The signs are there.
More graffiti has sprung up. Violent assaults and robberies are on the rise. Snohomish County prosecutors recently charged five teenagers, most students at Kamiak and Meadowdale High Schools, with felony assaults that police investigated for gang overtones.
As summer begins, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office is starting a countywide effort to assess the level of gang activity.
Recent events have a familiar ring for some people who helped keep youth gangs from growing here in the early 1990s.
“It’s deja vu,” Snohomish Police Chief John Turner said.
Turner was police chief in Mountlake Terrace the last time gangs began making inroads. He helped form a countywide youth gangs task force.
“My perception is that gang activity has been increasing in the last year or so,” Turner said.
Over the summer, the sheriff’s office plans to use its four schoolresource deputies to work with city police departments gathering information about gang members, their associates and their territories.
The deputies also will be asking people to provide information about gang activity in their neighborhoods.
“By the end of the summer we hope to have a good idea what we really have out there,” sheriff’s crime analysis detective Steve Haley said. “We can develop a better plan about what we’re going to do about it.”
Haley has been tracking gangs for about a year. He said he has found hundreds of people with ties to gangs in every city in the county.
“We want to do something about it before we’re in full crisis mode,” Haley said.
An assessment is an excellent way start to addressing any gang activity or perceived gang problems, said Martin Speckmaier of Comprehensive School Safety LLC in Seattle. The retired Edmonds police detective and school resource officer works with school districts around Puget Sound.
“For the sheriff’s office to take a unified approach and conduct an assessment is a very important step,” Speckmaier said.
It also will be critical for the community to talk about how it will define ganglike behavior and what needs to be done to prevent gangs from getting a foothold in the county, he said.
Dan Bond was a member of the county’s gang task force in the early 1990s.
Communities often try to deny they have any problems with gang activity, he said.
“If they acknowledge they have a problem, they have to do something. Most communities don’t know what to do,” said Bond, now a substance abuse prevention specialist for Island County.
The 1990s gang task force learned that police on their own can’t effectively fight gang problems, Bond said.
Parents, schools, youth advocates and community leaders need to join police in trying to help young people, he said.
‘Gangs fill a void’
If more kids are claiming to be in a gang – whether their claims are real or not – it’s likely that their needs aren’t being met, Bond said.
Police think that may be the case in Thursday’s arrest of a 14-year-old boy at Olympic View Middle School in Mukilteo.
The boy allegedly threatened two classmates, telling them that if they didn’t join his gang they’d die, Mukilteo Cmdr. Chuck Macklin said.
The boy was carrying a steak knife. He was arrested at school for investigation of felony harassment, Macklin said.
The boy told police he’s been a member of a notorious Central American gang since he was 6 years old.
That’s unlikely, Macklin said.
Yet something else may be going on. Young people may claim gang affiliation as a way to intimidate others or out of need to identify with a group.
“Gangs fill a void for kids,” Turner said.
While in Mountlake Terrace, Turner helped start The Neutral Zone, a weekend activity center for teens. Part of the motivation was to draw kids in, build relationships and keep them away from gangs, he said.
The center, which was housed inside Scriber Lake High School, recently closed because the building is to be torn down to make room for a new district office.
Recently appointed Snohomish police chief, Turner this summer plans to start teen activity nights on Fridays. He believes it will help build bridges between police officers and Snohomish youth.
“We need to do a better job bonding with the community, particularly the young people,” Turner said.
Mukilteo Mayor Joe Marine also is making efforts to reach out to the young people after a violent assault outside Kamiak High School last month.
Marine said he wants forums with students in the fall to talk about issues facing teenagers.
Two Kamiak students, both 16, recently were charged with felony second-degree assault in connection with a May 15 beating across from the school.
Prosecutors allege that the teens, one from Mukilteo and the other from Lynnwood, attacked a 15-year-old boy. The Kamiak freshman was repeatedly punched and kneed in the face. He suffered a broken bone in his face.
The boy told police that he expected to fight someone else that day to settle a dispute over a girl. Instead, he said, the car he was in was surrounded by a large crowd and the two suspects attacked him. He told police he believed the assailants belonged to a gang, and he also claimed gang ties himself.
Detectives said they never found any evidence that supported the boy’s gang claims. The suspects and others who know them denied gang affiliation, Mukilteo detective Lance Smith said.
More than 100 students watched the beating. At least one student used his cell phone to videotape the assault, according to court records. Later the boy told police he’d accidentally erased the footage while trying to save it to a computer, Smith said.
A witness told police the boy erased the fight video after pressure from classmates, court records said.
Not so easy to spot
Lynnwood police Sgt. T.J. Brooks, who has been tracking gangs in the city for nearly two decades, said more needs to be done to educate police officers and the public about how to identify gang members. It is more complex than how a person dresses, he said.
Prosecutors are now handling a Lynnwood case involving three teenagers, including two Meadowdale High School students.
The trio were arrested in February after a serious assault. One of the teens claimed he was the leader of Flipside 23 and another had the gang’s name tattooed on his forearms.
Flipside 23 is a predominantly Asian offshoot of the Bloods gang. Members have been linked to a homicide, as well as numerous assaults and robberies around the county, according to court documents.
The three boys were charged with felony second-degree assault. Prosecutors allege they punched a classmate, whipped him with his own necklace and spit on him, court records show. The victim told police he’d made disparaging remarks about the gang at school, according to court records.
Deputy prosecutor John Stansell, who spent about four years as lead juvenile prosecutor in Snohomish County, said he noticed increasing numbers of young people claiming gang affiliation.
However, he said he didn’t see a corresponding spike in gang-related crime involving juvenile defendants.
“We haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “But we probably will.”
Reporter Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463 or hefley@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
