About a week after two homeless men were beaten up in Second Street Park and videos of the attacks rapidly spread across social media, the Bangor Police Department wanted to bring a different kind of attention to that part of the city.
Because of those attacks, it chose Second Street Park as the location for the department’s annual National Night Out event, which took place Tuesday night.
As part of the event — which happens all over the country — the department handed out free burgers and hot dogs, set up a bounce house and other entertainment for kids, and invited members of the public to meet with officers. Beforehand, the city also mowed the park’s grass and arranged for youth volunteers to clean up trash.
“We wanted to bring a little positivity and community building to Second Street Park,” said Community Resource Officer Elizabeth Brunton. “These assaults? That’s not Bangor.”
Attendees had a mix of views about last week’s assaults in Second Street Park — and a related attack a couple days later on the Bangor waterfront — as well as about the safety of Bangor as a whole.
While some said they avoid the park because they think it’s dangerous, others called the recent assaults isolated cases that have not scared them away from using the public space.
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“I don’t feel less safe,” said Audrey Sparkes, a resident of nearby Parker Street who came to the event to show her support for police. “I don’t think [last week’s assaults] are part of a trend.”
Two other people, Susan Record and David Bentley, also live nearby on Sanford Street. They regularly enter the park, either to relax in its shady areas or pass through it on the way to the Shaw’s supermarket on Main Street.
“It’s a quiet park, besides the isolated incidents,” Record said.
In fact, while some violent cases do receive great attention, they have been fairly rare over the last decade for a city of roughly 32,000 people.
The number of aggravated assaults reported annually to the Bangor Police Department hovered around 25 in the decade that ended in 2017, according to the latest crime data available from the Maine Department of Public Safety.
The annual number of reported robberies hovered around 28 between 2008 and 2017, and just four of those years saw more than one murder reported, according to the data.
Even so, other attendees at the Bangor Police Department’s event said they know of people who behave dangerously in the park — using drugs, fighting or intimidating others — and steer clear of it.
[Bangor wants to reclaim park after ‘fight club’ complaints]
They pointed to one area in particular, a low-slung wall tucked into the trees near the park’s lower exit, where people — some of them homeless or living in shelters — tend to hang out. The city received similar complaints about that area last summer, prompting a push to clean up the wall and send police officers there more frequently.
But even with the recent efforts to clean the park ahead of the police event on Tuesday night, a few needles, bottle caps and shards of broken glass were still sprinkled near the wall as young kids played games nearby.
After noticing the litter, another Bangor resident, Shannon Denbow, brought a rake down to the park and started doing some additional cleaning.
To help address the myriad health and safety problems of what appears to be a growing homeless population in Bangor, the city recently set aside funding to hire a new outreach worker.
[Bangor wants more feet on the ground to fight homelessness]
But Bangor still needs to do more to crack down on dangerous activity in public spaces and find safe shelter for people who don’t have permanent housing, according to Denbow.
“One outreach worker is not enough,” she said.
Two others who came to the event, 22-year-old Ethen Cosgro and 20-year-old Dasha Rodriguez, said they live in a house on Essex Street and have stopped coming to Second Street Park in the last year because of what they say is a handful of “problem causers” who pick fights.
“It didn’t surprise me,” Rodriguez said of the news about last week’s assaults. “But it did make me more paranoid.”