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Last modified: Saturday, November 22, 2008 8:12 PM PST
Ontario police battle vandalism
BY JESSICA KELLER
ARGUS OBSERVER
ONTARIO — Three vehicle vandalism incidents Aug. 26, which Ontario Police Department officers thought were linked, have yet to be solved, but efforts to unravel other similar crimes in the city met with more success, according to law enforcement officials.
Ontario Police Chief Mike Kee said recently, the city has had 140 vehicle vandalism incidents reported since Jan. 1. Vandalism, however, is a category that can keep Ontario police officers fairly busy because vandalism incidents can fall into a number of different categories.
“You know, all the graffiti gets classified as vandalism,” Kee said. “Vehicle vandalism is everything from a car getting keyed at the high school to somebody putting sugar in a car’s gas tank. And there’s all different reasons for these things happening.”
In many cases, such as with the vehicle vandalism where nothing was stolen, Kee said, the crimes appear to be staged at random, and he believes the person or people responsible drive around “looking for things to tear up.”
He said a good example of that was when a Vale youth targeted several cars parked in Lion’s Park at the beginning of August, peppering a number of cars with BB gun pellets and causing significant damage.
In addition to vehicle vandalism, other vandalism categories include nonresidential and residential.
“We’re never going to get rid of it because, like I said, there’s myriad of reasons this happens,” Kee said. “I guess it just depends on who’s doing the vandalism.”
He said, in some situations, people are caught because the perpetrators tell the victims they were responsible, and some vandalism can be traced back to an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse. Kee said, many more, however, are random and difficult to solve without anybody coming forward and helping police.
“And sometimes we just purely luck out, like we did in the cars in the park,” Kee said, adding in that situation somebody called police to report the incident and provided a description.
The string of vehicle vandalism Aug. 26, in which three separate vehicles had their windows broken, and the incidents were all reported separately, are less likely to be solved.
“We can’t do this without people helping us,” he said.
Of all the vandalism cases in Ontario currently, Kee said graffiti, much of which is tied with illegal gangs, is the most prevalent.
Kee said there are weeks when the city’s ordinance officer, who deals with most graffiti vandalism cases, can file reports for more than five incidents a week.
“Over a year-long period, five or six cases in a week really adds up, and a lot of weeks we have more than five or six cases,” Kee said, adding between Nov. 7 and last week, the ordinance officer handled five different graffiti reports.
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