Three young men have died, and police say the rivalry between Bloods and Crips is mounting.

Some who lived through it recall the height of the city's gang violence in the 1980s and 1990s."I have actual gang members saying, 'This is bad out here,' " Michael Johnson, a former Crip, told The Oregonian newspaper.In response, pastors at funerals are appealing from the pulpit to gang members to end the shooting. Police are paying overtime to put more officers on the street.Probation officers are making more contacts with gang offenders on supervision and mapping out safety plans for those who may be targets. Outreach workers are staying visible on the streets and are lobbying to keep their programs going.Dan Saltzman, Portland's new police commissioner, promised to press the City Council to maintain gang outreach programs and to try to keep local community centers open late with programs aimed at teenagers."We don't want to wait for the shootings and just try to arrest people afterward," he told the paper. "There's just a lot of different tacks we have to take."Although the city's homicide rate and overall crime rate are down, gang violence has increased sharply over the past year, police say.They say they identified more than 150 new gang members and seized 112 firearms from gang members in 2008, about one-eighth of all the guns they seized in the year.On Dec. 12, Darshawn Cross, 31, collapsed from multiple gunshots during a funeral in the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.Police say near-daily shootings followed, with bullets flying in drive-by shootings, during car chases, outside busy malls and theaters and into homes.On New Year's Eve, two 18-year-olds were killed at a Gresham apartment complex. One, Willy Butler, was a half brother of the man accused of shooting Cross."We have a crisis," said Lt. Mike Leloff of Portland's gang enforcement unit.

Posted in: Portland