MISSOULA -- Missoula might not have an abundance of gang-related crimes, but according to Detective Guy Baker, that's due in part to the police department's 17-year effort to aggressively quash gang activity.

"Missoula has a gang presence, but it has never developed into a gang problem," Baker said. "And that's not by chance. It's due to the police department's diligence."

To help combat the threat of gangs, more than 200 gang-savvy officers from city, county, state and federal agencies across the country gathered for the 2007 Northwest Gang Investigators Association's fall training conference last week in Missoula.

Bringing their expertise from as far away as Los Angeles and Canada, law enforcement officials spent four days swapping anecdotes, attending courses and discussing how to keep gangs out of their respective communities.

Baker is senior vice president of the Northwest Gang Investigators Association, which boasts more than 400 members, and is also a member of the California Gang Investigators Association. He said Missoula's gang activity blossomed in 1991 and peaked a few years later.

"We took a very proactive approach, with zero tolerance toward any gang activity," he said. "Law enforcement traditionally is reactionary, but when it comes to gangs or drugs you have to be proactive."

Besides the Missoula Police Department's 13-year membership in the Northwest Gang Investigators Association, it also formed a target enforcement unit three plainclothes officers who work the streets, compiling gang intelligence.

Since then, gang-related crimes have tapered off. By working with snitches, motel clerks and actual gang members, the police department has compiled a database containing profiles of nearly 200 gang members, consisting of both homegrown locals and nonresident transplants. Baker said gang-related activity is defined as any crime that is gang-motivated.

Gangs were never a problem in Missoula until 1990, when the Garden City became one of more than a thousand cities that was infiltrated with gang activity, mostly because of the growing popularity of crack and cocaine.

Baker said that roughly one gang-related drive-by shooting occurrs in Missoula each year and all have been solved. The statistic, he said, evinces a commitment to keep gangs out of Missoula.

Baker said interstate drug trafficking is the most common conduit through which gang affiliates enter Missoula, with methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana as the primary drugs of choice.

"No community in America, large or small, has been able to eradicate gangs once they have become entrenched," Baker said. "And a gang problem isn't a law enforcement problem, it's a community problem."

In 2004, through the National Youth Gang Survey, the federal government determined that at least 24,000 identifiable gang sets exist in the United States, accounting for almost 775,000 individual gang affiliates.