Were you about to leave for work when you discovered your car tires have been slashed? Did you go outside to pick up the Sunday paper and found your house or car have been egged? Has anyone driven down your street and spray painted the curbside parked cars? Have your house or car windows been shot out by pellet guns? Has your curbside mailbox been bashed? Have your outside Christmas or Halloween decorations been damaged or destroyed? Consider yourself lucky if you have'nt been subjected to those kinds of vandalism.
If such acts are occurring in your upper middle-class or wealthy neighborhood, are the vandals young gang members from a run-down ghetto or barrio? Most likely not. Kids from impoverished neighborhoods tend to raise hell in the familiar surroundings of their own backyards. If they're not disadvantaged kids, then who are those vandals?
Those hoodlums are kids from your neighborhood, maybe even your own sons and daughters. They are spoiled brats running around at all hours of the night, having fun by intentionally making life miserable for many of their neighbors. Since they come from good church-going families and attend good schools, they do not see themselves as lawbreakers and do not consider their idea of fun as unlawful. Their attitude: Laws are for criminals, not for us.
Parents are largely to blame for their children's delinquent behavior. There is something fundamentally wrong in the way our kids are being raised today. They are spoiled rotten by parents who want them to have a better (wealthier) life than they themselves had. Just take a look at all the cars in the student parking lot of your local high school. Kids are allowed to run around at all hours in the cars their parents gave them. Parents obviously do not teach their kids that bad behavior can have unintended consequences.
Law enforcement is not blameless either. In most jurisdiction, criminal mischief (vandalism) is not high on the list of police priorities. It should be. In 1982, criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling developed the "Broken Windows" theory which held that cracking down on minor crimes, such as vandalism, created an atmosphere of law and order that discourages major crime. In New York City, all crimes, minor and major, were significantly reduced after NYPD adapted the Broken Windows concept.
The juvenile justice system is also to blame, its courts usually treating children from upper middle-class and wealthy families differently than the children of poor families. Kids from well-off families, who have been charged with criminal mischief, are too often treated with the proverbial slap on the wrist and leave the courtroom thumbing their noses at the system.
Some years ago, several kids were riding around in a rural area of Galveston County (Texas), leaning out the car windows while bashing curbside mailboxes with baseball bats. One of the youths, the son of a respected physician, was decapitated when his head struck one of the mailboxes. That put a stop to vandalism in the area, but only until the shock of his death wore off.
Police affiliated unarmed citizen patrols have been effective in reducing neighborhood crime. However, as long as kids believe they are not committing crimes but only having fun, their neighbors will continue to be vandalized. The fact that both mom and dad are working is no excuse for a lack of parental control.
What can be done to get our youths to understand that some forms of fun may be criminal? Parents must excercise full oversight of their chidrens' lives. They must teach their kids that laws are made for everyone and that there will be consequences for breaking those laws. The police and the courts must treat vandalism more seriously than as a mere youthful indiscretion.
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