by POLLY KEARY, EDITOR

Unlike more urban Everett, the towns of the Sky Valley are not yet host to the huge, organized gangs that operate up and down the west coast, trading in drugs and stolen goods. But that doesn’t mean that the Sky Valley is free of gangs. Indeed, according to gang specialists, there are several smaller gangs of youths that have created problems for educators and police locally in recent years, and that, they say, is not to be taken lightly.

WHO THEY ARE

“East County as a whole has four or five gangs running around out there, Monroe has two or three,” said Steve Haley of the Snohomish County Gang Task Force. “The biggest one is probably 30 teenagers.”

Up valley, Gold Bar and Sultan have at least two gangs, according to Dave Woods, the Director of the Sultan Volunteers of America. “The Brown Pride Soldiers are in town, they have been here a couple years,” he said. “And there’s the Gold Bar Crips.”

In Monroe, according to gang specialist officer Spencer Robinson, one local youth gang called itself the South Side Killers, and there have been others. “They are mostly young adults,” said Robinson. “We’ve had MS-13 tagging in town before, but I don’t know that we have any of them around on a permanent basis.”

MS-13 is one of several huge international gangs, including the Surenos and Norenos, as well as their more famous forebearers, the Crips and the Bloods of L.A., that have been involved with drugs, murder and other crime nationwide.
But although MS-13 tagging, or gang graffiti has appeared locally, and although a Gold Bar gang is using the name “Crips,” the area gangs of which law enforcement is aware are home grown, according to Haley, who gave a talk on the subject Thursday at the Sultan Middle School.

“Gangs made of local kids might say, we want to be the Monroe Crips, they can. No one is going to drive up from L.A. and make them quit. But if you went to L.A., they wouldn’t know who the Monroe Crips were.”

WHAT THEY DO

But just because they are not part of a large crime syndicate doesn’t mean they don’t cause trouble, said Haley. One of the biggest public nuisances associated with youth gangs is graffiti, called tagging in gang parlance.

“Tagging in general means, I’m claiming this territory,” said Haley. “To you and I, it’s just someone vandalizing that wall, but to a gang member who knows how to read it, it can be a challenge.”

And it can lead to violence. “One gang will come and tag one area, and then there are retaliating tags from the other gang, then there have been fights,” said Haley.

Tagging initiated some violence around the Gold Bar area, said Woods. “Some Brown Pride Soldiers went to Gold Bar and started tagging,” he said. “And then a BPS attacked a GBC outside the Hoot Owl.”

Other things kids might do include selling small amounts of marijuana or other narcotics, said Robinson.

According to former Sultan Police Chief Fred Walser, gangs would sometimes “beat in” a new member, a brutal form of initiation in which the new member submitted to a beating given by the rest of the gang. And sometimes, said Haley, they get involved in more serious crimes like burglary.

And at least once, some kids practiced extortion briefly on Turk Trail, a paved trail that many Sultan students used to walk to and from school, said Woods.
“Last spring they took over the Turk Trail and started charging kids 50 cents to go through,” he said. “Because of that, Turk Trail is closed.”

WHY THEY DO IT

“Money, power and respect,” said Robinson. “They want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves.” There isn’t a lot of financial incentive for gang membership locally, and power is certainly limited, but the sense of belonging can be all the incentive that is needed.

The idea of gang membership may arise from music or movies, and it may arise from contact with members of larger gangs from outside the area.
“There’s a lot of California people who have moved here from the Imperial Beach area, San Diego and L.A., and have brought their gang culture with them,” said Robinson. Concerned families with a kid in a gang often flee the city for rural life, and that kid often passes that culture on to those in his or her new city, he said.

SOLUTIONS

In Monroe, the membership of the South Side Killers seems to have tailed off, in large part to a decisive police response, said Robinson. “We’ve made several arrests,” he said. “Most of the individuals have been arrested and charged with malicious mischief type crimes.”

Part of the police strategy also focused heavily on education and cooperation with the community, an approach called direct enforcement. “During the spring and midsummer, I was getting graffiti reports on a daily basis, but since direct enforcement, it’s dropped off,” he said. “We were able to get a team of officers together solely focused on malicious mischief crimes. Then we got the stakeholders together and told them what was going on, and then went out and educated businesses, making sure they knew about a new ordinance (requiring graffiti victims to quickly remove the paint, as graffiti builds were it is allowed to stay) and educated stores that selling spray paint and markers to kids was not allowed.”

In Sultan, the most effective solution Walser ever saw was having a cop in school. There, for a time, officer Andy Williams went to school with the kids and made himself available, such as playing soccer with kids at lunch. “He got the kids’ confidence,” said Walser. “Kids told him things.” Three child abuse cases, one marijuana grow operation, several drug cases and cases of neglect came from that confidence, he said. “Our crime rate actually went down,” he said.

The funding for the cop in school went away following the passage of initiatives that cut vehicle license tabs and capped property taxes, he said. But he thinks the program should come back.

Getting kids involved in sports, getting them jobs, and getting them educated may offer kids other routes to money, respect and belonging, said Robinson. “Want to be part of something bigger than you? Get on the football team,” he said. “Want respect? Get an education. Want money? We’ll help you get a job.”

And Haley said that when parents start to notice negative changes in a child, watch for signs of gang membership such as a gang’s logo written on school supplies and clothes, a preference for certain colors of clothes, and hanging out with other kids who do the same.

Current Sultan interim Police Chief Rick Hawkins said that gang activity such as tagging in the area has pretty much subsided. What is most important, he said, is addressing drug and alcohol use in kids.

In the end, the Sky Valley can’t be described as having a gang problem, said Robinson. But having kids who act like gangs is a problem all its own. “Would I say we have a gang problem? No,” he said. “Do we have youth who want to emulate gangs? Yes, we do.

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