Longmont hosts county task force

Officer estimates city has 13 gangs, 400 members

Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 20, 2007 at midnight

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Experts have likened gang activity's growth to a spreading cancer, and for Longmont, it metastasized into the city's first gang murder April 15 of last year.

The city has been turning up the heat on gang crime since that night, when 17-year-old Martin Garcia was set upon by four gang members using baseball bats, brass knuckles and a samurai sword.

And this week, Longmont hosted the initial meeting of a Boulder County gang task force with 48 officers in attendance, who also represented departments in Weld County and across northern Colorado.

"Longmont has its own specific gang problem," said that department's gang unit supervisor, Sgt. Alan Baldivia, who believes the Boulder County group could evolve into a Northern Colorado gang task force.

"But since there are no boundaries to gangs, we know there is movement back and forth, across the Front Range and throughout the state. The bottom line is that they're all over the place."

Baldivia estimates Longmont has 13 identifiable gangs with roughly 400 members, the vast majority being Hispanic.

Another northeast Colorado community with a growing gang presence is Greeley, in neighboring Weld County, to the east of Longmont.

"In Greeley, police tell me they are tracking 500 gang members," Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck said. "But they tell me they could easily have twice as many tracked members, if they had more officers to do that work. Five hundred is an underestimate. There are a lot more out there."

Buck said that for Greeley, the gang problem became impossible for anyone to ignore when it experienced five gang-related murders in a six-month period in 2004, numbers he calls "pretty scary, when you think of a town of 80,000."

Buck, elected as district attorney in November 2004, attended a meeting early in his tenure at which a Department of Corrections representative said the worst gang members in the state prison were from Greeley.

"He said they are the most violent and the most difficult to control in prison," Buck said.

"For a long time, Greeley ignored that they had a gang problem, and it kept getting worse. We are starting to really deal with it."

Weld County has secured life-without-parole sentences in the past two years against gang members, most coming from the 2004 spate of murders.

The prevalence of guns and crystal meth have made gang activity a far more sinister mix, and Buck doesn't intend to downplay the dangers. But he also said some Weld County residents are scared now, beyond what might be warranted.

He gets calls on a regular basis from residents afraid to shop at the Greeley Mall, who are taking their business, and tax dollars, to Loveland in Larimer County.

"It's an unusual weekend that we don't have some gunshots in Greeley," Buck admitted.

"Luckily, they're not very good aim."

Brennanc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2742

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