The Associated Press
CALDWELL, Idaho (AP) - Retiring Canyon County Sheriff George Nourse believes escalating gang violence in his county can be checked if the gang members are held to a higher criminal standard.
“I think we need to define this as domestic terrorism, which is basically what it is,” Nourse said. “They are out there terrorizing the community, shooting guns at houses, cars and into people walking down the street.”
The veteran sheriff’s comments followed a weekend in which gunfire erupted twice on the streets of Nampa. One exchange of shots outside a movie theater left one man wounded. The second brief fire fight, apparently over drugs, occurred on a residential street.
“Put a life sentence on them,” said Nourse, who is stepping down after 12 years.
The number of shooting incidents in the county of 150,000 is approaching 200 since July. While not all are gang related, investigators say many are. In the smaller farming town of Caldwell on the western side of the county, two men have been killed and several others wounded in gang-related drive-bys.
Officials have held two community meetings in response to the violence. One in October resulted in the creation of a Public Safety League to merge community and police initiatives to identify those involved in the violence and get them off the street. The other was Monday, where gang members and their parents complained about police handling of some situations and offered little in the way of immediate solutions to the problem.
The city of Caldwell, where over half the shooting incidents have occurred, has asked for federal financial help to increase resources to fight street violence and provide young people with alternatives to gang involvement.
Nourse’s successor, Chris Smith, believes a crackdown on drugs would get to the financial root of the gang problem. Drug trafficking is financing gang activities, he said, and 90 percent of the drug arrests result in removing one or more guns from the street.
But Nourse wants tougher penalties, and he intends to lobby state lawmakers in January to include gang violence in the domestic terrorism law, which covers threats to life that are intended to intimidate or coerce the public.
His idea has gotten some resistance from lawmakers who believe the issue should be handled locally.
But Nourse said his plan also would convince witnesses to violent incidents to come forward. Investigators of past shootings have complained that they often get no cooperation from those who’ve seen or been involved in shootings. In many cases, the rival gang wants to retaliate on its own.
“We need to get the grand jury investigating, bring them in, make them testify, then we catch them lying later, charge them with obstruction of justice, just like they do on any other thing,” Nourse said.