Public Safety – Where Are Our Leaders ?

In rural states like Maine, public safety is a growing concern. Why? Citizens must be safe to do everything else – not worried about organized crime, drug traffickers, and illegal aliens. If taxes, energy costs, and spending are too high, education and public integrity too low, safety is critical.

Like the boiling frog, people hope for the best until reality hits:  A child or old friend gets addicted, or worse, dies of drugs or drug-related crime. We do not imagine organized crime here, yet it is here.

In Maine, we suffer from this problem acutely. We often do not know how the world outside is changing. We do not hear about the growing high purity of foreign source drugs in our state – yet it is happening.

Last month, the purest heroin ever seen in Maine was found in Lewiston. Fentanyl – already 50 times more potent than heroin – is shockingly being cut with new drugs that are unresponsive to naloxone.  

We do not hear about new synthetic trafficked into Maine, but they are here. We do not hear about multi-kilo loads heading north, trafficked by violent Dominican, Mexican, and Chinese trafficking groups, and by the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, and Gangster Disciples. Where are our leaders?

Mid-Vietnam, blind leaders claimed the war was going well, just as Maine’s Democrats say all is well. But life is truth. In Vietnam, pine boxes said different. Today, dying and addicted children do.

From Portland to Lewiston, Augusta, and Waterville, from Bangor to Calais, then north to Holton, citizens are experiencing something they have never seen before: evidence of rampant drug trafficking, addiction, record overdoses – 10,000 last year, Maine losing 40 and 70 kids a month.

Mainers – and citizens of other Democrat-run states, particularly rural ones – are seeing human tragedy up close, the effects of a horrible misjudgment, the devastation of families before their eyes. Where are our leaders?

As drug trafficking, abuse, addiction, and overdoses rise, so do burglaries, robberies, homicides, and assaults. Domestic violence is escalating. Half of Maine homicides are now domestic violence, a third of all assaults. The kicker is that 80 percent of domestic violence is drug-related. Where are our leaders?

When fear rises, naturally, public confidence—in everything—falls. People look around, hoping for answers, for someone to stop the carnage. They get little back. Often, blame is cast.

Ironically, or perhaps cynically, Democrats blame the wrong people. Underfunded police and prosecutors caught in Democrat-created red tape, punished for deterrence, doing God’s work at great risk – are blamed. Democrats misdiagnose the effects of their own decisions and agenda.

This cancer in Maine – and other Democrat-led states – can be traced to misguided policies, lawmakers who misunderstand the gravity of the threat, and the peril they have created. Pushing “social justice,” letting felons free, ending bail, legalizing drugs, and “equity” over “equality,” safety vanishes.

Objectively, measurably, these bad priorities undermine citizen safety. To underfund those who protect us, who can create the deterrence that protects us and keeps foreign traffickers out, is folly.

It is also dangerous on many levels – encouraging teen use of killer drugs, widening addiction, young overdoses, inevitable death, undermining respect for laws, and creating a safety nightmare.

What these Democrats ignore or do not want you to know is that we are losing kids at a record rate, watching addiction and abuse rise as drugs tear families apart, erode the effectiveness of our schools, crowd our jails, and make people afraid to walk at night.

Democrat politicians introduced this destruction with cuts to law enforcement, district attorneys and their prosecutors, clipping authorities, imposing new requirements, endless red tape, letting dangerous felons onto the street for “fairness,” and no arrests on I-95 or northern border.

Democrats, in control for years, have single-handedly displaced deterrence, inserted high-minded permissiveness and appeasement in its place, opening the door to opportunistic organized crime.

As they say, this is not rocket science. This is human behavior, allowing foreign criminal predators into our state – allowing them to ravage our communities, families, and kids. There is no excuse, and this only gets worse unless we move to fix it now.

When Maine’s Democrat governor, House, and Senate look the other way, pretending – or perhaps believing – they are serving the public good by endangering kids and the rule of law, everyone gets hurt.

As with other issues, citizens are waking up to the rise of ideological leftism in Maine, the growth of these dangerous groups around us, the damage they are doing, and how Democrats betrayed us. Public safety matters because it makes all other aspects of life possible. Where are our leaders?

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).