Peter Santenello was making his way slowly up Knox Street, described by one area teen as the most dangerous in Lewiston, when he said this:

“Some things you don’t see on a spreadsheet — the person yelling at the wall or throwing stuff at you on the street. Quite often, you just can’t put a metric on that kind of stuff.”

Sometimes, Santenello said, you can just feel an uneasiness about a place.

That, as far as I’m concerned, is the moment this wildly popular YouTuber hit the nail on the head.

Lewiston doesn’t have big crime numbers, as Santenello pointed out, if you look only at the official records. And yet, as he wound his way along the downtown streets, talking to anyone who would have him, he would learn what us locals know to be true.

The city is very unsettled right now. It’s just not always easy to define what it is.

Santenello’s approach to his documentary “Inside the Most Dangerous City in America’s Safest State” was simplicity itself. This was just a man roaming from one end of the downtown to another and talking to the very people who populate its neighborhoods.

An older Somali gentleman handing out water on Bartlett Street.

A pair of Black teens riding around in a car.

A man who had just recently arrived from Angola and a young local fellow trying to get his life together at one of the city’s new apartments.

Those people talked, Santenello listened.

He talked to a man running a Lisbon Street pawn shop, a Pine Street market owner and a fellow sitting behind the counter at a Bartlett Street variety store, selling legal weed and lottery scratchers.

Santenello just walked and talked and listened and the sad fact is, you just don’t see that kind of man-on-the-street brand of objective reporting anymore; especially in the clickbait world of social media where having extreme views is almost a requirement.

And yet, when I first heard that Santenello’s video was making the rounds, I had no interest in watching it.

Another self-important “influencer” coming to exploit all the hot button issues within the city, I figured. Another click-starved YouTuber here to push one agenda or another — to chum the already roiling waters and to get viewers so enraged that they might just smash that subscribe button and add to the revenue stream.

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered Santenello’s hands-off style of reporting, instead.

When a teenage girl on Ash Street told him that she worries about being accosted by men who are high on crack or meth when she’s downtown, Santenello didn’t rush in for a kill shot. He just listened some more.

When a teenager told him: “”Lewiston is not a great place to live. It’s a lot of shootings. It’s a lot of rebellious kids. It’s rough out here,” Santenello hadn’t led the kid to that opinion, he had simply asked the kid to describe his life in Lewiston.

There were those who leveled all of the usual criticisms, of course. A couple younger women in Kennedy Park referred to the city as “The Dirty Lew” and suggested that people try to live in Auburn, instead.

But he also talked to plenty who are still optimistic about Lewiston and these are the people who don’t get heard, a lot of the time, because so much attention is paid to those with extreme positions.

There’s Tyler, a 28-year-old who works at a bread factory and who is getting his life going from an apartment at Picker House Lofts.

Tyler grew up here and sees more of Lewiston’s problems than most of us, but he still had measured things to say.

“It has its substance abuse, homelessness and all that stuff, which is not good,” Tyler says, giving Santenello a tour of his neat apartment. “But they’re trying. If they bring in more places like this around town, people will  have a place to live and actually have a better chance.”

Susan Longchamps, interviewed by Santenello outside the Pine Street store she owns, said more or less the same about the city.

“In Lewiston, people are so resilient,” Longchamps said. “When someone is in need, everyone pulls together to help.”

“We’re a service center,” Longchamps said. “That’s why it gets such a bad rap. We service so many people. If someone has an issue, they get dumped off to Lewiston. But the great thing is that most of the time, we help.”

And Santenello didn’t try to steer her off toward a more controversial topic. He asked for Longchamps’ opinion and was content when she gave it.

Over the weekend, roughly 10 different people sent me a link to Santenello’s video. It annoyed me, if you want to know the truth. Before I had a gander, I imagined some overstimulated , mad dog of a YouTuber coming to Lewiston with a posse and cameras in tow.

Instead, it was just one guy with a camera, walking our streets and shaking our hands when they were offered. Just one man on a walkabout, inviting us to share our thoughts without a specific agenda to pursue.

He does this all over the country and I see now that there’s a reason this cat has more than 4 million subscribers. Santenello just talks to regular folks in a way that’s open-minded and nonhysterical.

In the Lewiston video, he shares an observation, from time to time, but almost never puts forth an opinion of his own. And while this kind of unbiased reporting would have been unremarkable a couple decades ago, these days it’s a unicorn.

Santenello came to Lewiston to learn something about us, but in the end, maybe he taught us a little something in exchange.

Maybe when we want to talk about Lewiston’s problems, we should all step away from the mosh pit that is social media and go outside to talk to people in the real world.

Call me crazy, but I learned more about my neighbors from Santenello’s one-hour video than I ever will in a 400-comment thread on Facebook where it’s all gnashing teeth and ad hominem mayhem 24 hours a day.

One man on the ground for a single day isn’t going to solve anything, of course, or unite people enough to leave them singing hymns of peace in Kennedy Park.

Santenello came for a look around, reported what he saw, heard and felt, and then went on his way.

This was but a stranger’s view of the weirdness that is Lewiston and while it won’t change anything in any significant way, I feel I have to give respect where respect is due.