LEWISTON — The underlying problems that ultimately lead to youth gun violence in the city are complex and multifaceted, city and state leaders said during a special City Council meeting Tuesday.

Solving them will take changes to laws and policies, they said. Above all, it will take more money and manpower than is currently available.

The meeting, which packed the multipurpose room at Lewiston High School, brought out several officials and community stakeholders. 

Speakers included Lewiston Police Chief Carly Conley, Androscoggin County District Attorney Neil McLean Jr., Lewiston Public Schools Superintendent Jake Langlais, New Beginnings Executive Director Chris Bicknell, Restorative Justice Project Manager Dunkins Pierre, and Department of Corrections Associate Commissioner for Juvenile Services Christine Thibeault and Director of Government Affairs Jill O’Brien.

Langlais addressed behaviors and resources at the schools while Bicknell and Pierre gave their perspectives of the realities faced by many Lewiston youths. 

Langlais said there have been 15 expulsions among middle and high school students this year.

Still, even for those students, Lewiston schools continue to provide help, implementing specific plans, volunteer requirements, counseling, teaching and other experiences, Langlais said. Some are afforded opportunities to earn limited credit, and the general aim for most students is getting them back in school.

Speaking with students who have gotten in trouble has been one of the best tools for understanding where they are at and how and why they get into trouble, the superintendent said. He noted that one 12-year-old student confided that he had become talented at stealing firearms from unlocked vehicles. 

Bicknell said Lewiston needs to come to grips with the reality that a solution to youth gun violence involves money and the responsibility sits with state and local officials. 

“Period,” Bicknell said. “If you don’t want to spend money on this, you’re not going to get a solution.”

Lewiston needs to immediately invest in a director of public health because the incidents of gun violence in the community is one of “public health … not criminal justice,” Bicknell said. 

“This is about children in fear,” Bicknell said, adding that children and young adults do not process or react to trauma in the same ways as adults. “I see every day in my life children who have little to no support structure in their lives, who do the absolute best that they can to solve the problem they’re presented with. … They are doing what they can to keep themselves alive based on visceral reactions to the horrible realities in the streets.”

POLICE AND PROSECUTORS

Conley spoke on the realities of policing during the uptick in gun violence and pointed to statistics on this year’s incidents. 

The first six months of 2025 saw 19 incidents of gun violence in the city. The first six months of 2026 saw the same number, yielding eight adult arrests and 19 juvenile arrests, Conley said. So far in 2026, 44 firearms have been seized in active investigations and 13 of the 19 incidents have been solved.

Conley attributed the department’s successes to increased foot patrols, reallocation of patrols and special units, various community engagements and the use of Flock cameras, which solved six of the shootings and yielded three stolen weapons. 

McLean spoke on the difficulties and limits to prosecution. There are over 3,000 pending cases in the Franklin, Oxford and Androscoggin counties’ district, he said, and just 16 prosecutors. Without a dedicated juvenile prosecutor, and because rules around “chronological immaturity” result in many youths being found incompetent to stand trial, it is difficult for his office to move the needle on the successful prosecution of potentially dangerous juveniles. 

While many try to recognize the youthful nature of juveniles involved in crime, McLean said adults and the judicial system fail them by also minimizing the alleged crimes. 

“When these cases arrive on my desk, the children are the problem. And they’re not children, they’re juveniles,” McLean said. “Some of these juveniles that are involved may be the shooter one day and may be the victim the next day. I think we’re failing them if we continue to treat them like children.”

Despite dedicating two of his best prosecutors to Lewiston’s gun violence alone, McLean said his office, like all district attorneys in Maine, needs more resources, more prosecutors, a dedicated juvenile prosecutor and serious policy change in Augusta.

“We need people in elected positions to take this seriously and not fight among each other, not be divisive in nature,” McLean said. “We need people to come together and stop blaming (violence) on specific groups, stop pretending it doesn’t exist where it does.”

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

Thibeault and O’Brien, of the Department of Corrections, discussed where Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland and detention programs fit into the discussion about youth gun violence. They said the DOC’s role goes beyond detention, with many resources poured into community-based programs intended to keep youths out of the justice system.

“I’ve been working in Maine’s juvenile justice system for 30 years,” Thibeault said. “I see juvenile justice as an art, and the art of juvenile justice is figuring out that individual kid. … Each kid comes to us as an individual.”

Long Creek holds detained youth awaiting hearings and trials as well as adjudicated youths. Its current count is 49 juveniles.

O’Brien said the department invests $4.6 million statewide for community programs and over $1.4 million for the region that includes Lewiston. Programs include mentoring and restorative justice, where the juvenile is pushed to give back to the community he or she harmed.

Thibeault said a vast majority of juveniles in the justice system exhibit “normative delinquent behavior” and don’t require expensive programming. Long Creek tries to “divert them with as light a touch as possible,” she said. 

Some others do not exhibit the likeliness of repeat offending, but do need extensive support due to circumstances surrounding home life, poverty and substance use, among other factors.

Very few residents at the center are high risk for reoffending and require intensive intervention, she said.

“That’s part of our job is to do assessments and figure out if the youth before us is a high-needs kid,” Thibeault said. “Maybe DHHS needs to do more if there’s a risk that that youth is going to continue to be a danger to themselves as well as all of you. We want to take a different approach and address those risks, and science tells us and there are programs that tell us what works. So, we’re really trying to prioritize what we know works for those high-risk kids.”

Thibeault said Maine’s juvenile justice system has shifted from a punitive model to a rehabilitation-focused one over the past two decades as research around adolescent brain development has improved. Accountability remains a top priority for the system, she said, but the department’s goal is to help address underlying causes of behavior.

WHAT CAN THE CITY DO?

Many were asked what the council can do to combat the issue and one answer was constant: continue to provide resources and opportunities to youths keeping them involved in social life through extracurriculars. 

Youths need fun, McLean said, and guidance on how to grow as a person.

Pierre said many of the supports youths need are in place — what they need now are adults in their lives who connect them with those opportunities.

City Council President David Chittim of Ward 6 said the most concrete suggestion for residents that he heard — beyond creating opportunities for youth — is to “lock up your guns.”

“Do not leave your guns on the front seat of your pickup truck so that a 12-year-old can be told by an 11-year-old, ‘There’s easy pickings,’” Chittim said. “It’s your fault if your gun is stolen and I’d like to see some consequences.”

Ward 2 Councilor Susan Longchamps suggested the city is in dire need for outside help.

“We’re experiencing gun violence almost daily … and we heard our chief say we’re down 11 officers — in my opinion, and no one will like to hear this, but I believe this is a call for our National Guard to come and help us,” Longchamps said, adding that she hopes Gov. Janet Mills continues working with local law enforcement and the DA’s office to come up with a plan. “This, to me, needs state help.”

Mayor Carl Sheline said after the meeting that local solutions call for resources that do not require more policing.

“Ripping Maine’s National Guard members from their families and employers to walk the streets of Lewiston will do nothing for our community,” Sheline said. “If we have money for National Guard deployments, then we have money for our Rec Department to increase the amount of downtown youth enrolled in its programs, expand our Kennedy Park pool hours and fund the kinds of programs that build relationships and community that will create lasting change in our city.”