Portland Police Chief Mark Dubois on Tuesday provided an update regarding police presence in the city’s Bayside neighborhood, a crime hotspot, to the City Council’s Health and Human Services and Public Safety.
In April, Portland Police increased officer presence in the neighborhood in response to a disturbing video published by a Bayside landlord showing open drug use, violence and public indecency outside of his building.
Following the video and after complaints from residents, Chief Dubois doubled the dedicated Bayside patrol detail to include four officers.
On Tuesday, Chief Dubois said that two officers from the department’s community policing unit are present in the Bayside neighborhood Monday through Friday, and there are police details in the area in the evenings and on weekends until 10 p.m.
Arrests in Bayside remain high at 342 last month alone, up from 247 recorded in June of last year, Dubois said.
Of those arrests, about 30 percent were for drug offenses, and 20 percent were for disorderly conduct or disturbance instances, according to Dubois.
Calls for service to Bayside decreased from 911 in May to 783 in June.
Dubois attributed the increase in arrests to his department’s heightened presence in the neighborhood compared to last year, when police were primarily focused on the city’s large homeless encampments.
“So I think we have a pretty consistent presence down there, we’re still trying to figure what works and what doesn’t with different strategies,” Dubois said.
“I think moving forward we’re going to try and focus a little bit more on a lot of the quality of life issues that we run into very frequently,” he added, such as obstructions of sidewalks.
Dubois said that recently a lot of furniture has been dropped off on sidewalks in the neighborhood, including a freezer and La-Z-Boy reclining chairs.
“People continually drop off things down there for unknown reasons,” Dubois said.
You can thank the liberal lunacy for this.
Wow…
There’s no greater sign that they are in over their heads than publicizing their policing schedule.
WTH! 342 arrests in one month in one section of Portland? Liberal media has kept that well hidden. Portland has become another failed Democrat social experiment.
Thanks Maine Wire. Watch out for Soros.
Lock them up That Works
I stay out of that area and for that matter all of portland.