The emergence of gangs in nonmetropolitan areas is a phenomenon that has been neither well documented nor well accounted for. Ibis study utilizes telephone interviews with 216 nonmetopolitan police agencies that had previously reported gangs in their jurisdictions. The interviews focused on how respondents from these agencies defined gangs and gang-related problems and also focused on local strategies for responding to gangs. The criteria for determining whether gangs were present varied widely. There was a perception that rural gangs were often short-lived and that they were composed mostly of local youth engaged in minor delinquency, although there were some reports of more serious violence. The study illustrates the difficulty of defining gangs in universal objective terms.
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