Even before Penn National Gaming Inc. opened its temporary racing casino in the former Miller’s Restaurant on Bangor’s Main Street, anti-gambling concerns forecast that Bangor would see a spike in crime, gambling addiction, bankruptcy and other social ills.

On the surface, little appears to have changed in terms of Bangor’s social fabric since Hollywood Slots at Bangor opened its doors a year ago this month.

Opponents of gambling warn, however, that despite the casino’s successful startup last November, the real effects have yet to emerge.

Critics of slots say that the crime will follow, after a two- or three-year “honeymoon” period, after people become addicted to the slots, referred to as “the crack cocaine of gambling” by slots foes.

As part of a 20-year examination of the effects of gambling, economists at the University of Illinois and the University of Georgia looked at crime rates in all 3,165 counties in the United States.

They concluded that counties with casino gambling have an 8 percent higher crime rate than counties without casinos.

So far, law enforcement sources in Maine say that the forecast crime wave has failed to materialize.

And they aren’t anticipating that it will.

“I’m not, really,” said Police Chief Don Winslow. He said he bases that on conversations with law enforcement colleagues in West Virginia,

one of the states where

Penn National does business.

“I’m comfortable with [the Bangor slots operation], and we haven’t attributed any crime to its presence yet, though I’d stop short of saying it will never happen,” he said.

Jon Johnson, general manager of Penn National’s operations in Maine, has 32 years of experience in the gambling industry.

“I have never seen gambling lead to an increase in crime,” he said. “It’s just like when Disneyland opened. Crime increased [because the amusement park drew crowds], but Mickey Mouse did not cause it.”

Though he wasn’t surprised about law enforcement officials’ conclusions and predictions that a crime wave likely is not on the way, Johnson said he expects anti-gambling concerns to keep up their fight.

“The antis are going to continue to predict [a crime wave is coming] on into the future,” he said this week. “So it’s really a controversy without an ending.

“Gaming hasn’t created crime. Unemployment creates crime,” Johnson further said. “When you bring in economic development to an area, crime goes down. The slots facility is part of that. If people are gaining money through legal means, which is employment, they are less likely to commit crime.”

A check with law enforcement officials in three other states with racinos shows that what crime has occurred since slots came to their towns has been limited mostly to lesser crimes, such as theft, burglary and attempts to pass bad checks and counterfeit bills.

In a six-month report before the Maine Gambling Control Board, Winslow said the racino typically has brought the kinds of incidents that result from virtually any large influx of people: Pushing in the ATM line. A fight. Patrons smoking marijuana in the parking lot. A parking lot theft, trespassing and an arrest on a protection order violation unrelated to the slots operation.

A bar would generate more crime, Winslow said.

To date, two alleged crimes have been linked to the Bangor slots operation, Bob Welch, executive director of the Maine Gambling Control Board, said in a recent interview.

One of the crimes involved a man who stole more than $20,000 from his employer and claimed he lost it all on the slots. The other involved a patron whose slots credits were played and cashed out while he was in the rest room, Welch said.

“I’ve checked with Bangor police, the [Penobscot County] Sheriff’s Department, the [Federal Bureau of Investigation, Customs and Immigration,” Welch said. So far, it appears that most of the crime that has occurred is “just a function of having a lot of people and alcohol.

“A serious gambler is not going to come up here [to play slots],” nor is someone trying to launder money, Welch said. The stakes are too small, and not enough cash is changing hands here, with only 475 slot machines in operation.

“You’d need several casinos for that,” Welch said.

He doesn’t expect that to change even after Hollywood Slots moves into the larger, permanent complex it will build across Main Street from Bass Park. That facility is allowed to operate up to 1,500 slots, under current state law.

“We’ll have to settle on manpower needs, but that will more or less be based on hours” of operation and peak demand, he said.

Still, slots foes warn that crime will come.

An often-cited September 2004 study by economics professors David B. Mustard of the University of Georgia and Earl L. Grinols of Baylor University in Texas concluded crime rates in casino counties “were stable prior to opening, slightly lower in the year of casino introduction, returned to approximately average levels for the next two or three years, and increased thereafter.”

By the fifth year, they wrote, all classes of crime were up: robbery, by 136 percent; aggravated assaults, 91 percent; auto theft, 78 percent; burglary, 50 percent; larceny, 38 percent; rape, 21 percent; and murder, 12 percent. They calculated that 8.6 percent of property crimes and 12.6 percent of violent crimes were attributed to casinos.

In a June rebuttal sent to the Bangor Daily News, which cited the study in an editorial, Frank Fahrenkopf, president and chief executive officer of the American Gaming Association, claimed the Grinols-Mustard study exaggerated the crime rate in casino counties.

“Experts both then and now acknowledge that the increase in crime within casino and amusement park communities is due not to the inherent evil of either activity, but rather to the influx of people visiting these popular entertainment destinations.

“But in their calculation of crime rates in casino counties,” he wrote, Grinols and Mustard “did not include tourists in their population measure, resulting in an overstatement of the crime rate in casino counties.”

A problem that Welch, a former Bangor deputy police chief, has with the Grinols-Mustard study is that it based its conclusion, in large part, on federal Uniform Crime Statistics. Simply put, it links crime to gambling operations on a county-by-county basis, he said.

“So if, say, Millinocket had an increase in divorce or murders, that could be attributed to Hollywood Slots” regardless of any real connection,” he said.

Because it is so widespread, gambling has been the subject of a parade of studies of differing conclusions, as noted in the 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission report, a panel appointed and funded by Congress to determine the economic and social consequences of gambling.

“The reliability of many of these studies, however, is questionable,” the report states.

“As one commentator observed: ‘The story of the relationship between legalized casino gambling and street crime is far from written. The problem is that although a great deal has been written on the subject, so much of the writing on all sides is bombast and blather that it is difficult to discern any strong facts.'”

Not surprisingly, the study concluded that many problem and pathological gamblers steal or commit other crimes to finance their habit.

But that’s not to say there have not been some extreme cases.

“The commission heard repeated testimony of desperate gamblers committing illegal acts to finance their problem and pathological gambling, including a Detroit man who faked his own son’s kidnapping to pay back a $50,000 gambling debt, a 14-year hospital employee who embezzled $151,000 from her employer for gambling, and the wife of a Louisiana state police officer who faced 24 counts of felony theft for stealing to fund her pathological gambling. … In Louisiana, one man confessed to robbing and murdering six elderly individuals to feed his problem with gambling on electronic gambling devices.”

One witness who testified before the commission indicated that “80 to 90 percent of people in Gamblers Anonymous will tell you they did something illegal in order to get money to gamble.”

White-collar crimes, fraud, credit card and employee theft are some ways problem gamblers support their habit, the report states.

So far, according to Welch, Maine has not seen a large influx of calls to a state toll-free hot line for problem gamblers. The hot line, he said, fielded hundreds of calls before Hollywood Slots opened its doors.

In Bangor, about a dozen people have signed up for Hollywood Slots’ self-exclusion list, one of three such lists the state maintains.

Being placed on the list is voluntary and irrevocable. Even the Maine Gambling Control Board can’t overturn self-exclusion, as Welch noted one area woman learned after repeated efforts to get herself off the list.

The other two lists are Hollywood Slots’ list of unwanted people and the list of people the state won’t allow to play slots here, namely known cheaters, which currently has no names on it.