I can't begin to remember all the day shifts I spent going from one vandalism report to another vandalism report, car windows shot out with BB's or pellets, sometimes a hundred or more at a time. Turned in reports by the stack at the end of a shift with no lunch break, no coffee, no doughnuts.
Mailboxes? Yeah, smashed with a baseball bat, or blown up with M80's (stick the fuse through a lit cigarette, makes a good 5-7 minute time delay fuse, allowing easy escape prior to mailboxes starting to explode all down the street).
For a while we dealt with a guy who liked to place a gallon milk jug filled with gasoline under a parked car, plastic wrap over the opening, bundle of kitchen matches taped over the plastic wrap, and the cigarette delay fuse igniting the matches. Totally destroys a car, frequently exploding the gas tank. Don't recall that we ever got that guy.
Potato stuffed into the exhaust pipe of a parked car, owner comes out and tries to start the car. Nine times out of ten the car just won't start due to excessive back pressure. But one in ten cars will have enough compression to fire, blowing the potato out as a projectile that will do serious damage to anything it hits.
Caught a smash-and-grab burglar once, working a downtown shopping area, smash a window, grab a few handfuls of expensive stuff from the display, put it in a self-addressed envelope, and drop it into the mailbox down the block. Pretty smart, but when we caught him that unique MO tied him to over a dozen jobs and he went away for a few years. (NOTE TO SELF: Never again execute a search warrant on a USPS mail box! Way too much hassle.)
My favorite convenience store robbers were two teen brothers. Stop in back of the store, put up a ladder to the roof, then one would go in, rob the store, run around back, climb the ladder to the roof, pull the ladder up after him, then a few hours later the other brother came back to pick up the robber and ladder. Couple of inches of light snow, I followed the footprints out back, disappearing beside the impressions left by the ladder, with one set of tire tracks going down the alley. Sat on the alley from about midnight until 4:30AM, then caught them as they loaded up the ladder in the truck. Ended up clearing 8 armed robberies. (I remember several times that I followed footprints in fresh snow from the scene of a crime to a house where the bad guys were divvying up the loot).
Young cops weren't entirely above all of this. Pimps' cars found parked were entered and the heater/AC ducts sprayed full of Mace. Pimp jumps in his ride, cranks up the heater or AC, and a couple of blocks away wrecks the car. Street walkers working around downtown hotels sometimes found themselves targeted by water balloons or eggs from the hotel roof, then a few minutes later a couple of beat cops would slide out the service entrance at the back of the hotel, moving on to the next crime prevention exercise.
Other peoples' children. What to do with them?