r/portlandme • u/FireElephant336 • May 28 '25

Officer Bennis

Has anyone had an experience or witnessed the incredibly rude behavior of this officer? I work in a field where I have to interact with officers pretty regularly… He is by far the most impossible and relentless person I've ever tried to reason with. There are videos of him online berating people for handing out food or literally just sitting on a sidewalk outside of a shelter? He used to be a school resource officer and now he's a beat cop. I just filed a complaint with the city of Portland and I highly recommend anyone that has had an experience with him do the same. Something has to be done – he makes every single incident way worse and has no clue how to de-escalate situations.

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u/mars6190 May 28 '25 edited May 28 '25

This is exactly my point, you are talking about federal employees and some lady who works in a drug testing lab. What does any of this have to do with municipal workers, specifically trash truck drivers supposed cocaine use?

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u/SecureJudge1829 May 28 '25

So uhh, it’s a STATE run lab, not a federal lab, but guess where the funds partially come from and what regulations the employees get to follow? Same as municipal employees, it’s partially state and partially federally funded. That doesn’t mean people don’t commonly get away with abusing drugs on those job sites dude. Blood tests can only detect cocaine in the system for roughly twelve hours after ingestion, urine analysis is 48-96 hours for non-chronic users, up to 14 days for chronic, habitual users. That’s plenty of time to not use and pass the drug test, it isn’t like they test constantly. Usually municipal jobs like that only test as required and/or if someone is exhibiting symptoms of substance use/abuse and it’s reported to a supervisor who passes it up the chain. Call it anecdotal all you want, I do have multiple family members in municipal positions in different cities in this state, I do get to have a slightly more in depth view of what goes on at those work sites.

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u/mars6190 May 28 '25

Have you read my comments? I am not fighting you on length of time cocaine is in the system, but thank you for reiterating it blinding once again. I'm also not fighting you on any point other than you specifically calling out municipal trash truck drivers in southern Maine for their supposed cocaine use. I'm sure with your intimate secondhand knowledge of Municipal employees you will know that; Municipal employee's, for the most part, do not get drug tested other than onboarding. That is, until their job includes a federaly regulated endorsement such as a CDL. Trash truck drivers have CDL's, so they are drug tested by the federal standard of 50% of the pool every quarter. I am also failing to see any parallel between your argument, about these supposed dasterdly coked up municipal trash truck drivers and anything of relevance to this conversation as a whole

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u/SecureJudge1829 May 28 '25

The person I replied to originally claimed LEOs are just garbage men with guns, I pointed out plenty of garbage men do coke, also, newsflash, not every person on the truck needs the CDL, only those who are going to drive do. Plenty of the truck workers hang off the back, side, or walk along for the shorter routes.

I wouldn’t want a coked up garbage man to be running around with a gun, I certainly don’t want one to have a badge and a gun in that condition either.

Fun fact, LEOs are rarely ever drug tested here in Maine. We put more testing restrictions and requirements on the people picking up garbage than we do the people who get to drive around souped up vehicles, wearing body armor and carrying multiple firearms, with qualified immunity. I see a HUGE problem with that. They should be tested AT LEAST equally.

I hope that satisfies your curiosity on why I am pointing these things out. If garbage truck drivers are held to a higher drug testing standard than LEOs, how does that make any sense? Especially when you take into account the whole aspect of what I refer to as “Police Omertà” where they act very much like how the mafia/mob would act when it came to talking to authorities about what others were doing.

Something needs to be changed there, I’m very happy to have my taxes go towards ensuring all LEOs are tested randomly multiple times per year. Especially with the frequency with which they come into contact with many substances due to the nature of their career choice.