One recent evening, my wife informed me that she was heading to a store on Pine Street in Lewiston for some meat that was on sale. Ribs, I think it was, or possibly buffalo wings. 

It wasn’t the price of meat that concerned me, though, I had other calculations in mind. I was trying to recall how many random shootings there had been along the Pine Street corridor in recent months and at what time of day they had occurred. 

I didn’t come up with anything helpful, of course. Gunfire in downtown Lewiston has become an almost daily occurrence and the time of day doesn’t seem to matter.  

The lunatics spraying rounds all over the city to settle their disputes don’t seem to care if it’s the wee hours of morning or if it’s the middle of the afternoon. They’ll pepper the streets while the city sleeps or they’ll open fire in broad daylight when school buses are rolling and little kids walk the streets. 

Your chances of getting dropped by stray rounds from some gang banger’s street-bought Ruger are greater than they have been at least since I started working the crime beat here in 1994.  

Two weeks ago, when groups of masked men exchanged fire in the Walnut Street neighborhood, there were schoolchildren out there ducking gunfire and making mad dashes from bus to home. There were old-timers out for walks on slippery sidewalks. There were men and women driving right past the scene of the shootout to get to or from work. 

It’s truly a marvel that more innocents haven’t shed blood in these explosive battles over drug debt, turf or whatever it is that gets these audacious hooligans slinging lead all over the downtown. 

So, while I was pondering my wife’s duck-and-cover trip to the butcher shop, I was also trying to recall a time over the past 30 years when I’ve heard the echo of gunfire so frequently within the heart of the city. 

But of course, that was an empty exercise as well. As far as I can recall, it’s never been like this. In more normal times, one could walk anywhere in the downtown residential areas of Lewiston and, unless you had an issue with some out-of-state drug slinger, you’d never feel the need for a Kevlar vest. 

In those days, if you heard gunshots somewhere within the city, you could be pretty certain that something specific had gone down. There would be no mystery about it.  

Some years ago, I was sitting at my newsroom desk when the scanner crackled with reports of gunfire in the area of Cedar Street. The police scrambled. I scrambled. What we found on that night was a young man with a new rifle who thought he would try it out by standing in the grass off Canal Street and firing at random toward Lincoln Street. 

Boom! That fool was arrested. No mystery. 

On an early evening in October 2014, I was just returning to the newsroom on Park Street when a series of gunshots thundered through the night. Wheeling over to Kennedy Park, I found a group of police officers standing over a man who had aimed a gun at them just moments earlier. 

Boom! That man was hospitalized and then arrested. No mystery. 

I’ve covered dozens of incidents like these, maybe hundreds. It was rare to show up at a shooting scene to find only a haze of gun smoke and a bunch of spent shells gleaming in the streets. More often than not, there would be a victim bleeding in the street and a suspect being loaded into the back of a cruiser. 

These days? More often than not, the shooters — often hordes of them — vanish like phantoms in the aftermath of their mayhem. Police will find buildings and cars dotted with bullet holes and a few people shaking with near-miss anxiety, but no one they can put into cuffs right away.  

It’s unnerving, all of it. 

Back in the day when there was gunfire within the city, people more or less had to huddle in their homes and wait for the news to reveal what it was all about. 

These days? Naw, man. These days, word of shots fired spreads fast on social media and on a Facebook page called Lewiston Maine Politics Uncensored, where the spate of gunfire is more or less a daily topic of conversation. 

Nobody is frozen with fear on that page. They’re mostly enraged and inspired to action. 

On Monday, a local couple used information gleaned from a Freedom of Access Act request to prepare a chart showing just how much gunfire is on the rise in Lewiston. The chart, dating back to 2010, shows exactly what you would expect it to. It rises like a mountain chain, that chart. 

In 2010, there were only two reported incidents of gunfire in Lewiston, according to the information gathered. By 2021, that number had risen to 27 and the year after, we were up in the clouds, with 43 gunfire incidents reported in 2022. 

According to the chart, 2023 and 2024 had lower lumbers, but we’re still up in the mid- to upper-30s, so nobody is out there asserting that a cease-fire has been declared. 

So, what happened at the start of the decade to cause gunfire to become such a frequent phenomenon? And more importantly, what can be done about it? 

Yes. Those are the big questions, aren’t they? 

While everyone can seem to agree that SOMETHING HAS GOT TO BE DONE, finding those solutions is another matter. Community meetings on the matter of gunfire didn’t seem to help. Police saturation patrols may have helped a little earlier in the year, but it was not an ongoing effort and so the THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of gunfire soon returned. 

On Lewiston Maine Politics Uncensored, the active members remain engaged. 

They’d like to see the court system more dedicated to keeping dangerous people locked up. 

They’d like to see parents keeping better track of their juvenile children. 

They’d like to see even more attention paid to the flow of drugs into the city, which some see as the main driver of the downtown gunfire. 

They’d REALLY like to see a return to Operation Hot Spot, a program launched by then-Lewiston police Chief Michael Bussiere in 2012 — without any grant money for the first two summers, mind you — that put more officers and drug agents on the downtown streets. 

It’s quite a wish list to take into the new year, but consider how high the stakes are. With so many rounds whizzing across the downtown, it’s probably not a matter of if some innocent soul is going to get gunned down just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

It’s likely a matter of when. 

For the people constantly rattled by the latest reports of gunfire too close to home, we either do something bold or we resign ourselves to frequent gun battles as just another way of life in Lewiston. 

“Gun violence — including by youth — has become so commonplace that a kind of mass desensitization has settled in,” said Maura Murphy, an active member of the Lewiston Maine Politics Uncensored group. “What horrified us several years ago is now just another ugly day in the neighborhood. We have pulled ourselves back from the brink before, and it is beyond time that we do it again. May 2025 be the year that Operation Hotspot returns to Lewiston.”