Sheriff Rocky Watson sometimes wonders if the current strategy of going after methamphetamine manufacturers in Kootenai County is working.

“I’m putting 100 percent of my resources into chasing meth labs. Am I missing 80 percent of the problem?” he asked. “I could be busting little meth labs and missing semis coming through.”

In Spokane and the Boise areas, most of the meth is coming from Mexico, moved through the region by gangs, he said. North Idaho isn’t immune to the transient drug dealers, he believes.

“Spokane doesn’t sneeze without Coeur d’Alene catching a cold,” Watson said Wednesday. “We are mirrors of each other.”

That’s why Watson has temporarily taken two detectives off the Kootenai County Drug Task Force and reassigned them to the Spokane Gang Enforcement Team. The detectives are spending two months working with the team, learning how it works, what gangs are active in the area and gathering information on them.

When they return, they’ll be ready to launch a gang unit in Kootenai County, or return to the drug task force with their newfound gang expertise. The Sheriff’s Office already is making preparations for a gang unit.

Watson said he chose to take the detectives out of the drug task force because the gang problem is parallel to the drug problem, and because it was the only place he could find officers without affecting the patrol division.

Losing the two detectives means a reduction in the work force from five to three in the multi-agency drug task force, said Coeur d’Alene police Sgt. Christie Wood, spokeswoman for the Police Department. “The task force is in the process of evaluating the future workload and making some decisions on how to adjust.”

Watson decided to explore the gang unit idea because of statistics.

In the county’s overcrowded jail, 30 percent of the inmates are there on drug charges, but 70 percent of the inmates have drug problems, he said. Meanwhile, state police statistics show that the number of meth labs being busted in Idaho has plummeted in recent years.

The local drug task force, established in 1988 with a grant, is still plenty busy, Wood said. But, “the trend has changed. The trend has become more mobile.”

Watson suspects that a lot of the methamphetamine is moving through the area with gangs. But while he knows that gang members from Spokane come to Kootenai County to visit the bars or hang out at the beach, he’s not sure whether he has a gang problem yet or not.

Spokane County’s Gang Enforcement Team, established in the late ‘90s, involves officers from the cities and county, probation and parole officers and county prosecutors, said Spokane County Sheriff’s Sgt. Chris Kehl. The gang team works closely with the county’s drug task force.

“Where you have gangs, you’ve got drugs, so it works well having them in the same unit,” he said.

Kehl said it’s a good idea to create a gang unit in Kootenai County, too.

“The state line does not actually stop people from going over there,” he said.

One expert from the Spokane gang unit recently gave educational presentations to school officials and others in Kootenai County, said sheriff’s Lt. Kim Edmondson.

“I think they had their eyes opened,” she said. “The wannabes are sometimes more dangerous than actual gang members themselves, because they’ll do anything to prove themselves.”

Coeur d’Alene High School Principal Steve Casey doesn’t think he has a gang problem at his school, but just to prevent any problems, the school recently instituted a ban on “head rags,” he said. Gang-related clothing is already banned, but nothing specifically addressed the headwear.

Parents and teachers noticed that they’d been seeing more of the bandannas recently than in the past, and they learned at the recent presentation that they can serve as gang symbols, Casey said.

“It’s very, very popular in a lot of areas,” he said. “Here it isn’t. We felt we needed to take a stand before it became a problem. We didn’t have any gang activity that we know of. … We’re growing, and that’s how we’re getting ahead of this problem.”