LEWISTON — For his latest community meeting, Mayor Carl Sheline wanted honest input from the locals on various problems within the city.

Honest input is what he got.

One man told the mayor that for the first time since moving to Lewiston in 1974, he was thinking of getting out. There’s too much danger in the city these days, he said.

“We know people up in The County and they told my wife, ‘you’ve got to get out of there. There’s too much crime and violence,” Dick Sabine said during a one-on-one conversation with the mayor. “And I said, ‘oh, no. It’s not all that bad,’ But that was some time ago and it’s no longer the case. Hardly two or three days go by without you hearing about another shooting or a murder somewhere.”

Marie, who declined to give her last name, decried the fact that she can’t walk to all her errands anymore because some parts of the downtown have become too dangerous. She, too, was considering the idea of moving out of her Barron Avenue home after living there her whole life.

“I love my house,” she said. “I love my community and I have great neighbors. But I have a hard time watching the city go down the drain the way it has. My son can’t wait for me to say the hell with it and move away.”

Pauline Gudas, a former probation officer, told the mayor there seems to be different rules for different people in Lewiston.

“There are the Bates College students, who can do whatever they please because police do not enforce the rules for them,” Gudas said. “And there’s a second set of rules for people who are homeless — they can drink and drug all they want. And there is a third set of rules for immigrants.”

When it comes to crime and violence from those groups, Gudas said, city leadership doesn’t seem to be interested in cracking down the way they might on everybody else.

And while these Lewiston residents talked, sometimes with rising volume, Sheline and Abdikadir Negeye, assistant director of Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services, furiously scribbled in their notebooks.

For this listening session at Geiger Elementary School, nobody stood up at a podium and made speeches. There were no scheduled speakers or any sort of structure.

The mayor simply went from table to table, trying to talk one-on-one with the roughly 30 people who showed up.

Sheline faced plenty of direct criticism with this format. One woman, after accusing city leadership of chronically minimizing the violence problem in Lewiston, told Sheline that he and his staff “are really dropping the ball on this.”

The mayor just kept scribbling. This is what he wanted, he said. Nearly two years after the last public meeting of this kind, he wanted unvarnished truth from the people.

Sheline initially formed an ad hoc committee on community safety in the summer of 2023 in response to increased gun violence, including a Knox Street shooting that left two dead. However, the committee was quickly plagued by political sparring over its membership, held only one meeting prior to the Oct. 25, 2023, mass shooting, and has been on hiatus ever since.

And the mayor was pretty clear about how this meeting was to go right from the get-go.

“What can we do,” Sabine asked Sheline at one point, “that hasn’t already been done?”

The mayor shook his head. That’s not what this gathering was about.

“This is a listening session tonight,” he said. “We’re just here to listen.”

By the end of the session, the mayor’s notebook was pretty well filled up and he has lots to think about.

“It’s clear to me that residents are concerned about public safety in Lewiston and I appreciate everyone coming out tonight,” the mayor said when it was over. “I look forward to hearing additional thoughts and feedback this Thursday night and then taking that feedback to the committee next week.”