COMMUNITY ISSUES

Policing the Old Port

By Noah Bruce

Unless there is a change in the city budget, the Portland Police Department will have to reduce the amount of summer foot patrols in the Old Port, Deputy Chief Bill Ridge told members of Portland’s Downtown District Safety Committee at the group’s meeting on Wednesday, March 28.

Committee members, mostly Old Port business owners, are concerned that a reduced police presence will be less effective at controlling problematic behaviors they say drive away customers. John Doyon, chair of the committee, and a partner with Malone Commercial Brokers, says these behaviors include “blocking sidewalks so pedestrians can’t pass and blocking storefronts so people can’t enter. Things are sometimes thrown from apartment windows or in the street. Verbal insults are sometimes passed along and the thing that really makes me crazy — when any female can’t walk down the street without being harassed verbally.”

Another problem discussed at the meeting is drug sales. “It is clear to people who have never rolled a joint that that is what’s going on on Exchange Street,” said a business owner who wanted to remain nameless. “If a tourist stands in certain places in the Old Port for five minutes, they would see a drug sale.”

Ridge, went so far as to call the neighborhood “a violent place,” where he himself does not feel safe at night, making the Old Port sound like a neighborhood in South Central LA rather than in Portland.

One business owner at the meeting spoke about his efforts with self-policing. He said when he asks a small group of kids to move from in front of his store, they are usually compliant, but when that group swells to 30 kids or so, he usually encounters resistance when he asks them to move along.

Joanna Morissey, the owner of Java Joe’s, feels that self-policing is difficult because technically the streets are public property, unlike at the Old Port’s main retail competition, the Maine Mall, where she says, “people can be ejected for swearing and spitting. It makes it difficult to have a business where you’re not allowed to tell people ‘please stop spitting.’ It’s not in my interest to stick my neck out the door and yell. It doesn’t look good.”

Committee members had hoped the PPD would increase the amount of foot patrols from last year, but Ridge said the department simply does not have enough money to even equal last year’s police coverage. “You can kick me and wring me out but you won’t get any money out of me. It’s not there,” Ridge told the Safety Committee.

Ridge told the Phoenix that the PPD is not the only department in the city that is strapped for cash. “The city’s current budget that ends June 30 is short of what it was supposed to have been . . . All city departments were told we have to tighten the belt a bit.”

According to Morissey, this is not the first year Old Port business owners have had to fight to ensure adequate police protection. “Every year it’s a budgetary process,” she says.

Morissey and other business owners planned on attending the Portland City Council’s Public Safety Committee meeting on April 4 [after Phoenix deadline] to persuade councilors not to cut the foot patrols. Ridge says the decision rests with policy makers, not with the police department.

“If I’m told [by the council] ‘do what you did last year,’ I’ll do that. Then they have to come up with the funds.”

As for Chief Chitwood’s suggestion, reported in the Portland Press Herald on March 29, that business owners ante up the money to pay for the coverage, business owners were, not surprisingly, less than encouraging. “I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that,” says Doyon. “The Old Port property owners pay school taxes even though they might not live in Portland or have kids in the schools. The Old Port benefits the entire city.”