Maine city recruiting Somalis as cops 'Diversity' program launched in spite of terror concerns June 10, 2015 Leo Hohmann
One of smallest cities that has received thousands of Somali refugees over the years is Lewiston, Maine. But, unlike the Minnesota Muslims from Somalia, this group appears to fly under the radar.
Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Andrew Luger, publicly declared in April that the state has a “terror recruitment problem,” as hundreds of young Somalis have been investigated for ties to terrorist organizations overseas.
But in Lewiston, there is a recruitment of a different sort going on.
Lewiston’s police chief, Michael Bussiere, made news this week when he told Reuters he was focused on recruiting Somalis to work as cops in his department.
It’s part of his “diversity” program to make the local police force look more like the community it serves, he said.
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And, with the help of the U.S. State Department’s refugee resettlement program, Lewiston has gone from one of the whitest cities in America to an increasingly diverse one.
“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.