Content warning: Contains mention of violence and gang activity.
At 2:15 a.m. on Wednesday, March 20, 2024, Nicholas Umphenour, a member of the white supremacist gang the Aryan Knights, opened fire on Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) officers at the Boise St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center.
Umphenour’s objective was to free fellow Aryan Knight member Skylar Meade, an IDOC inmate serving 20 years for firing a weapon at a Twin Falls County Sheriff’s deputy in 2017.
Umphenour succeeded and the two men fled to North Idaho where police said they murdered 83-year-old James Mauney before eventually being taken into custody in Twin Falls, ID.
The March medical center shooting was an example of what local gang experts and police the Arbiter spoke to described as bolder and more reckless acts by gang members in Boise.
In 2021, the Boise Police Department disbanded its gang unit. Two years later in 2023, it identified the increase in volume and recklessness as an issue that warranted establishing a new, temporary gang unit.
The gang unit
Idaho legislature defines gangs as ongoing organizations, associations or groups composed of three or more individuals who share a common identifying name or symbol, and whose members individually or collectively engage or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.
Peter Vasquez, a former gang member and now director of nonprofit 2nd Chance Grace through which he promotes good lifestyle choices among at-risk youth and offers tattoo removals, said gangs always operate on the basis of fear.
“I stabbed somebody out of fear, I ran somebody over during a robbery out of fear,” said Vasquez.
He said his life only took a turn for the better when he began reading the Holy Bible.
From 1993 to 2021, the Boise Police Department (BPD) had a gang unit, but in 2021 it was dismantled while former Chief Ryan Lee was in office. Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said the city dismantled it for fear of acknowledging the presence of gangs in Boise.
In 2022, former Internal Affairs Captain Tom Fleming told KTVB that under Lee, morale was extremely low. Mayor Lauren McLean eventually requested Lee to resign.
Without a specialized unit to address issues with gangs, BPD created a temporary unit to face rising gang activity in 2023.
Recently retired BPD Corporal Brian Holland had a reputation as a seasoned gang officer. He testified in court as a gang expert and was a part of BPD’s gang unit before it was dismantled. Holland’s colleague Quackenbush said he’s the most knowledgeable officer in the state of Idaho when it comes to gang activity.
Holland said a gang unit doesn’t just enforce the law and investigate crimes, it engages in proactive policing vital to keeping gang problems from spreading.
“I’ve taught these newer [officers] the value of intervention and humanizing yourself so that you are now a conduit for gang members to come through and say, ‘Hey, I want to change’, or ‘I can talk to you and nobody else’. And it may not happen right away, but they saw the value in doing that,” Holland said.
Holland warned that if the city experiences a large enough influx of people to overwhelm law enforcement, agencies could become so preoccupied with reactive policing their proactive policing efforts would diminish.
“The Treasure Valley still has the opportunity to be different from any other place in the nation. Boise, for instance, could stay non–territorial,” said Holland.
Non-territorial means that no gang has a defined territory in the city.
The temporary unit
“There’s an ebb and a flow to it here [in Boise], we’re not LA, we’re not Chicago, we’re not Philadelphia. We don’t have this sort of persistent presence where there’s territory, but it’s something to stay ahead of,” said BPD Captain Jim Quackenbush, who heads the department’s temporary gang unit.
Quackenbush, who said his goal is to proactively address groups that appear to be trending toward violence so they can prevent violence altogether, transferred from the Portland Police Department at the same time as former Chief Lee in 2021.
Quackenbush said he and a group of BPD officers established the temporary gang unit as a response to issues at the Boise Towne Square mall caused by groups of kids.
“A group of officers came to me, the patrol captain, and said ‘We have an idea. We’ll start identifying who these problem people are, we’ll really start digging into this,’” said Quackenbush.
Quackenbush said that while groups of kids exhibiting non-violent gang behavior such as identifying with a common sign or symbol and tagging bathrooms are initially innocent, he has witnessed those behaviors devolve into violent conflict very quickly during his service in Portland, Oregon.
Holland said that Ada County is beginning to face issues similar to those Canyon County has been dealing with for some time: young gang members, largely juveniles. He noticed a greater prominence of outlaw motorcycle gangs like the Hell’s Angels. The prison-to-street connection, he said, is becoming more prolific.
The prison-to-street connection is largely how the Aryan Knights operate, with gang leaders directing their non-incarcerated counterparts via texts and phone calls. The white supremacist gang formed inside the IDOC prison facility southwest of Boise and have engaged in drug trafficking and racketeering for years. Racketeering earned many members their sentences in federal prison in a prosecution led by US Attorney Josh Hurwit. These federal sentences do not offer parole.
