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LePage office releases 'binder' of drug dealer photos

AUGUSTA, Maine (NEWS CENTER) — Gov. Paul LePage stirred up a controversy in late August with comments about the race of people dealing illegal drugs in Maine.

Asked a question at a town hall meeting about previous comments on race and drugs, the governor said he had been collecting the photos of people arrested for drug dealing this year. "And I will tell you," LePage said, "that 90 plus percent of those pictures in my book — and it's a three-ring binder — are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

"I didn't make the rules, I'm just telling you what's happening," he said.

That comment promoted criticism of LePage. The American Civil Liberties Union and new organizations filed Freedom of Information Act requests to see the binder.

The governor’s office gave out copies of the binder on Monday as a result of those FOIA requests. They show the binder contains a collection of press releases, MDEA emails, newspaper items and jail mugshots of people arrested for drugs dealings since early January.

Many arrests are for heroin, but some others are for methamphetamines or other drugs. It contains 93 photos, which show more white people than black people having been arrested.

The governor’s office said the point the governor was making was about out-of-state heroin traffickers, not all drug arrests in Maine. MDEA has said many of the heroin traffickers do come from New York and Connecticut.

The binder itself only contains some of this year’s arrests. The MDEA said it arrested 343 people on drug charges in the first half of this year, and only 93 of them appear in the governor’s binder.

NEWS CENTER's media partner, the Portland Press Herald reported that 51 of those pictured in the binder were arrested on heroin charges, and that slightly more than half of them were white. The governor's office did not discuss specifics of the binder on Monday.

The Maine Civil Liberties Union said Monday the binder shows Gov. LePage's statements about race were incorrect and said the governor should have relied on more detailed information than what is in the binder.

The MCLU had also said last month it was worried that Maine police departments might be racially profiling people for drug crimes. Alisson Beyea of the MCLU told NEWS CENTER the binder doesn’t contain anything that shows profiling is happening in Maine.

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