By ROBERT STERN

WEST WINDSOR - A couple of years ago, someone painted the logo of the brutal MS-13 street gang on a walkway in the Mercer Mall shopping center on Route 1 in Lawrence.

In Edgewater Park, a tiny Burlington County borough on the Route 130 corridor, a 15-year-old girl's recent initiation into the violent Bloods street gang required her to steal a vehicle, assault a police officer and get placed in a juvenile detention center.

In Hopatcong, Sussex County, a small borough deep in bear country, a group of white members of the Bloods recently made a CD touting the gang, distributed it throughout the high school and later threatened to murder someone they didn't like.

Those were a few of many examples of recent gang activity in New Jersey that state experts enumerated to an audience at Mercer County Community College yesterday to drive home the point that gangs are a menace that reach every corner of the state.

It's past time for New Jersey communities, no matter how small or wealthy, to recognize that violent street gangs like the Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings and the 18th Street Gang, are no longer just a big city problem, experts said.

Although gang violence afflicts cities such as Trenton, Newark, Atlantic City and Camden, less urban communities - such as the Princetons, Hightstown, East Windsor and Willingboro - also are being victimized by gang activity, said Lt. Edwin Torres, supervisor of the gang management unit of New Jersey's Juvenile Justice Commission.

"The number one problem we have in New Jersey is denial," Torres said.

One especially dangerous way a community fools itself into believing that its gang problem either doesn't exist or is not that serious is by distinguishing between "real" and "wannabe" gang members, some as young as 10 years old, he said.

That distinction is so subtle that it should be treated as an illusion because "the `wannabe' is a `gonnabe' some day," Torres said.

"A lot of times, people use that term to make you feel good about something you really shouldn't feel good about: `Oh, he's just a wannabe,' " Torres said.

"Well, if he's acting like a thug, he's going to be a thug, somehow, some way.

"If a kid says he's a gang banger, then you'd better work with him and deal with him as a gang member," Torres said. "Because it's not what you and I think a young man or a young woman is or that group of young men or women are, it's what they see themselves as.

"If they see themselves as gang bangers, then they're going to live up to that challenge and produce results of the gang banger," he said.

"He's right," said Princeton Borough police Lt. Dennis McManimon.

"If you have kids acting in concert, acting in certain ways, whether or not they're official members is really a moot point," said McManimon, who has made that distinction himself when talking about escalating gang-related violence in the borough this fall and winter.

Torres told the audience of central New Jersey educators and law enforcement officials, including McManimon, that no community is immune to gangs - not the state capital, not his hometown of Willingboro.

"The same things that we see in Newark, New Jersey, are happening in Willingboro, New Jersey, with the (gang) colors and the way people are repping (representing) gangs.

"And it's a small, quiet community, one of the nicest communities I've ever lived in, in Burlington County," Torres said.

Statewide, law enforcement officials have identified at least 12,000 gang members on the streets. At least 8,000 more are in the state's prison system.

The average age of a New Jersey gang member is 19 years old.

"That means there's a lot of young kids running around as gang bangers," Torres said.

Some - as young as 8, 9, and 10 years old - are used by older gang members as lookouts or drug couriers.

Some 30 to 40 percent of the juvenile cases that New Jersey's Juvenile Justice Commission deals with each day are gang-related, he said.

"Children should not run neighborhoods and that's what's happening right now," state Attorney General Peter Harvey said. "We must intervene in the lives of these young people and do it now."

The state is attempting to combat the problem through law enforcement and through programs like yesterday's forum that seek to make local police and school officials more aware of gang symbols and behavior.

Preventing gang recruitment is the key for any long-term success to erode gang activity in New Jersey, experts said.

But that key won't budge much unless families of children who are at risk for joining gangs - and many of them come from single-parent households from which the father is absent - become constructively involved in their children's lives, Harvey said.

In part, that means parents must be keenly aware of who their children's friends are and what they're doing, Torres said.

If a child shows up unexpectedly wearing an expensive new pair of shoes or a team sports jacket or flashing various complex hand signs, it could indicate gang involvement, experts said.

"As a parent, if my child ever came to my house with a $200 pair of Timberlands that I didn't buy for them, there's gonna be a problem," Torres said.

"But some parents don't look at what their kids come home with. They don't see it, they don't want to see it," he said. "If your young man is wearing a brand new jacket and you didn't buy it, someone bought it. You'd better find out who bought it for him."

"Unless someone is hearing impaired in your house, there should be no kid running around tossing up hand signs," he said.

"We encourage parents to search their kids' rooms. And they don't like that term" out of respect for their children's privacy, Torres said.

In his view, that's a potentially huge mistake.

"I'm the son of a Puerto Rican family, first generation, and my mother would search my room like an FBI agent on any given day," Torres said.

Her vigilance kept Torres on good behavior.

"Mom kept me alive by being in my business 24-7. A lot of parents have shied away from that," he said.

Forum plumbs gangs' spread