The Portland Police Bureau’s annual budget has risen by nearly $90 million — roughly 40% — since 2016. But increased funding doesn’t always equate to reduced crime. A recent investigation by Street Roots shows that Portland hasn’t been having a crime wave. It found that reported crimes have increased less than 10% over the past four years, according to data from PPB. K. Rambo is the editor-in-chief at Street Roots and has been reporting on this. They join us to share more.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to crime rates in Portland. They’ve been the focus of national, at some points even international attention since the racial justice protests of 2020 the turmoil that followed. Then over the last year-and-a-half or so, elected leaders have trumpeted a drop in reported crimes. But recent reporting by K. Rambo and Street Roots has painted a more complicated picture. They did a deep dive into crime, policing and the media in a three-part series, and they join us now. K. Rambo, welcome to the show.
K. Rambo: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me.
Miller: Yeah, thanks for joining us. What prompted you to do this series of articles?
Rambo: Well, I think everyone in Portland has heard a lot about crime here in recent years. And I think that we’ve just seen more and more statistics from local leaders, from the police bureau, that indicate crime is a very, very serious problem in Portland. I think the desire was really just to put a finer point on what’s going on with crime in Portland, and I think initially started from the thought that well, crime has probably increased here. But was there an actual crime wave? We started looking at data over the last eight years, and pretty immediately the data started to tell a very different story.
Miller: Well, what stood out to you when you looked at crime data provided by the Portland Police Bureau?
Rambo: Well, there were a number of sources that we analyzed. There is the reported crime data, which is what PPB most often references. That’s not raw data, that’s not just “this is the number of crimes that were reported.” That’s something that’s actually analyzed and prepared by PPB. We also then looked at more concrete data sources like arrests, community originated dispatch calls for police, total call volume at the Bureau of Emergency Communications. It painted a very different picture I think than what we’ve heard so far.
Miller: We did reach out to the bureau before this conversation to give them a chance to respond. I’m not gonna read their whole email, but I can summarize one of their main points: you compared to recent periods, the four years going up to and including 2019, and the four years after that going up to 2023. And when you did that, you found only a 10% increase in reported annual crime.
A spokesperson for the Police Bureau pointed out that if instead we compare 2019 to the peak year of reported crimes in recent years of 2022, then you see a 20% increase – a sizable difference depending on how you slice the data. Why did you choose those particular four-year periods for your main analysis?
Rambo: Part of that is this narrative about crime in Portland really started in 2020. That was a logical starting point for this frame of comparison. But I think PPB’s response really goes back to one of the core questions of this series, which is how do you select and present data. And one of the things that we heard from experts repeatedly were concerns about officials’ penchant for cherry picking, which is the practice of selecting something like a small sample size to support a particular point. Part of that was cautioning us against looking at a one-month comparison between two years, a six month comparison between two different years, or even comparing one year to another, which is what PPB is doing in this case.
To establish real trends in terms of data, you need a larger sample size. We had four full years since 2020, including 2020. And then we had four years prior. So that was why we ended up going with those two time frames to analyze.
Miller: But do you concede their point that by including a year that saw a big decrease in reporting crime, that it could undercut your contention that there wasn’t a significant increase in crime in Portland over a short period of time? I mean, for example, you could have chosen two different three-year periods that didn’t include the recent drop in 2023. They didn’t make that point, but there are a million ways you can slice the data. You’re saying they are cherry picking. Without using the words, they might argue the same thing that you’re cherry picking in a different way.
Rambo: I think using larger periods of time is not cherry picking. It’s explicitly trying to avoid doing that. I’ll also say, when we talk about a substantial decrease or a substantial increase between years, we might be talking about in total a 5%to 10% decrease, which what we heard from experts is that is not something you can draw a conclusion from in terms of developing policies, routing funding, or even really getting a beat on what is going on. Because there are going to be spikes, there are going to be temporary decreases. The goal was to get the largest period of time we could since 2020, and then compare that to the previous four years, since those are the years that we often see being compared to more recent years from the city’s perspective.
