A hundred miles east of nowhere and one block from the center of town, Ashland Police Chief Michael Montpetit shifted his department’s only dependable cruiser into gear and headed out for his morning patrol.
For a few hours, Montpetit looped up and down the few dozen roads that make up Ashland — which, at more than 80 square miles, is Maine’s second largest town by land area.
Around 1,200 people live there, half what the town’s population was a century ago. The decline follows trends in the logging industry, the economic driver of this sparsely populated region on the edge of the North Maine Woods. Its only grocery store has been closed for months.
But Ashland still has its own police department. Few of Maine’s small towns can say the same.
Farther north, Van Buren closed its department in 2019. Limestone followed suit in 2023. Washburn, where Monpetit once worked, disbanded the next year after its chief, Cyr Martin, stepped down.
At that time, Martin was also both Ashland’s police chief and town manager. After Washburn disbanded its force, he told News Center Maine that he was worried Ashland might be next.
That thought lingers in the current chief’s mind. The department’s $500,000 budget passed by two votes at Ashland’s annual town meeting in March.
“I hope that doesn’t end up being my legacy, being the chief when the town decides to close up,” Montpetit said. “It’s always a possibility.”
A Bangor Daily News analysis of 25 years of law enforcement employment data found that 15 police departments in Maine have disbanded or merged with another since 2000. The trend dates back at least a decade further, experts say, and mirrors a shift toward more centralized models of policing across the U.S.
“The trend in Maine that I see is the tax base disappears and public safety is an expensive endeavor,” Mark Marsolais, professor of criminal justice and security at Thomas College, said.
The reasons a department closes vary, often tied to budget constraints or an inability to recruit new officers. Occasionally, scandal shakes a community’s trust in police. But the outcomes are the same: in Maine’s most rural areas, where the vast majority of closures occur, county sheriff’s offices and the state police have taken over.
“A municipality that cannot afford to maintain a police department of at least 10 full-time officers probably should look at contracting that service with the county sheriff or combining services with neighboring municipalities,” said Noel March, Maine’s former U.S. Marshal and a senior lecturer of justice studies at University of Maine at Augusta.
Larger departments are inherently more efficient and pooled resources allow them to provide specialized services, March and other experts said. Larger departments also typically offer greater pay, benefits and promotion opportunities, which aid recruitment and retention.
Forty-nine of Maine’s 101 municipal police departments operated with 10 or fewer full time officers in 2024 — the last year with available employment data. That includes Ashland.
The town has just three full-time cops — Monpetit included — and five reserve officers. Monpetit himself patrols anywhere from 36 to 70 hours in a given week.
The Ashland Police Department is a single room, less than 250 square feet, tucked between the town office and the fire department. Its officers buy their own handguns because the department doesn’t have the money to purchase them.
In spite of that, Monpetit believes contracting outside policing would be a genuine detriment to the town. Ashland is isolated, more than 20 miles to the nearest service community. Who is going to be there when “grandma locks herself out of the apartment,” he asked. Who will conduct property checks? Could a larger agency build the same kind of rapport?
In Washburn, which has turned to regional policing provided by the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office and Maine State Police, town manager Donna Turner said the arrangement has worked out well.
“We have been very pleased with the level of service they have provided,” Turner said.
Montpetit, who spent 15 years as sheriff’s deputy, says some residents have told him otherwise, to no fault of the police agencies.
“They’re spread thin,” he said. “You can’t expect a deputy that’s covering 30 towns to show up when you have a barking dog complaint. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Maine has the lowest violent crime rate in the nation, according to FBI data, and its overall crime rate has steadily decreased since 2021. But increases in mental health and substance-related calls have kept small departments busy.
Monpetit rejoined the Ashland Police Department in late 2024 and rose to chief within six months. Since then, data shows the department has been more present in the community and developed a stronger enforcement footing.
In 2025, the department responded to 1,919 calls for service and made 23 arrests, on par or higher than other towns of its size. It’s a stark contrast from the previous year, where officers responded to 764 calls for service and made four arrests.
From Dec. 1 to July 27 of this year, the department had already handled more than 2,000 calls, Monpetit said. He attributed the increase to officers working proactively, especially on drug enforcement, which he’s identified as a priority.
“The drug problem here, man, it was really out of control,” Monpetit said. “When I took over, there was no documented intelligence anywhere that I could find about anything that had been going on. We basically had to start from scratch.”
The department coordinated with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency on several arrests in drug-related investigations in recent months, a DEA spokesperson said.
Little about the arrests is public. So naturally, most of Ashland knows about them. That’s the cost of doing business in a town with two stoplights. But a public perception of an active police department is a good thing, Montpetit argued.
Ashland has avoided many problems that have doomed other small Maine police departments. It has found creative ways to recruit and retain officers, and hasn’t found itself mired in scandal.
But he knows there’s only so long trust can outweigh expense. A nationwide affordability crisis is raising the temperature on local governments to cut costs, and Ashland has a small tax base. Two of the area’s largest businesses, Irving sawmills in Masardis and Nashville Plantation, are just outside town limits.
It’s always possible that in a community where residents vote on the municipal budget, they could revolt against police spending. It almost happened this spring. It’s difficult to say what would happen next, and that frightens Montpetit.
“At the end of the day, we’re fortunate to even have a PD here,” Montpetit said. “We’re one of the few left. We really are. It’s scary. I’m not scared for myself … It’s not an employment issue. I just know the town needs it.”