LEWISTON – Officer Danielle Murphy’s patrol beat is centered downtown. On a bike.

Murphy, a 12-year veteran of the Lewiston Police Department, is one of the department’s seven bike patrol officers, and she is on a cordial, first-name basis with many downtown residents.

Pedaling along Horton Street on Thursday, an older man hailed her from his front porch, telling her about an abandoned bike in his dooryard and asking her to find the owner. She stopped, looked at the battered bike, and gave the man the option of assuming ownership or letting a public works crew pick it up. The man said his young nephew needed a bike, so he decided he’d keep it.

The man called her by her first name, and she his. They speak often when she trolls through his neighborhood, and he seemed genuinely glad to see her pass by.

Lewiston’s bike patrol, primarily used for law enforcement, is also a community outreach effort. It dates back to the early 1990s when then-Sgt. William Welch implemented the Police and Community Enforcement team, or PACE team, to patrol the downtown on mountain bikes. The concept, according to Lt. Mike McGonagle, is to mimic old-time foot patrols that allowed officers and residents to freely interact, something lost when police patrol the downtown in cruisers with closed windows.

Foot patrols are not that practical because they limit officers’ ability to quickly respond to calls. The bike patrols, used for day and night shifts as much as possible, offer interaction with people plus the speed to respond to calls.

Murphy, who was patrolling Thursday afternoon near Pierce Street, was called to respond to a report of a man beating another man with a baseball bat on River Street. With her bike siren sounding at intersections, Murphy pedaled to the apartment and arrived before her backup cruiser, which was dispatched at the same time she was.

Not limited to the streets, Murphy’s route to the River Street address was a dash across the Kennedy Park lawn before zipping down Chestnut Street and cutting sharply left onto River. If there’s an alley nearby to shorten her route, she’ll take it. She’s trained to ride her Trek up stairs, skid through dirt and rocks, and in how to use her bike as a barrier between herself and a suspect. But, mostly, she rides neighborhood streets and talks to people.

A former DARE officer in the Lewiston public schools, Murphy recognizes a lot of the city’s teens and slows to talk to them as they walk along.

Although friendly and often sporting a broad smile, Murphy is all business.

Her approach with a 17-year-old she stopped after seeing him smoking a cigarette on Oak Street was formal. The boy, who was not in school at 1:30 p.m., said he was scheduled to start school next week after arranging with Community Concepts for daily transportation to Winthrop.

When Murphy asked whether she could pat him down for weapons, he allowed her, and immediately told her she would find a marijuana pipe in his pocket that he’d found on the road. Rather than leave it in the street, he’d picked it up, he explained.

Murphy, who later said she didn’t buy the teen’s tale, offered to dispose of the drug paraphernalia for him and warned him she’d be looking for him next week to make sure he had started school.

Asked why she didn’t ticket the 17-year-old smoker for illegal possession of cigarettes, she said she felt her verbal warning was enough. “What we don’t get now, we get later,” she said, certain she’ll see that 17-year-old again.

Although her vehicle is unconventional for a police officer, Murphy said people do show her respect. She doesn’t get any more guff on the bike than she does in a cruiser, and can quickly get a suspect’s attention because her bike is quiet and she’s got a real element of surprise in her approach.

After interviewing witnesses to the reported River Street beating, Murphy and Cpl. Jeff Baril determined everyone involved had already left. “No victim, no crime,” Murphy said, although she would file a report that police had responded, especially since there had been a couple of arrests there Tuesday night.

As she was finishing up her notes, a red van with New Jersey plates moved slowly down the street. She asked the driver whether he was lost. He was. He’d driven up Route 136 from Freeport and was looking for Route 4. She gave him directions and, as she mounted her bike to leave, a skateboarder sailed past. Murphy turned on her handlebar-mounted siren and gave chase, quickly gaining on the 20-something man and informing him he was violating a city ordinance against boarding in the street.

“Where do you want me to skate?” he fired back at her. She suggested that he move along to the skate park or take the board inside.

He hopped off the board, picked it up and went into his apartment without another word. She said that kind of thing happens all the time and her ability to get close and ride along with boarders allows her to talk with them.

Turning from River Street onto Lincoln Street, Murphy stopped a man who was using his cell phone to photograph the front of a house. While she was checking his identification, the man explained that he was disabled and collecting Social Security, but was in the market for a house and was photographing houses that interested him. She asked him to stop, especially since it appeared he had been photographing inside the house.

Thursday’s temperature climbed into the 80s, with high humidity, so Murphy stopped at Pine Tree Trading and Pawn Shop for conversation and water midafternoon. Like other officers, her uniform includes a bullet-proof vest and a belt weighted down with weapons and other equipment. She said the heat does get to her as she carries all that equipment, but she really prefers the bike patrol to being inside an air-conditioned cruiser. Much of her job satisfaction, Murphy said, is her contact with residents. “I’m a people person,” she said, and hopes she’s making a difference each day on the job.

Murphy routinely patrols Lisbon Street a couple of times a day. She rolls through Kennedy Park more often than that, makes a point to check the trail behind Lewiston High School and makes regular passes through alleyways downtown, seeing things that can’t be seen from a cruiser on the street.

She also frequently backs up other officers on domestic abuse calls, like she did Thursday on Elm Street.

These are tough calls to witness, she said, but she’s most disturbed by marijuana use among young people. When they start toking, she said, “it’s like they just stop in place.” They lose the ambition to go to school and get a job, and it bothers her to see “such potential in young people wasted.”

Facing that waste and dealing with the teens is part law enforcement and part outreach, Murphy explained, which is her job.