Hartford - Whether they're considered cliques or gangs, officials agree that teens in Connecticut's capital city are finding solidarity in tightly knit groups.

But the distinction has become a $500,000 question in Hartford, which won a federal grant based partly on a police memo that says the city is "infested" with 138 known gangs - including 800 members under 17 years old and a "prison yard atmosphere" on middle school playgrounds.

The city's schools superintendent disputes those comments. And police say that since the memo was meant for internal planning and not public consumption, they'd included smaller and less formal groups that don't meet the federal definition of a gang.

For Hartford activists and parents, the spat over semantics leaves an unanswered question: Is Hartford's gang problem really getting worse, or was it hyped to help win the grant?

"I don't know if it's really gangs or just unruly kids, but either way our city has taken its eyes off the prize, our kids, and we're under siege because of it," said Hyacinth Yennie, an activist and parent in the city's South End.

"Kids want to be wanted, and these gangs or cliques or whatever you call them are saying, 'Come with us, we're your buddies, we can take care of business for you,"' she said.

City administrators say miscommunication led them to use the police memo in the federal grant application though police told them not to, but they defend its assertions that Hartford youth are at risk of being lured into gang activity "right at school."

Gangs have long plagued Connecticut's capital city, where Mayor Eddie Perez is a former gang member and turf wars have divided some neighborhoods for decades.

After a particularly violent spell in the mid-1990s, state and federal authorities conducted massive crackdowns that sent scores of gang members to prison. Yet city officials say gangs never really went away, prompting the need for services such as the mentoring program being launched with the new federal grant.

"We used a definition that was maybe too broad, in hindsight, but the fact is that there's no one definition - and either way, these are youth that are in real need of services. Statistics beyond that (police) memo bear that out," said Enid Rey, Hartford's youth services director.

"If as a community, we can mobilize like this around this debate, we should be able to mobilize around helping our young people," she said. "Even if we gave the money back, the issue wouldn't go away."

The federal government has not made any moves to rescind the grant, despite the disagreement among city leaders over which youth groups constitute "gangs" and whether they actually are recruiting pre-teens at school.

"It would be foolish to say there aren't students who belong to gangs, which unfortunately is a phenomenon nationwide. The leap comes when people say it has seeped into the schools and classrooms, and we've seen none of that, especially in this year," said David Medina, a Hartford public schools spokesman.

The June internal police memo, originally obtained by The Hartford Courant, is from a lieutenant to an assistant chief and says officers knew of almost 4,200 gang members and 138 street gangs in the city.

A spokeswoman for Police Chief Daryl Roberts said the department would not comment on the memo because it was intended to be an internal planning document.

Some city residents who work with troubled Hartford youth say they do see them staying together in tight-knit groups, though they stopped short of characterizing them as gangs.

"I wouldn't say they're all in gangs, but that a lot of them have their little associations they stay in. They want the security of that circle," said the Rev. Donald Johnson, executive director of HOPE Street Ministries, which mentors youth in Hartford's troubled North End.

Experts say that to fit the definition of a "gang," a group generally has specific rivals, defends a particular turf, may tag its area with graffiti and acts together for a particular purpose - often illegal or violent.

"There's been controversy and confusion about the definition of a gang for at least 30 or 40 years," said Irving A. Spergel, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and a nationally recognized expert on gangs.

"A lot of it has to do with how the community and the police view them. If the cops and the community say they're a gang, maybe they're a gang - but really, there's no single accepted definition out there," he said.