Joelle Fredman
WMAL.com
FAIRFAX COUNTY — (WMAL) Fairfax County officials are trying to figure out how to stem their growing gang problem, including the MS-13 murder of a 15-year-old girl last month.
Teenagers from Fairfax County have also been involved in multiple gang-related homicides in Northern Virginia so far this year.
“The gang activity is very serious now, there’s been a resurgence of activity [and] heavy recruiting in our schools,” Jay Lanham, The Director of the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force, told the County Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
Lanham said it has been increasingly difficult to stop the recruitment because a lot of it takes place in cyberspace.
“They are advertising on social media, they post on Facebook regularly,” Lanham said. “It’s very difficult to follow and it’s very difficult to stop it.”
Chairwoman Sharon Bulova said the best way to reduce the gang issue is to provide good, after school programming.
“We also need to be really evaluating our youth programs, so that kids have wholesome activities that they are engaged in, which helps to make them less of a target,” Bulova said.
Chairwoman Penny Gross said, however, that the current programs such as Road DAWG, a one-week summer camp for at-risk youth, are not far-reaching enough.
“The challenge for us is these things are not nearly broad enough for us,” Gross said. “Road DAWG is great, but its one week in the summertime- what do we do about the other 50 weeks?”
County Police Chief Edwin Roessler said the County needs to be start being proactive in stopping gang recruitment and violence.
“Unfortunately what we see ourselves is reactive- we’re finding two dead bodies in Holmes Run Park and then we have to work backwards,” Roessler said. “We’re trying to stem that and prevent it.”
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