Data show about half of Portland police arrests are people who are unhoused

In many West Coast cities, housing has become more expensive and homeless populations have grown. Police arrest people experiencing homelessness at a greater rate than the general population. In Portland, the numbers are particularly striking. Melissa Lewis is a data reporter for the radio show and podcast “Reveal.” She found that over the last 10 years, rents rose twice as fast in Portland compared with the rest of the country, and the city’s unhoused population grew by an estimated 30%. Analysis of the data showed that the majority of calls police get involving people who are homeless do not involve crime. Lewis joins us to share more about what she uncovered and its implications for how to respond to the homelessness crisis.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Four years ago, The Oregonian Data Journalist Melissa Lewis analyzed Portland’s police data and found that about half of their arrests were of people who were homeless. Now, Lewis is at the Investigative Nonprofit Reveal [revealnews.org], and she’s gone further. She looked at data spanning four full years in cities up and down the West Coast. She found that the pattern in Portland has remained consistent. She also found that Portland is not alone. In Seattle and Sacramento and Oakland and LA and San Diego, police are all arresting homeless people at disproportionate rates. Meanwhile, those arrests are less likely to be for serious crimes. Melissa Lewis joins us now to talk about what she has found. Welcome to the show.

Melissa Lewis: Thanks so much.

Miller: So, you, as I noted, looked into the arrests of people experiencing homelessness in all these different cities. But before we dig into that, I’m just curious if you can give us a sense for how the homelessness crisis in Portland compares with these other cities that you looked at.

Lewis: It’s common among cities in general, but especially coastal cities, for homelessness to have increased significantly over the last few years. I actually don’t have offhand how it compares to, say, other West Coast cities, but I will say that part of the difficulty of even making the comparison is that the accounts themselves of unhoused people are conducted annually, but of people living outside, it’s actually even every other year, and it’s really only just a couple of nights a year. So the samples fluctuate quite a bit. So we don’t have a huge sense of what the actual increase is, but we do know that has increased significantly here.

Miller: In Portland’s, as I noted, and you found out years ago, and now you have more granularity in this. About 50% of the arrests over four years, leading up to 2022, were of people who are homeless. What are the kinds of things that they are being arrested for?

Lewis: Most commonly, they’re arrested on what we call procedural charges. These are warrants or say, a supervision violation related to previous arrests. So they enter a kind of positive feedback loop for a variety of reasons. One issue is that if police encounter a person who has such a warrant issued because for example, they failed to appear at their arraignment or some other court date, the statute says that they are mandated to put that person under arrest.  The other charges are most commonly what we call crimes against society. That’s what the FBI calls them as opposed to violent crime where the victim is a person or property crime where it’s a car theft or burglary for example, although, theft is among the more common charges as well, but by far the most common is on warrants alone. So not a new crime.

Miller: You include the story of a man named Christian, who has been arrested in Portland 14 times in five years. Can you give us a sense for what he has experienced? Because I don’t know if this is the norm, but it’s in one person’s story, it seems to illustrate how the system can be working right now.

Lewis: I reviewed those arrests, both through jail booking data, arrest data obtained from Portland Police Bureau, and court records and found that of those 14 arrests, ten solely involved a previous warrant. One of his arrests, one of his more recent arrests actually dates back to an original arrest of possession of methamphetamine from December 2017, and that’s interestingly not even an arrestable offense at this point. It is still a crime, but he would receive a citation or he would need to check into, like a rehabilitation service. So, it’s interesting. I mean, it’s very common for possession of controlled substances or paraphernalia to be why people have these warrants in the first place. And so I think it’s worth the City and County examining the rest of the court system and not just policing in terms of why we keep, we maintain warrants for what are decriminalized charges now.

Miller: How common from what you found is it for people experiencing homelessness to be arrested on charges that would be more obviously tied to being homeless, such as illegal camping?

