ECS 4 Life was painted in black about a month ago on Church Street in Jay, near the Livermore Falls line, in front of a playground. It was still there Wednesday.

ECS stands for East Coast Soldiers, a group believed to be made up of youths from the Jay and Livermore Falls area. They range in age from 14 to 18, maybe younger.

It is one of the loosely knit groups of young people in northern Androscoggin and Franklin counties that police call wannabe gangs. They come and go over the years.

Floyd Patrick, who lives on Church Street in Jay, said Wednesday he called police when the kids were “tagging” the street with the initials about a month ago.

“I’m 26. I hear all the kids talk about it,” Patrick said. “ECS stands for East Coast Soldiers.”

He and his girlfriend are moving to Wilton, he said, to get out of the neighborhood.

Police say they don’t know of any organized, formally structured gangs in the region.

Police in Farmington, Jay and Livermore Falls have addressed issues with young people in recent months regarding purported gang activity. Law enforcement officials in the area soon will hold gang training so they’ll know what to look for.

In Livermore Falls, police Lt. Thomas Gould said there are and have been small-town gangs, usually made up of a small number of youths who are very unorganized. They name themselves, make up symbols and letters that represent their group and spray-paint their tags on others’ property, Gould said. They also wear symbols and specific colors.

They haven’t been particularly dangerous in the past but have been known to create mischief at times, Gould said.

At last Friday’s Jay/Livermore Falls football game police initially believed that a threatening incident at the game was gang-related.

That turned out not to be the case.

The initials EBC on a bat used in the incident stood for Elmer’s Billy Club and were not the ECS initials.

Jay police, along with school officials, spoke to a few students in September after information came to light that some young people were trying to initiate gangs, Jay police Chief Larry White Sr. said.

“We told them it would not be tolerated,” White said.

A lot of them want to feel a sense of belonging and want to connect to something, he said

“Some of them do it because they want to look important in the eyes of their peers,” White said.

But police and the schools cannot take the wannabe gangs lightly, White said.

“You can still have violence erupt from an unorganized group,” he said.

Farmington police investigated rumors of intended gang violence at the Farmington Fair in September. The rumors escalated to the point where people were saying there was going to be a killing at the fair, Farmington Lt. Jack Peck said.

Police questioned several youths and identified a group of five, most of them in middle school, who appeared to have started the rumors, he said. Police spoke to the youngsters and their parents. Three admitted making statements and were given criminal trespass warnings and banned from the fair, Peck said.

The other two totally denied involvement, he added.

Franklin County Sheriff Lt. Niles Yeaton said there have been some attempts to set up so-called sidewalk gangs, but he knows of none in the area now.

Kids in Strong took over a sidewalk and threatened other kids if they walked on it a couple of years ago, Yeaton said, before they moved on.

“The gang thing really doesn’t work well in small towns because everybody knows everybody,” Yeaton said.