There’s gang activity spread out far from the metro areas - there are reliable reports of it in smaller communities far flung across the Northwest. Getting a handle on how large the problem is, though, is a little more difficult.

A swipe at this from Moses Lake turns up; there’s evidence of increasing gang activity in the Columbia Basin region, enough to prompt calls for hiring a couple of new prosecutors specifically to deal with it.

How major is it? There’s also this in a news story today: “Moses Lake School Superintendent Steven Chestnut disagreed, saying gang activity was not that big an issue. Wearing gang-associated colors and displaying gang symbols in schools is prohibited, and only 3 percent of the 171 suspensions and expulsions in the first quarter of the school year were gang-related, Chestnut said.”

Doesn’t mean there isn’t any, though.

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