4 teenaged girls are arrested after they figured out what clothes and jewelry they wanted and which celebrities houses to break into to get them.

The L.A. Times reports:

... Rachel Lee, 19; Diana Tamayo, 19; Courtney Ames, 18; and Alexis Neiers, 18 ... were arrested last week on suspicion of burglary in several of the cases....

Most of the group were classmates at Indian Hills High School, a continuation campus in Agoura Hills, set atop a leafy incline in an upscale neighborhood next to a traditional high school. BMWs and Audis were parked in the student lot Monday, and some of the nearby roads mark off horse trails for equestrians.

So... apparently children of privilege. How could this happen?

Blair Berk, an attorney who represents some of the victims, blamed "paparazzi shots and magazine coverage" for "increasingly prying into the private homes, schools and personal possessions of stars."

"There are only so many shot of a star's back gate before someone, be it a stalker or burglar, goes through it," Berk said.

Damned paparazzi, enabling us to see things we might want. Once you see what you want and where it is, it's just a short leap to stealing it.

At least one of the accused had her own aspirations for television stardom. Neiers was set to appear with her family in a reality-TV pilot about aspiring actresses on the cable network E!, and she was arrested on the set of the show, police said....

Reality is really biting us in the ass this month, isn't it? Balloon Boy, and now this. Is everybody in L.A. working on a reality show? Too bad criminal activity — so far, at least — hasn't become acceptable subject matter for reality TV shows. But the line between crime and reality shows is getting blurred. There seems to be some serious overlap in the kinds of people that are draw to the 2 things.

A young woman who identified herself as Neiers' sister said at the family's Thousand Oaks home Monday that the accusations are untrue. "My family is in so much debt," she said. "If this TV show falls through, you don't know how bad this is going to be."

How many families out there are hanging by the thread of a possible TV show? All it takes is one kid in the family to screw up... or can they edit out that kid — kind of like the way Aimee Osbourne was kept out of "The Osbournes" — except that Aimee was the sensible person who simply preferred not to be a reality show kid.