Nearly 1,000 gang members have been arrested in Prince William County since 2005, a member of the county gang unit said Tuesday.
Detective Dennis Gill, in a presentation on the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force, said that 941 gang members have been arrested in the county since 2005. He also said that members of the Prince William gang unit have executed 162 search warrants “to support the charge of criminal street gang participation.”
The Regional Gang Task Force, founded in 2003, is a multi-jurisdictional partnership that combines area law enforcement divisions — as well as federal agencies — to combat gang activity in Northern Virginia.
Detective Gill said that gang activity began to appear in Prince William in 1992, with the area’s first gang-related homicide occurring in Dale City in 1993.
There are approximately 15 gangs currently active in the county, he said. These include MS-13 and SUR-13, as well as the South Side Locos (SSL) and 18th Street, two rivals of MS-13. Members of the West Coast-based Crips and Bloods have also appeared in the area.
Prince William Police Chief Charlie Deane said that he has met with law enforcement officials from El Salvador to discuss gang activity. Gill noted that MS-13 originated in Southern California in the early 1980s before migrating to locations in Central America, including El Salvador.
Deane said that Central American officials were quite concerned with gang-related crimes such as bribery and extortion, unlike local officials.
“We’re not seeing that in our crime statistics,” he said. The most common type of gang-related crime in the area was assault, officials said.
Board of Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart asked if there was any way to quantify gang activity in the county, but Deane said such a task would be difficult.
“It’s hard to gauge whether gang activity is going up and down, because you can’t judge it just on the [number of] arrests you make,” said Deane.
Stewart, though, said he believed gang-related crime was on the decline.
“Anecdotally, we’re seeing a decrease in gang activity,” he said.
Gill said the experience of gang-related crimes has been slightly lower in recent years, but cautioned that the potential for gang-related problems in the county is “higher than it’s ever been.”
