While I was away, I missed posting this story from World Net Daily. It is not just about the police chief’s new officer recruitment, but is a good summary of how Lewiston became the Little Mogadishu of New England.
If you would like to catch up on the happenings in Lewiston, including the case of the Somali kid who burned down an apartment building, see our huge archive, here, on the little city being colonized.
I’ve only snipped a small segment of the story by Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily, so be sure to read the whole thing:
“One place in Lewiston where that growing diversity is not evident is the city’s 82-member police force, but Chief Michael Bussiere aims to change that amid an intense national debate over race and policing,” Reuters reports.
The Lewiston-Auburn area now has a Somali population of 7,000, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of its total population. They arrived in the U.S. either as refugees or were born in the U.S. as children of refugees.
About a quarter of Bussiere’s officers will become eligible to retire in the next few years, so he figures to have quite a few openings.
“We have to think about who is living here now and who’s going to live here 10 years from now,” he told Reuters reporter Scott Malone.
“We need a department that is reflective of the demographics of the community it serves.”
Lewiston, a city of 36,000 people that spent decades struggling through job losses from mill closings and a shrinking population, may seem an unlikely place for such a rebirth given that Maine is among the whitest U.S. states, Malone reports.
But, according to U.S. Census data, 8.7 percent of Lewiston’s population identifies as black or African-American, a rate higher than any other city in the state and more than seven times the 1.2 percent state average.
And the Somali population is exploding not just in Lewiston. It has spread to nearby Auburn and Portland.
Many Somalis originally came as refugees to larger cities, Atlanta in particular, but then moved to Maine after hearing that it had a wider array of subsidized housing available and also was easier to get on the welfare rolls. This is called “secondary migration” when a refugee is assigned to one city but then moves elsewhere after arrival in the U.S.
Read it all, here. And, again, see our archive on Lewiston. There is probably enough there to write a book!
About the photo: These Somali refugees sure do have the protest (community organizing) thing down pat, don’t they!