Maine has lost 15 local police departments since the turn of the century. That’s changed the face of rural policing.
A Bangor Daily News analysis of 25 years of law enforcement employment data found that 15 police departments in the state have disbanded or merged with another since 2000. The trend dates back at least a decade further, experts say, and mirrors a shift toward more centralized models of policing across the U.S.
Reasons for department closures vary, but the outcomes are the same. In Maine’s most rural areas — where the vast majority of closures occur — county sheriff’s offices and the state police have taken over the responsibility of policing.
That isn’t necessarily a problem for communities who’ve lost their police forces, experts and the agencies argue, because larger departments have more resources available. But the changing picture has created debate as to the value of traditional small-town police departments.
Maine has the lowest violent crime rate in the nation, according to FBI data, and its overall crime rate has steadily decreased since 2021. But increases in mental health and substance-related calls have kept small departments busy. Add to those the smaller undertakings people count on local police for, from property checks to animal control.
“When municipal police departments in Maine disband, the local law enforcement responsibility doesn’t vanish with that,” Maine State Police Operations Major Aaron Turcotte said.
Why do departments disband?
The towns of Jonesport, Eddington, Bethel, Swans Island, Lincolnville, Madison, Brownville, Mount Desert, Dixfield, Van Buren, Millinocket, Limestone, Washburn and Mexico have all ceased operating their own forces.
Mount Desert de facto merged its police department with Bar Harbor in 2013, and is still in the process of fully merging. The remaining departments all disbanded.
The reasons range from an inability to recruit new officers, to budget constraints, to scandal that shakes a community’s trust in police.
Staffing challenges in particular have plagued departments nationwide for more than a decade, largely beginning after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
They accelerated in 2020 amid the civil unrest and intense public scrutiny that followed the high-profile killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Other cultural and economic drivers, including the coronavirus pandemic, saw retirements and resignations rise in more than 60% of departments, a Police Executive Research Forum study found. And 70% experienced a decline in applications for officer positions.
In rural communities, where a fully staffed police department may only have four or five officers, the repercussions of that trend are magnified.
Van Buren — a northern Maine town of 2,000 — had just one full-time officer when it shuttered its department in 2021. When the Oxford County town of Mexico closed its department in 2024, its chief said the shortage of officers nationwide had reached “epidemic levels not seen in decades.”
“When you have a four-person police department and you have one vacancy … you’re operating at 75% strength,” said Noel March, Maine’s former U.S. Marshal and a senior lecturer of justice studies at University of Maine at Augusta. “If one person [gets] injured or is gone for training, on vacation, whatever it might be, you’re operating a part-time police department. It is very difficult to handle the numbers of calls.”
Other communities found the cost of operating their own police force too expensive. Brownville in Piscataquis County voted overwhelmingly to disband its police department in 2017 after a 15% budget increase.
Many of Maine’s rural towns have shed population over the last century as industries have waned or exited completely.
“The trend in Maine that I see is the tax base disappears and public safety is an expensive endeavor,” Mark Marsolais, professor of criminal justice and security at Thomas College, said.
In some instances, scandal killed a department. Millinocket disbanded its force in 2021 amid heated leadership turnover and workplace harassment allegations.
Is regionalization good?
There’s an argument to be made for more departments to disband or merge, March said.
“My perspective may find disagreement among New England town leadership,” March, who is also the director of the Maine Community Policing Institute, said. “A municipality that cannot afford to maintain a police department of at least 10 full-time officers probably should look at contracting that service with the county sheriff or combining services with neighboring municipalities.”
The rationale is that larger police departments are inherently more efficient, he and other experts said. Pooled resources allow departments to provide specialized services. Larger departments also typically offer greater pay, benefits and promotion opportunities, which aid recruitment and retention.
A number of large departments across the U.S. follow this model, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg — a combined force covering the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina — and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which covers both Las Vegas and Clark County, where the city is located.
Those examples are hardly applicable in Maine, the second most rural state in the U.S. with a total population rivaled by many mid-size metro areas. Forty-nine of Maine’s 101 municipal police departments operated with 10 or fewer full time officers in 2024 — the last year with available employment data.
Consolidation can save money.
“When you buy in bulk, it’s like the Costco effect, if you’re going to buy one police car versus 10 police cars, or whatever is needed,” Marsolais, a 20-year veteran of the Houston Police Department, said.
Monmouth, which reported having five officers in 2024, followed that path in June, voting to merge its police department with nearby Winthrop in the name of operational efficiency and stronger recruitment.
Many of the small Maine towns that have disbanded their departments now contract with sheriff’s offices. That’s partially why the state’s 16 county law enforcement agencies have scaled up their staffing by an average of 65% since 2000, with three counties — Androscoggin, Penobscot and Waldo — more than doubling the number of full-time deputies employed.
On the other hand, the Maine State Police, which has taken on less of that burden, has fewer full-time troopers than it had in 1990.
It has rebounded from a record 59 vacancies in 2023 to just 12 early this year, a state police official told CBS13. But the number of troopers in rural areas is well below the national average, something Turcotte, the operations major, acknowledged.
“We’re already starting from behind,” Turcotte said. “How do we get there? I think that this administration and certainly administrations that come in after Governor Mills, our priority is expanding our rural patrol function in those counties: Washington, Aroostook, Piscataquis, Somerset.”
A bill in the Maine Legislature that would have added 24 state police positions in rural counties died in appropriations this spring.
The towns still hanging on
On the same day Monmouth approved a merger, Camden residents resoundingly voted to keep their police department. Jay and Wilton voters rejected the possibility of merging their police forces.
Similar referendums have played out in other towns in recent years, affirming that even as many rural police departments disappear, sects of Maine’s population prefer to keep policing local.
“New England really embraces, since its founding since the 1700s, a local control home rule mindset,” March said.
“There are some 300 municipalities in Maine — organized municipalities — that have no police department and they rely on the regional services of the county sheriff and the state police,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they’re rampant with crime and that those towns who do choose to invest in their own police service are absent of crime. It’s more local preference.”
