Jurisdictions Cooperate to Keep Tabs on What Some Say Is a Major Concern in Fast-Growing Area
By Matt Zapotosky
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 26, 2008
Their headquarters is little more than a spare room at the local power company: The officers' four desks occupy almost half the available space. Jeans, sweaters and tennis shoes are the dress code, and the sergeant in command wears a backward baseball cap to disguise a bad hair day.
It's not a glamorous operation, but this is the epicenter of Southern Maryland's attempt to deal with an emerging gang presence in the region.
"The impressive information center," says Maryland State Police Sgt. Shane Bolger, gesturing across the room just bigger than a college dorm's. "This is basically it."
He's only half kidding. Bolger's Southern Maryland Information Center might not look impressive, but the results speak for themselves, officials said.
The first of its kind in the state, the center was formed last year to share crime information among the three sheriff's offices and three state police barracks in Southern Maryland. It also has become the region's gang intelligence center, keeping tabs on what some officials say is a major concern in the fast-growing area.
"The budding gang problem in Southern Maryland is an issue," said State Police Lt. Greg Cameron, who oversees the three information-sharing centers in Maryland. "Southern Maryland is starting to see an increase in gang activity."
The center is funded with $50,000 in state funds, Cameron said. The plainclothes officers who work there -- two state troopers and a detective from each of the three local sheriff's offices -- are paid out of their department's budgets. The Charles County Sheriff's Office lets the center use its crime analyst, and the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative provides the office space rent-free.
In some respects, the effort seems quite small. Officials at the center estimate there are about 380 gang members in Southern Maryland, and identifying and interviewing them is only half of the detectives' jobs. (Their main objective is spotting regional crime trends, making sure police in Calvert County, for example, know which criminals from St. Mary's might cross the border.)
But officials at the center are hesitant to say they need more resources, and they are quick to note that the "gang problem" in Southern Maryland is in its infancy. Urban counties such as Prince George's, by comparison, have thousands of gang members, officials say.
"It is and it isn't a problem," Bolger said. "But they are here."
And that is a change from as recently as a few years ago, said Detective Jon Burroughs, who analyzes gangs in Charles for the center.
"Three years ago, if you tried to identify a gang member in Charles County, most people would laugh you out the door," he said.
Not anymore. Burroughs estimated that he has identified about 300 gang members in Charles alone, using state standards that say a gang member must have some sort of "identifying sign, symbol, name, leader, or purpose," and be focused on committing crimes.
The gangs in the Southern Maryland region, he said, range from well-known national organizations such as the Bloods or the Crips to more regional enterprises such as the District's 18th-n-Monroe crew.
And Southern Maryland has a few homegrown groups, such as the Dope Boyz and Cut Boyz, Burroughs said. He said the local groups have fewer symbols, simply tattooing their gang names on their bodies and adding a "z" at the end of the word "boy" to form their identities.
"That's kind of how you tell a local gang," he said.
Quirky though that practice might be, Burroughs said, Southern Maryland's homegrown gangs are no laughing matter. Called "nontraditional" gangs, their members can sometimes be more violent than traditional ones because they feel they have more to prove, investigators say. Although many gang members in Southern Maryland simply commit acts of vandalism or robbery, some have graduated to more violent crimes, he said.
The key, Burroughs said, is keeping a finger on the pulse of who is doing what. And if the information center's walls and shelves are any indication, the detectives there have a pretty good idea of that.
Across from the officers' desks are two gang artifacts: a Mexican flag seized in St. Mary's bearing the name of the Mexican gang Sur-13 and a T-shirt seized in a Charles high school bearing the name 18th-n-Monroe.
Thick, three-ring binders full of gang intelligence fill the shelves, sitting alongside high school yearbooks. Those, Burroughs said, are invaluable in tracking gang members in schools.
"Knowing who your gang members are is knowing who your criminals are," he said. "Anywhere gangs come, the quality of life deteriorates rapidly."
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