Police, parents and students said both of the Arundel groups began committing small crimes, such as tagging at school. Then they started beating up other kids and stealing iPods and bicycles, police said. Most recently, gang members sold marijuana.
Initially, county Police Chief James Teare said, the crimes were misdemeanors and were "off the radar" of the police.
In Baltimore County, "historically, our gangs have been nonterritorial and nonadversarial unless disrespected or encroached upon," said Sgt. James Conaboy, head of the county's gang unit, in a summary of gang activity he prepared for The Baltimore Sun.
"This has recently been shifting and we have seen an increase in violent crimes - shootings - by gang members against gang members in an effort to claim territory," he said. "We have also seen recent violence against rival gang members simply due to affiliation with a rival gang."
In other words, the kind of behavior seen in city gangs.
Hundreds arrested
Last year, Baltimore County police officers arrested 451 adult gang members and 309 who were juveniles, said Johnson, the county chief.
The numbers are down significantly this year, he said. "We're taking them off the streets," Johnson said.
Still, there are plenty of gang members left. The Bloods have the most adherents of any gang in the county - 406 - followed by Dead Man Inc., with 147; the Crips, 141; and MS13 (the initials stand for Mara Salvatrucha), 26, police said. The rest of the county's gangs have fewer than 25 members each.
In Howard County, Chief William McMahon sees less of a gang problem, although it has been growing in the past few years.
"There were always little neighborhood groups that sort of grew out of their behavior and went on with their lives," the chief said. "But four or five years ago, we started to see more hard-core guys, people associated with the bigger gangs, like the Bloods and the Crips."
Without a Howard police gang unit at the time, an officer was assigned to "help us get a gauge of what was out there," McMahon said. "Now we have two full-time gang officers, both detectives, and that's their primary mission, not only intelligence-gathering and helping our main investigators to see if there's a gang attachment in a case, but trying to do a lot on the prevention end."
That involves having the officers speak at schools and community groups and "trying to educate parents and teachers" as to what to look for when schoolchildren start showing signs of gang membership.
