By MICHAEL TARM

THE Associated Press

CHICAGO- Another crowd has apparently begun escaping the pressures of big city life by beating a well-worn path to the suburbs: gangs.

That’s one of the findings of a report being released Monday by the Chicago Crime Commission in its first major study of area gangs in more than 10 years.

Chicago police have become skilled at disrupting gangland activity, the report says, so some gang members are moving to the suburbs, where authorities often don’t have the manpower to deal with them.

“People in the suburbs can no longer view gangs as an inner-city problem,” said Jim Wagner, the crime commission’s president and one of the editors of the 272-page report. “It’s a problem they can no longer ignore.”

The migration, which became more noticeable starting around five years ago, has coincided with gang involvement in new areas of crime, including real estate fraud and identity theft, according to the report.

Among the report’s findings is that there are up to 100 street gangs with as many as 125,000 combined members in and around Chicago. Ten to 20 of the gangs, including the powerful Gangster Disciples, the Latin Kings and the Vice Lords, are sophisticated, well-organized entities, it says.

The document, titled “The Gang Book,” is also meant to serve as a guide for suburban police, parents and businesses who may know little to nothing about gangs or how to identify gang members.

It includes photographs of gang hand signs and tattoos, as well as block-by-block maps showing which gangs control what parts of the Chicago area. There’s also an explanation of gang slang: “cabbage,” according to a lengthy glossary, means cash money, and “a kite in the wind” is a letter sent to a prisoner.

Des Plaines Mayor Tony Arredia, who took office in the northwest suburb in 2000, said suburban authorities don’t need a report to tell them that gangs exist outside Chicago.

“Gang activity in the suburbs is not new. It hasn’t been new since way before I was the mayor. When my kids were in school- they’re grown men now- we had to worry about gang activity,” he said.

Arredia said he believes suburban police departments are good at keeping in touch regarding gang trends and activity in their areas.

“… We catch them a lot of times, too,” he said. “We know where they’re at and we know who they are and we know the gang signs.”

The Crime Commission’s report also briefly raises the possibility of gangs hooking up with foreign terrorist groups, such as by selling terrorists counterfeit immigration documents. But the report hastened to add that “there is little, if any, valid evidence currently linking Chicago street gangs to international terrorist groups.”

The report cites several reasons for the migration of some gang members out of Chicago.

One is that gangs presume – correctly in most cases, the report says – that suburban police aren’t as well equipped to scrutinize and disrupt their illegal activities.

Another reason is the phasing out and tearing down of high-rise housing projects in Chicago “that were hideouts for gangs, incubators for gang crime and were often impenetrable to law enforcement,” Wagner said.

The study does not provide an estimate of the number of gang members who might have moved to the suburbs, conceding the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But in its survey of 81 suburban police departments, the commission said it found most had come into contact with gangs in their communities.