Lewis: In Portland, I did not find that as common as arrest per se, but I think it’s crucial to note that in many jurisdictions, the ordinances and the like, that pertain to homelessness are often punishable through citations and it’s through failure to pay, or failure to appear on those citations that leads to bench warrants. So, in other cities there is clearer information on the provenance of the bench warrants than there was in Portland, but in California, for example, one of the most common charges across cities is for a disorderly conduct statute that actually, I believe, was… originates in the 19th century. It’s section 647 and it was specifically designed to address vagrants and has since evolved through legislation to be a little less directly so, but functionally, per the legal literature I’ve read, is still a vagrancy law, and its charges described as disorderly conduct, you know, illegal lodging.

Miller: Could you tell us how a particular ordinance about trash cans has been used in San Diego in recent years?

Lewis: Yes, that was one of the more interesting findings. That is an ordinance in San Diego that was originally developed to encourage residents to put away their trash cans in a timely manner after trash pickup has happened. It’s called Unauthorized Encroachment and researchers believe that the paper is the new vagrancy laws, California’s new vagrancy laws are like found, you know, an officer who said that he was explicitly looking for an ordinance to use as a means of controlling homelessness in public space, and leveraged this ‘Unauthorized Encroachment’ as a way to get people to move because their belongings are taking up sidewalk space.

Miller: What happens in general, obviously we’re talking about different cities, different years and different crimes, but what do the patterns show in terms of what happens after these arrests?

Lewis: So, part of the reason that we have a chart in the story, specifically addressing how frequently arrests are made solely on procedural violations, and what happens across cities and over time, is an unhoused person will receive a citation or they’ll be arrested and then released on their own recognizance, it’s called. After that, they’re supposed to make another court date and they frequently don’t show up to those court dates, or in Chris’s case, he was placed under supervision and then wasn’t calling in often enough to speak with his supervisor and from the people I’ve spoken to- legal advocates, the reason is, as you might intuit, that without reliable transportation, without money and often without phones – in Chris’s case, his phone was stolen. It’s very hard to make your way through this byzantine legal system that really, it’s difficult for a lot of people, I should say. Unhoused people represent a lot of these arrests, but housed people also are often failing to appear and like are being charged with that. It’s just much more disproportionate.

Miller: What did you find when you looked into the data about violent offenses among people who were homeless when they were arrested?

Lewis: I found that consistently, in every city, unhoused people were much less likely to be arrested on a charge that included a violent charge, that is to say, what what the FBI calls ‘violent,’ and I was even conservative and included a couple of charges that the you know, strictly that Uniform Crime Report they always publish, doesn’t include, included robbery, and what’s interesting is Portland is actually, Portland and San Diego had just a very low rate of violent charges in general. About one in five arrests of everybody made in both San Diego and Portland included a violent charge as opposed to more than one in three, for, like LA, Oakland, Sacramento.

Miller: It was really one of the most striking- I mean your article wasn’t about that, but it was one of the most striking bits of data in the entire article. Just the disparity in terms of the percentage of violent crimes in those different cities.

Lewis: I think people care about property crime as well for sure. These arrests are just so much less likely to involve a person, that’s why they call it a ‘person crime.’ And I think, just Portland is interesting because I reviewed the very FBI data and found Portland is actually the only city among the cities I analyzed that had a lower crime rate than, than cities averages across the United States. Cities in general have more violent crime than, you know, suburban areas or rural areas. But Portland is especially low, not just on violent crime but even relatively with property crime, which surprised me because I know that we have such a significant issue with car theft.

Miller: You note in your article that Portland Street Response was modeled on the Cahoots Program in Eugene and it was created in recent years specifically to address these kinds of issues, or the idea that police were being called in for too many situations where they’re not the best people to respond. How many versions of something like Portland’s Street Response do you see when you look West Coast-wide?

Lewis: Something like this is rolling out in every city I examined. Part of that is that federal funding specifically designed to develop Cahoots-like programs, has been dispersed to several of these cities, including LA, and Portland. Many millions of dollars allocated to Portland’s Street Response over the next couple of years, actually comes from this American Rescue Plan Act, and so I think cities everywhere are figuring out that this is a better alternative, not just in terms of personal outcome, individual outcomes, but also financially, as police funding is controversial today, Cahoots provides evidence that these unarmed responses save the city money over time.

Miller: Melissa Lewis thanks very much.

Lewis: Thanks so much.

Miller: Melissa Lewis is a Data Reporter for Reveal, which is a part of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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