LEWISTON — Police Chief Michael Bussiere is not one to gloat.

For years he’s been telling people that Lewiston is a safe city, undeserving of the bad reputation that follows it. And for years, the crime rate has been dropping steadily, to the point where Lewiston barely registers on state crime charts.

Bussiere doesn’t have to gloat; the numbers do it for him.

Consider: Auburn has had a higher crime rate than Lewiston every year since 2007. Portland’s has been higher since 2002 and Bangor has seen higher numbers since 1996.

In 2014, the last time the crime rates in Maine cities and towns were compared, Lewiston didn’t crack the top five, the top 10, or even the top 20.

That year, the city had a rate of 26.8 crimes per 1,000 residents compared to Portland’s rate of 34.7 and Bangor’s rate of 53.4. That crime rate calculates all of the so-called index crimes, including violent crime and other offenses such as larceny, burglary, motor vehicle theft and arson.

“This is the second-largest city in Maine,” Bussiere said, “and we were ranked 26th.”

Dozens attended a community forum by the Young Professionals of the Lewiston-Auburn Area on Wednesday night when police sought to dispel rumors that have dogged Lewiston for decades. Bussiere told them a story about his mother going through customs at a Boston airport. When the customs agent learned that she was from Lewiston, Bussiere said, all he could talk about was the high crime he’d heard about: the drive-by shootings, the gang warfare.

Every police officer on the force can tell similar stories. So can most longtime residents of the city, who hear the same kind of negativity whenever the matter of Lewiston crime is addressed by an outsider.

“Most of the time, the people saying these things haven’t even been to Lewiston in 10 or 20 years,” said Ed Plourde, who has lived in Lewiston for all of his 64 years. “We get that bad rap and it’s based on hearsay. How do we tell people from outside what the reality is? It makes me want to carry a little card in my pocket with some quick statistics.”

Police Sgt. Robert Ullrich hears it all the time, too. Whenever Lewiston’s relatively puny crime numbers are addressed with people from other Maine towns, there’s a sense of indignation.

“They say, ‘We can’t be ahead of Lewiston in crime. That’s unacceptable,'” Ullrich said.

At the forum, held at the Bates Mill Atrium, Community Resource Officer Joseph Philippon manned the controls to a slide show containing enough evidence to convince even the staunchest Lewiston critic. The numbers alone prove how far Lewiston has come since its darker days, but there are quotes from the people who live here, sentiments Philippon has collected over the past few years.

One local man described Lewiston as “the safest, cleanest, quietest, nicest” it’s been in 20 years. An area woman noted that she was having trouble sleeping because her neighborhood had become so quiet.

Just how has Lewiston risen so far? Efforts such as Operation Hot Spots, launched in 2012, has proved so popular that it has been adopted by cities across the state.

Programs such as The Root Cellar and Tree Street Youth, where volunteers work directly with police to improve the lives of young people, help to steer them away from bad influences.

“Don’t think that all of this is the Police Department doing a great and wonderful job,” Bussiere said. “It’s the community that’s great. If we didn’t have these organizations working with us, we wouldn’t have this kind of success.”

Mostly, police credit direct lines of communications between the department and the people who inhabit the city. The forum Wednesday night was not the first of its kind – police keep inviting citizens to come out and share their thoughts and the turnout gets bigger every time. That dialogue, Ullrich said, is as important as anything.

“The Police Department opened it up. We said, ‘What can we do better? What do you need?’ And the community responded,” the sergeant said. “We didn’t just go out and start picking things to do. We listened to the community.”

If the police aren’t gloating, nor are they sitting back and enjoying the fruits of their efforts. More Hot Spots details are planned over the summer, Bussiere said, along with more forums and more innovation.

Philippon unveiled plans for an Outside Movie Night in Lewiston, a program that calls for six nights of family-friendly movies over the summer to be played in areas including Simard-Payne and Marcotte parks. Police plan to announce the program through their Facebook page later this week.

And there are still concerns. A few members of the audience wanted to know if heroin is a problem here. Bussiere acknowledged that it is a problem, a rather big one, not just in Lewiston but across New England.

One woman wondered if home burglaries were on the rise, saying she doesn’t always feel safe in her home. As it turns out, break-ins are not on the rise, although they continue to come in clusters and police are constantly trying to track down the suspects.

There are still problems, police admit, but compared to previous decades? It’s not even close. In 1985, a time some folks recall as the “good old days,” the crime rate in Lewiston was 82.5 crimes per 1,000 residents. In 2014, it was 24  and a year later, it had dropped to 22.5.