,” said Cal Lutheran University professor Robert Meadows. “I think we’re going to see more random violence because we’re going to see a lot more youth. The population base is growing, and kids are growing up.”

As the juvenile population expands, Meadows said, societal changes are weakening the main force that keeps it under control: parents.

“There’s a lot of frustrated kids out there, and it comes from a lot of factors, like broken homes,” Meadows said. “I think a lot of parents fail to recognize that their children may be having problems, and try to conceal it and make excuses for deviant or antisocial behavior.”

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Many of the violent crimes committed by juveniles and adults are driven by drug use, he said.

Drug arrests of juveniles in the sheriff’s jurisdiction alone have increased 1,000% since 1991, because drug prices dropped, police cracked down on young offenders and more teen-agers began brushing off the “just say no” bromides.

While the rate of violent crime is dropping, the proportion of crimes committed by young people is rising, said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Kathy Kemp. “Safe” cities such as Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, she predicted, will be increasingly hard-hit.

“The Baby Boomers had babies, and that population is going to expand,” said Kemp, who acts as Thousand Oaks’ chief of police. “And if we don’t take strong steps to make sure we have an adequate response to it, even safe communities are going to be impacted by violent crime.”

Many of the factors bending teen-age morals are hard to control.

The most powerful, said Thousand Oaks Mayor Jaime Zukowski, is mass media leading youth to believe that violence solves problems or wins respect.

“You can’t go into a pizza parlor without your youngest toddler wanting to step up to a game whose main purpose is killing other people,” Zukowski said. “Now there’s entertainment where kids of all ages and adults put on gear to shoot each other with lasers. The lights make them all look like enemies, and the humanity is out of it. . . . [It’s] a game that, the more you annihilate, the better you are at it.”

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True, says Prof. Meadows, violent pop culture is feeding young imaginations. Otherwise well-behaved middle-class youth, who lack confidence and caring parents, he said, are getting sucked in.

“A lot of kids get a thrill out of this violence,” Meadows said. “It’s all around you, in the movies coming out, the TV shows. A lot of kids pick up on that, and it kind of inflames their instincts.”

The price of violence and the damage it does, said Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton, have become devalued.

He pointed to the bicyclist who explained he only intended to scare a rival gang member with the .22-caliber bullet that proved fatal.

“That’s what kids don’t understand, is that you can kill somebody with a knife, you can kill somebody with a .22, you can kill somebody with a stick or a baseball bat,” Stratton said. “We have people who don’t really understand that there are repercussions, and that you really can’t hurt and kill people.”

Stratton and other officials agreed that everyone--parents, teachers, churches, doctors, psychologists and government as well as police--must work together against the rise in violent crime in east Ventura County.

In the meantime, they said--while it is becoming popular to blame pop culture and poor parenting--an increase in violent crime may also be merely the price Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks must pay for their rising populations.

“The city of Simi and the city of Thousand Oaks have crossed that threshold of 100,000 [people],” said Cmdr. Kemp. “Older communities, by the time they reach 100,000--it crosses the line where you start to experience what people call big-city crime.”