Depending on who’s in, who’s out, membership may vary day to day from 50 to 65 people, from whisker-less boys as young as 11 to at least one man as old as 39.

Many are the real thing, others hangers-on, wannabes.

Some live in Auburn, others are Seattle, Kent, Federal Way or Tacoma residents.

While most of what engages and enrages the public is graffiti and tagging, from time to time gangs make their presence known in bloodier ways — like the fatal shooting of Angel Mireles and his stepfather, 40-year-old Mark Rivera, on Oct. 20, 2015 at a bus stop at 17th Street Southeast and B Street Southeast.

“I wouldn’t say we are South Central Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, but we do have gangs, and they span many ethnicities,” Auburn Police Officer Jason Blake told the Auburn City Council on Monday at Auburn City Hall during a briefing on graffiti and tagging.

“… In the city we have documented at least five different gangs that call Auburn home, and in the schools we have representatives from all of those gangs,” Blake said.

In the last 18 months, Blake said, police have noted a sharp increase in the linear, monochrome, in-no-way-an-attempt-at-art style of gang graffiti.

That spike, he said, reflects recent gang efforts to fatten their membership rolls.

Police document all of the graffiti, gleaning vital intelligence about gang goings-on from the bizarre combination of letters and symbols left on fences and buildings, encouraging quick removal or cover up of the graffiti, and arresting and prosecuting those caught in the act.

“It’s a hard activity to catch a person doing,” Blake conceded.

“We take it very seriously,” Barak said of the graffiti. “It’s not one of those things where it’s, ‘we’ll get to it when we can,’ it’s kind of a ‘right-now’ sort of thing.”

Once the City logs a graffiti complaint and has determined whether the property involved is privately- or city-owned, officers explain to the complainant that, while what has happened is a crime, they, as the property owners, are responsible for dealing with it.

“We deal with a lot of hostile individuals, because they feel victimized, and now the City is on their doorstep saying, ‘You’ve got to remove this within a certain time frame,'” Blake said.

Blake, Barak and Bailey will then explain the importance of quick removal while discouraging the gang graffiti or tagging from occurring.

The City offers a paint voucher program at the AgroShop on West Main Street. Victims get a cleaning kit and stain or paint to cover or remove the graffiti.

In less serious cases, complainants get a “soft notice,” giving them five days to remove the graffiti. If the graffiti is particularly vulgar or gang-related, Barak said, the City usually moves to a notice to correct that gives the complainant up to 15 days to remove the graffiti.

Barak cited studies showing that the faster graffiti is removed, the more discouraging it is to the taggers.

“Once we give (property owners) a notice to comply, if they do not comply or ignore our request … the code allows us immediately to go to an abatement, so we can either hire a company or do it ourselves. We can also write an infraction to the homeowner or business owner, or a civil penalty. We can do all three, but usually, we go right to an abatement because they want it removed,” Barak said.

Auburn Police have responded to the overall gang problem at Block Watch meetings and by pitching in to community outreach efforts like the Alive and Free! program, which brings former gang members to the community to work with gangbangers or people on the verge of becoming gangbangers.

“Are they getting support from their Southern California associates or are they independent?” Councilmember Claude Da Corsi asked of the gangs.

“Just like with any organization, at some point you can probably find some nexus to groups elsewhere. … But I should say, this isn’t just an Auburn thing, we’re seeing it all over the Puget Sound region, influences from Chicago, from Texas, California, Nevada. Some of them are very independent, while others have some sort of longstanding tradition,” Blake said.