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Law enforcement and social service officials in Montgomery and Prince George's counties are expecting a $2.7 million federal grant that will increase anti-gang enforcement and education efforts in both counties later this fall.

Most of the money will initially be concentrated on the border between the two counties from the Takoma Park/Langley Park Crossroads up through Silver Spring, White Oak and Briggs Chaney in Montgomery County.

"There's a federal role here, because it's not just one jurisdiction, it's several; gang activity can move across borders," said U.S. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen Jr. (D-Dist. 8) of Kensington. "What this does is create a mechanism for bringing the law enforcement agencies and federal agencies together; ... that obviously improves cooperation and coordination to address this common threat."

After hearing about the funds from colleagues in Northern Virginia, Van Hollen said he joined U.S. Reps. Donna F. Edwards (D-Dist.4) and Steny H. Hoyer (D-Dist. 5) to meet with Montgomery and Prince George's county police chiefs in 2007. The group discussed the ongoing anti-gang efforts in both counties and the possibility of receiving the extra funds, which were applied for through a federal appropriations bill that was approved last December, Van Hollen said.

Of the $1.3 million to be received by Montgomery County, about $400,000 is planned for the county's Department of Health and Human Services for outreach and counseling services for at-risk youth, while the remainder will fund four new police gang investigators: a sergeant and two county investigators, along with an investigator in the city of Takoma Park's police department, according to Capt. David Gillespie, director of the Montgomery County Police Department's Special Investigations Division.

The grant will also fund a Montgomery County Department of Corrections officer to receive training as a specialist in gangs to keep track of gang members behind bars, as well as increased funding for the Montgomery County State's Attorney's gang prosecution section, Gillespie said.

Of the total fund, roughly 11 percent will be directed toward streamlining intelligence sharing between police jurisdictions, 50 percent will fund prevention and suppression activities by police and the rest will fund efforts to keep youth from joining gangs and rescue programs to help current gang members leave the criminal groups, Van Hollen said.

"The allocation among these different missions will change somewhat from year to year depending on the circumstances," he explained, saying the funds will be redirected to match trends. "That's why you want to create a structure that allows local law enforcement and those agencies that provide such services to remain flexible over time."

Working together

To handle a growing gang problem on both sides of the border, Montgomery police first formed the Joint County Gang Prevention Task Force with Prince George's County police in February 2004. The task force released a 25-page final report in September 2004.

Among other things, the report recommended a massive public awareness campaign aimed at preventing youth involvement in gangs and a standardized information collection and data-management system to ensure police in both counties share intelligence gathered on gangs, the report stated.

As a result of the recommendations, coupled with a timely grant from the federal government, a central gang unit was formed under the Montgomery County Police Department's SID to add even more officers to the steadily growing ranks of gang investigators spread across each of the county's six police districts, according to Gillespie. Now even more positions are being funded.

"This is another step in the right direction," Gillespie said. "It's great to make a few phone calls now and then, but we need to meet on a regular basis and go out there and hit the pavement together to really make an impact on the problem at the ground level. This task force will help us do that."

Jeffrey Wennar, a deputy state's attorney in the five-member gang prosecution unit of the Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office, agreed with Gillespie's assessment.

"It just behooves everybody to work together to deal with the problem," Wennar said Thursday. "If you're not sharing information, then you're not getting information."

Keeping up the trend

The additional funding may be coming at exactly the right time. Though, crimes tied to gangs have increased in some categories, including an unsettling increase in homicides from zero in 2007 up to six last year, gang-related crimes have decreased overall across the county from a five-year high of 507 incidents in 2007 down to a five-year low of 285 in 2009.

Gang-related assaults in the county dropped from 107 in 2007 to only 56 in 2009, while incidents of gang-related vandalism and graffiti decreased from 130 to 49 over the same time period, according to county police crime statistics.

"What we've heard from our leaders in law enforcement is you need to have a constant focus on this issue or the problem will get worse," Van Hollen said. "I think that the fact that we were able to get money for this a number of years ago has begun to bear fruit in the crime statistics."

Because of the fluidity of gang member movement between different police jurisdictions in the Metro-accessible Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, gang investigators need to likewise learn how to ignore borders on a map to reach out to their counterparts, according to MCPD gang investigator Sgt. Charles Welch, who works in the county's central unit, which was formed in 2004.

"Ten years ago, the gangs were more neighborhood-based, [but] as the years have progressed, they've become more regionalized," he said. "Whereas before we might have had to call each other up and get something put together or set a time to sit down and talk about the area, we're now going to be able to do that immediately after the incident has happened; ... it's going to be huge."

Officials in both counties were uncertain as to when the money would be available to spend.