Residents of several King County communities are being surveyed about their perceptions of gang activity and violence as part of a larger effort to assess the scope of the suburban gang problem and develop strategies to combat it.

"We're trying to get as many people as possible to respond," said Dan Carew, project director at the Center for Children & Youth Justice, which secured a $50,000 private grant earlier this year to convene a gang council and conduct a community gang assessment.

The Suburban King County Coordinating Council on Gangs, which first met in June, is chaired by the center's founding president, retired state Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge. The council is composed of officials from King County government and the prosecutor's office, local mayors, and several police agencies and school districts.

People living within the boundaries of seven school districts — Auburn, Kent, Federal Way, Highline, Renton, Tukwila and Bellevue — are being asked to answer the 17-question survey to help officials diagnose the problem and come up with "a more coordinated and collaborative response to gang activity in South King County," Carew said. Questions include: "Do you feel safer in your community than you did two years ago?" and "How satisfied are you with the current response to gang activity?"

In addition to the survey, Carew said, officials with six law-enforcement agencies, including the King County Sheriff's Office, have been combing through police reports from January 2010 to August, looking for crimes gang members are considered likely to commit: homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, weapons offenses and the pimping of girls. The data will be analyzed alongside a "community scan," which has already been conducted and is helping officials identify hot spots for crime, he said.

The center is also working to compile an inventory of existing community resources that help prevent kids from joining gangs, intervene in the lives of gang members and help those who've served time in prison or juvenile-detention facilities re-enter their communities.

A youth and student survey is also planned, with hopes that students in each of the seven school districts will be able to provide additional insight since middle- and high-school students are commonly targeted by gangs looking to swell their ranks.

"We want the data to drive the planning process," said Carew. The surveys and collection of police data are based on a comprehensive gang model created by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

According to the office's website, a National Youth Gang Survey found roughly 730,000 gang members belonging to 28,100 gangs were active in more than 3,500 jurisdictions across the country in 2009.

"As most gang members join between the ages of 12 and 15, prevention is a critical strategy within a comprehensive response to gangs that includes intervention, suppression and re-entry," the site says.

In a separate but related strategy to combat gangs, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced in August that $1.4 million from a law-enforcement emergency fund would be immediately tapped to combat the war erupting between rival Latino gangs in South King County. Constantine's announcement came a month after a July gunfight between rival gangs at a Kent car show that injured 12 people and led to several arrests.

The money has been used to buy equipment for the sheriff's gang unit and reopen the sheriff's White Center storefront; pay for three deputy prosecutors and a paralegal to build cases against gang members; and fund programs aimed at intervening in the lives of young Latino mothers and at-risk youth.

Information from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com