Not every crime a gang member can commit would be a federal crime,” Hurwit said. “Over the years we’ve addressed different gangs in Idaho and the overall problem of gang activity — which overlaps with two of our main areas of prosecution, generally; that being narcotics and firearm crimes.”
Hurwit said social media has played a big role in making activities like recruitment and drug trafficking easier for gangs. Hurwit noted that the attorney’s office is seeing more juveniles involved with gangs in their investigations, though the US Attorney’s office doesn’t prosecute juveniles. Justice.gov says this is because state and local justice systems are better equipped to handle juvenile cases.
A broken system
Luis Granados is the executive director of Breaking Chains Academy of Development, a Nampa-based nonprofit that provides at-risk youth with support and resources to deter them from criminal and gang activity. Granados himself was a member of a gang in his youth and through the academy which he now operates, he earned a GED.
In interviews the Arbiter conducted with Hurwit, Quackenbush, Vasquez and Granados, each expert mentioned serious gang involvement happening at younger ages than before. Several said the system juvenile offenders go through needs to change.
“The amount of kids who have guns at these young ages is insane. We had guns, but I didn’t get my first gun until I was about 16 and now I know that there are 13, 14-year-olds running around with guns,” said Granados.
Vasquez said there are several issues with how the state addresses gangs and criminality, especially among juveniles and women.
“The whole system, that’s the problem. [School Resource Officers]; they’re not counselors, they aren’t going to do prevention in schools, they’re there for one reason: in case something happens,” said Vasquez.
Vasquez warned against the danger of sending gang members to federal prison for short sentences.
“You know what’s in federal prison? The highest [ranking] gang leadership. So if you’re there for two years and you come back to Idaho, what happened? You left little Idaho, now you’ve got all kinds of connections all over the country,” said Vasquez.
Vasquez said the way people in Idaho get prison sentences is unfair and biased, saying people from communities with worse reputations getting worse sentences. He cited a 2017 case where Adam Paulson from the affluent city of Eagle, Idaho, received probation after 14 months in jail for committing vehicular manslaughter while drunk. Paulson’s conviction was eventually vacated.
“The sentencing guidelines need to be changed in this state. They need to be reformed. All sentencing guidelines, from juvenile to adult,” said Vasquez.
In 2023, Caldwell, Idaho — a city Donahue said was once a “war zone” — revamped its gang unit following an FBI investigation into the Caldwell Police Department’s former gang unit, called the Street Crimes Unit, and subsequent arrest of its lead officer.
Caldwell Police Chief Rex Ingram reworked, renamed and restructured the Street Crimes Unit into the Operation Safe Streets (OSS) unit.
In its first four months, the OSS unit made around 100 arrests in its crackdown on gang-related crime in Canyon County.
“Imagine a pit full of baby rattlesnakes. [They’re] more dangerous than a bunch of mature ones because they don’t know how much venom to release. That’s kind of what we have here,” said Ingram.
“But the caveat to that is, Caldwell has never been safer — because the gangs are doing things internally, they’re not robbing random people or shooting at random people,” said Ingram.
Caldwell Police Department is also a part of the Treasure Valley Metro Violent Crimes Task Force which includes the Canyon County Sheriff, Nampa Police Department, IDOC and the FBI.
The task force’s mission is eliminating violent crimes, including gang crime. The metro task force also works directly with the district US Attorney, Hurwit, to earn offenders federal sentences.
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said BPD left the Treasure Valley Metro Violent Crimes Task Force years ago.
Donahue said measuring gang activity and measuring increases and decreases is as simple as giving officers the ability to tag cases and reports as gang-related, but that the Boise Police Department doesn’t measure their gang activity this way.
Quackenbush was unable to provide statistics measuring the increase in gang activity, saying BPD measures gang activity on a case-by-case basis. While crime rates are steadily declining in Boise, it is difficult to find publicly available statistics of a true increase in gang activity in Boise.
“Boise has always refused to do it because they didn’t want the stigma that there’s actually gangs. I’ve had leadership prior to Ron [Winegar] say ‘There’s no gangs here in Boise, they’re all out in Canyon County,’” said Donahue.
Canyon County keeps a database of gang members that notifies officers and deputies on traffic stops, for example, that they are stopping a known gang member.
“Well you’re an idiot if you’re saying [there’s no gangs in Boise]. Do they stop at the border? Do they stop at Meridian? That’s asinine to say, but I’ve had leadership from that agency say that to my face,” said Donahue.
“The better approach is to address it head-on, to have a gang unit. The better approach is to have never left the Metro Violent Crime Task Force,” said Donahue.
Gangs are an always-evolving issue and the way Boise shapes its approach to the issue could have significant effects on the city’s future.
