Small Town Justice - part the second

One might suppose that vacation places have a higher proportion of absentee (i.e. much less than 12 months residency) houses than your standard subdivision. Block Island is such a place

Block Island has an unusually low housing occupancy rate, in that the majority of housing units are considered vacant because they are not occupied year-round. As counted by the 2010 Census, the number of seasonal housing units is 1,253 out of 1,808 total housing units, nearly 70%.

I suspect that's approaching Nantucket territory.

The censuses have been topping out at 1,000 true Islanders for some years. The last count I can find on the innterTubes puts the count at 971. The Ground Hog Day census hasn't been posted for some time, alas. One day we'll go over to be counted.

These scraps of demography are mentioned because of another story in 'The Block Island Times'

An island resident has been arrested on a misdemeanor charge for what New Shoreham Police Chief Vin Carlone termed as an incident of "harassment" of a long-term, multi-generational island homeowner who was driving in a car with out-of-state plates.

Paranoia strikes deep, as the lyric says. It's worth mentioning that many Islanders have made fun of their own. To wit: when the mainlanders have left after the off-off-season (people like us, for instance), Islanders go into drinking mode. They line up at the Red Bird for their daily bottles. Now, that might just be exaggeration to tickle the naive mainlander. But, given the level of isolation in normal off-off-season and now Covid-19 limiting travel twixt the mainland and the Island, one might suspect that further isolation, a bit more hooch than usual, and a presumed mainlander bringing disease...