King County Sheriff’s Office Detective Joe Gagliardi spoke at the North Highline Unincorporated Area Council Public Safety Forum in February, discussing gang graffiti (a separate story on graffiti can be found here), populations and territory.

Detective Gagliardi provided a number of facts on the current gang landscape in West Seattle and White Center. Here are some highlights:

-Demystification: Gangs do not discriminate based on race (with the exception of white supremacist gangs) or gender. For example, he said a predominantly Latino gang in Burien is actually ran by a white person.

-There are 143 active gangs in King County, 46 of those with 15 or more members. South King County has 4000 active gang members while there are 12000 total in the county, including Seattle. Some gangs have been around long enough for several generations of family members to get involved. There are babies born into gang affiliation.

-Gangs really want to recruit juveniles because they can put in “work,” and get out of the juvenile jail system more quickly than an adult sent to “big boy” jail.

-While there are basic colors gangs tend to wear (Crips generally wear blue and Bloods don red), there is a lot of variation in subsets of those umbrella affiliations. Additionally, Gagliardi said it is “next to impossible to identify these gang members based on just clothing alone because their clothing very closely conforms with current hip hop culture and youth culture styles of clothing, so they are wearing the same thing as non-gang members.”

-White Center, North Burien and West Seattle are currently neutral territory. He said White Center, for the last year and half to two years has been neutral which means gangs are still present, but not “actively protecting it as their territory.” This is a change from five years ago when gangs in our area were more active and territorial.

-Most of the gangs in our area are based on the Los Angeles gang culture of Blood, Crip, Sureno and Norteno. In South King County, Gagliardi said the majority are subsets of the Surenos (predominantly Hispanic, but mixed races found in their ranks). There is a lot of Sureno on Sureno gang violence.

-One of the oldest gangs in King County, around since 1985, claims White Center as their territory. Gagliardi said they were “quite a big problem” off and on for 25 years but in 2010 the KCSO gang unit pushed their gang activity, including drug trafficking, weapons trafficking and aggravated assaults, south to Des Moines and Kent.

-Two Blood gangs, traditionally operating out of West Seattle, have a “very, very reduced presence … now” after several middle and high level members were sent to jail in 2009 and 2010. Another Blood gang, operating out of the High Point neighborhood for 20 years, are “underground now, not too active.”

-Blood gangs in North Highline and West Seattle are often predominantly Southeast Asian in their ranks.

-Pacific Islander gangs were active in 2009 and 2010, but after KCSO “put away a lot of their guys … (we) have not seen a lot of activity lately.”

-When Club EVO (a nightclub in White Center notorious for attracting gang members and violence) shut down in 2010, Gagliardi said there was a dramatic drop in gang-related crime in 2011. He estimated 300 fewer cases after the nightclub closed. The NHUAC was instrumental in blocking Club EVO's plans to reopen in 2011.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story included specific gang names. Those names have been removed at the request of the King County Sheriff’s Office Gang Unit. The reasoning behind their removal is two-fold: to protect ongoing investigations of the gang unit and to not give notoriety to one gang over another.