BANGOR – The Maine attorney general was there.

The media were there.

About 50 of the city’s homeless – the very people from whom Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe wanted to hear – were at the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter on Friday afternoon.

Only one person, however, was willing to talk about the discrimination experienced because of homelessness. And that person refused to speak in front of reporters.

The hearing was the second of four the attorney general is holding around the state to determine whether new laws are needed to protect the homeless from discrimination. Rowe said Friday that about 30 people had testified on Nov. 22 at the Preble Street Resource Center in Portland.

“There has been a rise in violence in the Bangor area against homeless people sleeping outside,” Michael Andrick, an outreach worker at the Bangor shelter, said Friday. “During the summer, we got reports of younger kids coming into campsites in areas around Bangor. We heard they had torn up tents and destroyed personal property. A couple [of sites] were even burned down.”

He said the victims had not contacted police, although staff at the shelter and other area providers encouraged them to do so.

Andrick was the only person who testified publicly at the hearing.

Others in the area who provide services to the homeless asked questions about how any new laws might be worded.

Pat Kimball, executive director of Wellspring Inc., which provides substance abuse treatment to many people who have been homeless, said that many female clients have said they’ve been sexually assaulted while living on the streets. She speculated that the homeless might be reluctant to report crimes to the police because they may themselves be breaking laws, such as trespassing or using drugs.

Homeless teenagers have special needs, especially in attending school, Kathryn Danylik, an AmeriCorps-VISTA volunteer with the Maine Department of Education, who works with homeless youth, told Rowe.

“A lot of students require records from the last school they attended and immunization records,” she said after the public portion of the hearing. “Many of them don’t have those records or access to them.

“Being homeless is an embarrassment to them, so it’s difficult to get back in school when they are homeless,” she said.

The Legislature last year directed Rowe’s office to study discrimination against the homeless focusing on the following categories:

. Bias-motivated violence or threats of violence.

. Bias-motivated property damage or threats of property damage.

. Discrimination in housing, public accommodations and the pricing of goods and services.

Other groups of people are protected from such crimes under the Maine Civil Rights Act and the Maine Human Rights Act, Thomas Harnett, Maine assistant attorney general for civil rights education and enforcement, said Friday at the hearing.

Rowe said Friday that his office would gather information through Dec. 14, then prepare a report with recommendations by Jan. 5.

In addition to the hearings, the Attorney General’s Office is gathering information from service providers such as the shelter in Bangor and law enforcement officials. People can submit written testimony to the shelter and other service providers and they will forward it to the Attorney General’s Office.

Harnett said that, so far, 21 of the 48 surveys sent to service providers had been returned. Only four reported hearing about at least one incident of discrimination from their hundreds of clients. None of the four was in the Bangor area, Harnett said.

Hearings on the homeless issue are scheduled in Alfred and Lewiston later this month.