Behind the Violent Acts of Vandalism

They pillaged and plundered, sparing little at Sunny Hills High School. Besides the 100 shattered windows, battered computers and ransacked classrooms, they also went after the heart of the Fullerton school, damaging a 25-year-old athletic trophy, old photos and other mementos.

That was in January. A month later, at a different campus, a different squad of invaders smashed lights and splattered paint through the halls of La Puente High School. Then they desecrated the senior wall, drenching the mounted names of graduating seniors with paint and gouging the school’s 36-year-old mosaic insignia.

And last Sunday, yet another band of teens from suburban Orange County neighborhoods--one held responsible for a five-week vandalism spree that cost an estimated $100,000--was caught ripping out mailboxes and throwing them through windows in Orange, police say. It was the latest in a series of crimes notable for their extreme nastiness.

At one neighborhood or campus after another around Southern California, especially vicious acts of vandalism being committed by teens are adding up: $50,000 at Sunny Hills, $25,000 at La Puente, $9,000 at Villa Park High School last month, $20,000 in a spree in the San Fernando Valley last year.

“It’s what I see as mean-spirited vandalism,” said Supt. James A. Fleming of the Capistrano Unified School District, who said the incidents have frequently come in bunches.

The spurt of vandalism comes even as national and statewide arrest figures show teen crime dropping in all categories--including vandalism.

“The larger general population of youth is becoming more law abiding than they were a generation ago,” said Mike Males, a social ecology researcher at UC Irvine who has studied juvenile delinquency.

Yet to some educators and authorities, the declining vandalism rate oddly seems to be accompanied by spikes of angry teenage assaults on campuses and neighborhoods, acts of a group of disaffected teens that stand out all the more from the overall improvement in general teen citizenship.

“I don’t think we’re an isolated case,” said Phyllis Wiersma, principal at La Puente High School, where vandals dumped so much paint into the swimming pool that authorities couldn’t see a golf cart that had been pushed into the deep end.

Perpetrators of such crimes, Wiersma said, seem to be getting even “bolder and more anti-social” than in the past.

“Every once in a while, you’ll have more significant acts of vandalism that seem more severe,” said Michael F. Escalante, superintendent of the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, where Sunny Hill High School was damaged in January.

On live television, Southern California viewers watched the Whittier High School gymnasium burning in a Feb. 14 blaze that caused nearly $1 million in damage but has not been solved. Fire investigators said witnesses reported seeing juveniles running from the scene as the smoke began to billow.

Concerned about the plague of vandalism, Los Angeles County supervisors are considering $5,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the vandals. They are also weighing whether to bill the parents of the perpetrators if the suspects turn out to be minors.

“These were really bad cases of vandalism, particularly mean,” said John Wallace, an aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, who supports the concept of the rewards.

But criminal justice experts said all classes of crime have their particularly heinous examples, some coming in clusters, that do not necessarily signal a new turn in crime rates.

“The real truth of the matter [is that this] could be simply coincidental,” said Bob Gannon, in charge of juvenile court cases for the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Bunni Tobias, a Lake Forest educational psychologist, wonders if some kids feel increasingly hostile to schools that cut the kinds of programs that used to help marginal students stay involved.

“Our schools are cutting back financially and they’re cutting the programs that students who aren’t academically inclined identify with: music, wood shop, athletics,” Tobias said. “For the student who doesn’t do well in academics, they feel failure every single day.”

Despite a spate of destructive and highly publicized incidents, many local authorities and school officials believe that teens, overall, are better behaved than in the past.

“The average child out there . . . is working hard and doing well,” said Fleming of the Capistrano schools.

Statistics bear out this view: vandalism rates--like those for other youth crimes--rose through the 1980s and early 1990s but have declined since 1995.

In the neighborhoods where teens sometimes aim their destructive anger, the visible incidents may mislead residents into thinking vandalism overall is on the rise, researchers such as Males said.

“In the ‘70s, there was a lot of youth crime,” he said. “If people think this era is worse, they just don’t remember the past.”

Psychologist Tobias, a former school official, once studied a group of 40 of the most troubled and trouble-making teens at an Irvine school.

“One’s dad made her scrub the kitchen floor with ammonia,” Tobias said. “One had a parent who was molesting him. Some had biochemical problems. Some were not good at academics.

“Every one of those kids had something going on that was causing them to stress.”

And a combination of stress and repeated failure, she said, “really sets kids off against the school.”

Times staff writers Liz Seymour and Jeff Gottlieb contributed to this report.