About 100 people packed the conference room at the Napa City-County Library on Wednesday afternoon to listen and offer their input on how Napa County can deal with its gang violence problem.

The majority of the attendees were from law enforcement, city and county government, social services and non-profit organizations geared to preventing the county’s youth from choosing the lifestyle of a gang member.

The audience was also sprinkled with several members of the Napa community, who are concerned about gangs taking over their neighborhoods and affecting their quality of life in a place known for its low crime rate.

This was the second such meeting since a resurgence of gang violence that started last December with the fatal shooting of Ricardo Gonzalez during a gang street fight in the 2500 block of Laurel Street. Following Gonzalez’s death, the summer brought a rash of gang-related stabbings and other violence.

At Wednesday’s meeting, the audience was divided into several small groups to discuss how to define the gang problem and suggest goals to deal with it.

After brainstorming for about 30 minutes, the groups addressed the crowd with their input.

“The session was very productive. Part of this process is to create a community plan,” Napa Mayor Jill Techel told the Register on Thursday.

Techel said the consensus was to involve Napa’s youth in the plan and to zero in on early prevention.

“Suggestions included attacking the gang problem in the elementary schools as early as fourth grade. One officer talked about going to a home for an interview while investigating a criminal case and he saw family photos, which showed a toddler doing gang signs,” Techel said. “We want to be able to offer early prevention programs, so youngsters like him do not grow up in the gang culture.”

Techel said other popular anti-gang violence tools included more school police resource officers, counselors in alternative schools and to pay more attention to truancy.

“The feeling was we need to get kids into the schools and keep them there. Also there was concern about expelling students who do badly and sending them out on the streets. What good does that do?” Techel asked.

Before the attendees broke into groups, Napa Police Chief Rich Melton addressed the crowd.

Once again Melton stressed Napa’s gang problem is not just a law enforcement problem, but a problem that will take community involvement to solve.

“Right now we are putting about $100,000 into a gang homicide (criminal) case. What we want to look at is how to prevent the next one. This involves different skills,” Melton said.

“We don’t want our plan to be developed just because something bad has happened. We want it to be a plan on how to prevent it from happening again,” he said.

Techel said the gang task force still does not have a funding source.

“We will be reaching out to the community and business leaders for funding,” she said.

Techel said although there is no date set for the next community meeting, it most likely will be on a Saturday or week day evening so more people will be able to attend.

So far, the two meetings have been held in the early afternoon.

“We need to be make it more convenient for the people who work to be able to participate. We also want to bring in the youth and hear what they have to say,” Techel said