Library wins spring reprieve from loiterers

Ah, spring, that hopeful time when flowers bloom, breezes lose their sting, and the young louts who have bedeviled the Bangor Public Library for the last four months finally leave their winter haunts to wreak havoc elsewhere in the city.

“Yes, spring is a very nice time of the year,” Barbara McDade, the library’s director, said recently.

What a difference a change of seasons makes. The last time I spoke with McDade, back in the dark days of February, she and her staff had become hostages to a group of some 15 to 20 “problem patrons” who were doing everything possible to make themselves extremely unwelcome guests at the library. They were more than an occasional nuisance – they were a plague.

This newest crop of loiterers, some of them in their 20s, turned out to be even bigger pests than the usual ill-mannered types who have become an inescapable fact of life in just about every city library in America these days. Unlike their counterparts of the past, who swore a lot, violated the computer-use policies and even skateboarded inside on occasion, this group managed to cause at least $10,000 in damage as well as countless headaches for the small, beleaguered staff.

They punched their fists through, and urinated on, the walls of the upstairs restroom, and ripped the stall dividers right off the walls. They wrenched the heavy metal handrails from the stone steps leading to the library’s main entrance, and pried open the coin boxes on the microfilm machines to steal the couple of dollars they might contain. One of them punched out the filter screen on a computer, and another was caught trying to pry a decorative light fixture from the wall outside the children’s room. Their favorite prank was to steal the light bulbs from the elevators, which they did with annoying regularity. The staff kicked out the offenders for a day or a week at a time, but they always returned for more.

“Our policy has always been to have the library be the city’s living room, where everyone could feel welcomed,” said McDade, the Maine Library Association’s Librarian of the Year. “But these people were treating it as their private clubhouse, and showing absolutely no respect for property or other patrons.”

Surveillance cameras were installed, and McDade was forced at one point to hire off-duty police officers in the evenings – an effective though expensive deterrent. But routine police patrols were frustratingly spotty, she said. That changed in March, much to the relief of the worn-out staff.

“When the police finally understood we had real problems here, they began making the rounds every day,” she said. “The officers talked with the staff and worked out procedures for dealing with the offenders. We wound up kicking out five to 10 of the worst troublemakers for a year, and they were issued trespass warnings to keep them out. The uniforms made a big, big difference in the atmosphere.”

The problem of unruly patrons is by no means distinctive to the Bangor library. McDade hears similar complaints from librarians elsewhere in Maine and the rest of the country.

“It’s a dirty little secret that many librarians don’t want to talk about publicly,” she said. “They don’t want to give the impression that there are problems. But it’s certainly no secret to the regular patrons who feel intimidated. People have told us they didn’t come in because of the gangs always hanging around the main entrance.”

McDade would like to see legislation in Maine one day – as there is now in Oregon – that would establish clear, enforceable laws governing library behavior and “make law enforcement take the problems more seriously.” Until then, however, she and her staff are forced to endure their winterlong headaches until spring cleaning time rolls around.

“My staff tells me it’s nice to come to work again,” McDade said.