>>SOUTHERN INDIANA —  

I couldn’t get my mail the other day, because I couldn’t find the mailbox. It was laying on the ground about 15 feet from its usual location.

It was completely smashed and the door was missing.

We had just replaced the mailbox and its post about a month ago, when a driver mowed it down along with three nearby mailboxes.

Last time, I was sure it was vandalism, since I saw other mailboxes damaged farther down the highway. This time, I’m not as certain. The road was icy and our mailbox is on a curve, right in the middle of the trajectory an out-of-control vehicle would follow.

Vandalism, however, is a problem in Southern Indiana, as well as throughout the nation, with trains, buses, schools, parks, playgrounds, public buildings and yes, mailboxes, being common targets.

When we lived on a busy road in Florida, our mailbox was destroyed twice by people playing “mailbox baseball.” This act of vandalism, as portrayed in the movie “Stand by Me,” involves someone in a car using a baseball bat to smash roadside mailboxes.

Even though destroying mailboxes is a federal offense, punishable by a fine and jail time, it still seems to be a popular pastime in some areas. We know some folks locally who have had their mailbox destroyed so many times that they built a portable one that they wheel out to the road every day and then bring back after the mail is delivered.

They resorted to this desperate measure after the post office refused to bless the virtually indestructible mail receptacle they had tried to construct. Such “target-hardening” is one approach to vandalism, but it can backfire if the vandals view it as a challenge.

Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that the cost of vandalism in the United States ranged from $2 billion to $10 billion annually, depending upon whether you factor in taxes, repair costs and insurance.

Even this figure may be conservative, since vandalism is usually underreported and often viewed as just part of the cost of doing business. More recently, the cost of cleaning up graffiti alone has been estimated at $15 billion to $18 billion annually. The term “vandal” is taken from the fifth-century Germanic tribe, which the Romans accused of wantonly destroying anything of beauty or value.           

Most people have trouble understanding such senseless violence. Back in high school, I had a friend, Dennis, who was prone to random acts of opportunistic vandalism. Once after football practice, when the school was empty, he broke a water pipe which flooded the cafeteria.

Later in college, after going fishing one August day, he stopped by the campus late at night to stuff a large funky carp in the book return slot at the university library. Years later, these acts are still incomprehensible and simply frightening to me.

Graffiti is probably the most common form of vandalism today. It can be seen on buildings, overpasses and especially train cars. When it began to proliferate in New York City in the 1970s, social scientists started looking for possible motivations. British sociologist Stanley Cohen devised a classification of six basic types of vandalism:

1. Acquisitive vandalism is damage committed in order to obtain property or money. For example, thugs may be paid to vandalize a business in order to extort the owner.

2. Tactical vandalism is damage used to achieve some other goal, such as breaking a piece of equipment, to get a rest break at work.

3. Ideological vandalism is used to advocate for a particular social or political cause. For example, in June 2005, 24 people were arrested for spray-painting graffiti on the Indiana Capitol building to protest the extension of Interstate 69.

4. Vindictive vandalism is damage done to seek revenge. Some school vandalism may be an attempt to get back at authorities for perceived injustices. Keying — scratching a car’s paint with a key — or flattening someone’s tires are common forms of targeted vindictive vandalism.

5. Play vandalism is committed as part of an antisocial game or competition, such as who can hit the street lamp the most times or who can break the most windows. The playful World War II “Killroy was here” graffiti with its distinctive doodle of a face with a nose peaking over a wall, also falls into this category.

6. Malicious vandalism is damage such as Dennis committed and is usually an expression of rage or frustration.

Cohen also says vandalism can be motivated by boredom, the need for catharsis or just to seek recognition. Street gangs often use graffiti as their newspaper or billboard.

Symbols may mark the gang’s power and status, as well as its territory or “turf.” Graffiti may be used to advertise that drugs are being sold or to memorialize a dead member. Sometimes, it is used as a threat of warning to others that they are not welcome in a particular neighborhood.

Minor property crimes is mainly the province of males between the ages of 15 and 21. Favorite targets often are already-damaged objects.

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cracked down on vandalism as a main feature of his successful 1990s anti-crime campaign. He believed that a strong response to nonviolent “quality-of-life” crimes, such as vandalism, would eventually decrease violent crime as well. This is the “Broken Windows Theory” devised by Rutgers University criminologist George L. Kelling, which is based on research that demonstrated that vandalized environments — areas with many broken windows — were associated with increases in crimes of all sorts. Giuliani directed his police to aggressively target “Squeegee men,” subway fare violators, as well as graffiti crews and other vandals.

Today, the most common ways to address vandalism are architectural solutions such as target hardening, access control, target removal, increased surveillance, education, publicity, counseling and increased enforcement of rules and consequences. The latest hi-tech weapon to combat vandalism is an iPhone application.

According to USA Today, this software allows people to photograph graffiti with their iPhone camera and transmit the image to a remote database. The location is fixed using the phone’s GPS. In participating cities, an electronic work order is then created and technicians are dispatched to the scene with matching paint to cover up the graffiti.

Images are classified and mapped so police can identify likely suspects. Ironically, there is another iPhone application — DustTag — that actually helps you create your own custom three-dimensional graffiti tag (personal logo).

Vandalism, it is argued, may be a gateway to more serious crime or violence. Perhaps there is something to this. My friend Dennis never lived to see the iPhone applications. He ended up getting shot to death in a bar fight when he was in his 20s.