Crime in rural Maine (Part II): Miscellaneous

I'm following up here on my earlier blog post about local media coverage of crime and related issues in micropolitan Maine, with the first installment here.  I'm going to present other issues here as bullet points:

From the Courier-Gazette (of Knox County and surrounding communities for 173 years) of April 25, 2019, four of seven front page stories implicate crime and policing.  A fifth story is about the City of Rockland seeking legal costs in a fight over a zoning law:

• "Former lawyer pleads not guilty."  This reports that Anita Volpe, 73 of Tenants Harbor (part of the village of St. Geroge), accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from three "vulnerable" people pleaded not guilty.  
• "Man accused of assaulting pregnant girlfriend deported"  This story reports that a 34-year-old Bosnian man awaiting trial on the charge was deported.  He had been living in Cushing, population 1,534, and Hope, population 1,536.
• "Policing comparison set for heating," dateline Thomaston (population 2,781), reports that residents will have the opportunity to ask questions and look at the cost comparisons for law enforcement at a public hearing.  Implicated is the decision whether to disband the Thomaston Police Dept. and contract with the Knox County Sheriff's Department to provide police protection.  I noticed that a headline in the Hancock County paper, which I visited online, was also discussing closure of one of the municipal police departments.  
• "South School burglarized, doors damaged," reports on damage done to South School, an elementary school in Rockland, population 7,297. Among other things, the nurse's office was broken into and students' medications stolen.  

The Bangor Daily News April 29, 2019 edition includes a few national news items, including the Poway, California synagogue shooting.   The only local crime story is "Still unauthorized, Church of Safe Injection expands."  The "church" is a free naloxone distribution site at a public square in Bangor.  This "mobile syringe exchange" has distributed "more than 600 naloxone kits and hundreds of clean syringes in its six months." 

One pattern I noticed from reading many different papers was that, the smaller the community the paper served, the greater the number of crime and criminal justice stories--or at least the more prominent the stories were.  Larger papers were, of course, covering not only state but also some national stories.