Gov. Paul LePage’s dangerous narrative about dark-skinned dealers causing Maine’s drug epidemic must stop. It is not supported by data, and it wrongly demonizes non-white men. It also diverts attention from the real causes of the drug problem, which is on track to kill a record number of Mainers again this year, and it shortchanges needed interventions such as addiction treatment and overdose prevention.
LePage has repeatedly vilified black and Hispanic men for coming to Maine to sell drugs and, therefore, kill the state’s residents. Last month, he said he had a binder full of news clippings and photos of every drug dealer arrested in Maine.
“I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn,” the governor said at a town hall meeting in North Berwick. He later said, “black people come up the highway, and they kill Mainers.”
Data analyzed by several sources show that LePage’s binder offers a highly inaccurate assessment of what is actually happening with drug arrests in Maine. Black men and women do transport drugs to Maine and sell them here. But, so do many more white people, and LePage doesn’t talk about them.
“The most recent crime data from the FBI suggest the governor’s claim doesn’t pass muster,” the Associated Press reported recently.
Black people accounted for 14 percent of a total of 1,211 drug sale and manufacturing arrests and 7.4 percent of 5,791 total drug arrests in Maine in 2014, the most recent year for which numbers are available from the FBI.
CityLab came to the same conclusion based on a different set of data. The Bureau of Justice Statistics compiles data from statewide and local law enforcement agencies across the country. In 2012, the most recent year for which Bureau of Justice Statistics data is available, the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency reported 394 arrests for the sale or manufacturing of drugs. Forty-five of those arrested were black, or 11 percent of the total. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does not have a separate category for Hispanics. The highest percentage of black arrests was in Cumberland County, where 41 percent of those arrested for the sale or manufacture of drugs were black, according to the MDEA data.
In 2008, 6 percent of the 488 people arrested for selling or making drugs were black. For the arrest rate of blacks to suddenly jump to 90 percent of the total, something unprecedented, perhaps racial profiling, would have to be taking place.
As reported by the Bangor Daily News, 70 percent of the 430 Maine State Prison inmates convicted of any type of drug trafficking self-report as white, according to data provided by the Maine Department of Corrections, with 23 percent self-reporting as black. The overrepresentation of black inmates in state prison should be a priority for review by lawmakers when the Legislature convenes in January.
CityLab also pointed to press releases from the U.S. attorney’s office for the district of Maine, the agency responsible for prosecuting high-volume drug dealers who cross state lines. The press releases announce the sentences of lots of white men and women convicted of drug crimes, including trafficking.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Maine told CityLab that it doesn’t collect demographic data on its drug cases because “it’s not relevant to what we do.”
That, precisely, is the point.
The job of law enforcement is to find and arrest as many drug dealers and traffickers as possible, no matter the color of their skin or whether they came from Massachusetts or Maine. Casting this work as a battle against black and Hispanic people from other states is divisive, counterproductive and just plain wrong.
