Somali community in Lewiston, Maine.
WND, By Leo Hohmann, 06/10/2015:
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.
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.
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.
The Somali influence in Lewiston is visible along the city’s main downtown corridor, Lisbon Street. Shops offer Halal meat and brightly colored African clothing.
Muhidin Libah, head of a local Somali Bantu community organization, is among those Somalis who moved to Lewiston and attended one of the Lewiston Police Department’s recruiting meetings last month. He told Reuters he was surprised by the outreach effort.
“People were thinking, to be a police officer, you have to be born in the U.S. … you have to be white,” Libah told the news agency. “They never thought they could be a police officer.”
The diversity program takes on heightened meaning in light of race riots in U.S. cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore and Cleveland after police killings of unarmed black men. All of the cities where violence has flared have been criticized by activists for having police forces that are “too white.”
Reuters followed that theme in its article.
“Right now America is trying to reconnect with the idea of police,” John DeCarlo, an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former chief of police in Branford, Connecticut, told the news agency. “When we look like our communities, when we embrace the values of our communities, it increases the legitimacy of the police department.”
“When you’re trying to live in a place, then you need to look like that place,” Zam Zam Mohamud, who serves on Lewiston’s school board, told Reuters. “If we have Somali police officers, Somali lawyers, Somali judges … That is a sign the community is assimilating, people are feeling comfortable.”
Mohamud, 40, said she would encourage her children, in their early 20s, to consider a career in law enforcement.
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