Miller: One of the really helpful points you make in the article, or the people you talked to make, is that “crime” as a word, as a concept, is so broad that it’s maybe not helpful. It encompasses everything from murder to very minor infractions in the law.
So I want to turn to the most serious category of crimes. The average number of homicides per year in the eight years leading up to 2020 in Portland was 31. The annual average in the next three years was 88. It’s almost a three times increase. And it does mirror broad trends nationally. But from conversations we’ve had in recent years, it does seem that the rise in homicides was steeper in Portland than in peer cities, and that the drop in the last year-and-a-half has also been steeper.
I’m curious how you think about those numbers, in this particular category of serious crime?
Rambo: Well, I think any life that’s lost is tragic. And it’s something we do talk about in the story, that the increase in homicides, the increase in gun violence, those are tragic. And I don’t think anyone involved is trying to minimize just how horrible that is. I think though, again, it is one piece of a much larger picture in terms of how we talk about public safety, how we talk about crime in Portland. If you were to compare Portland to other cities of a similar size, Portland still has considerably less crime. It still has considerably fewer homicides. Which again, doesn’t take away from the tragedies that we’ve seen in recent years. But I do think that that is one piece of a much larger picture.
I will say, something we talked to the experts about was that there is, on the part of the media and often law enforcement, a large focus on the least common types of crime, which are those most extreme forms of crime. Which again, is one piece of what we’re looking at here.
Miller: I do want to talk about the media piece of this in a second. But let’s turn now to the question of police funding and police staffing, because that’s the focus of one of the articles in the series. You mentioned the first line of an article from the British newspaper, The Times, from not that long ago, from June. It began: “This city defunded its police.” What did Portland actually do with police funding in 2020, and the years that followed?
Rambo: There were very slight reductions to the police budget in 2020. Pretty much anything that was removed in the summer was later added back in. And ultimately, PPB’s budget in 2020 was a little less than 4% lower than it was in 2019, which was consistent with pandemic budget cuts across the board at the city level.
Since then, PPB’s budget has skyrocketed. It is now close to $300 million, it is 42% higher than it was in 2016, an $88 million increase. So yeah, Portland never defunded its police department, and in the last three years, has really ramped up the funding that PPB has.
Miller: But not the staffing. How do you explain that? There’s a pretty stark graph. You have a lot of graphs in your articles, but one of them shows staffing and funding. What’s happening?
Rambo: Well, staffing has been below pre-pandemic levels by about 7% to 20%, depending on the month and the year that you’re looking at. Those increased costs could be increased salaries, it could be increased overtime as a result of decreased staffing. And the budget itself is not the expenses, that’s something that is important to acknowledge. To keep this series as contained as possible, we didn’t dig too far into where all of that new money is going. I think the important takeaway here, and again this is something that the experts echoed, there is no real connection between police budget and crime. There have been a ton of studies to look at not only budget, but staffing. And there is not this kind of direct 1:1 that you see that I think a lot of people believe there to be, where more police means less crime or more funding means less crime. That’s just simply not the case.
Miller: I mentioned that article from The Times from June. What role have you heard that the media plays in this conversation?
Rambo: Well, I think there are some critiques from the experts that we spoke to about the media representation of crime. And one of them I mentioned a minute ago, the focus is so often on the most extreme forms of crime. They’re cause for concern, they’re tragedies. There’s no one I think that’s arguing the media shouldn’t cover those things. But I would be willing to bet that very few people know that PPB has arrested 44% fewer people per year since 2020. Or that shoplifting arrests are down by over two-thirds since 2020. There is this much larger picture, and that’s something that we talked about in the article. PPB will put out their reported crime data, which again, is not raw data, it’s not confirmed instances of crime. It is, according to the experts that we spoke to, probably the least reliable data that we analyzed, which is why we tried to focus on things like arrests or community generated dispatch calls. And those are the pieces of information that I think are not being publicized in the same way that this reported crime data is.
I think the main critique about the media was a reliance on official sources, a reliance on publishing what police or officials say uncritically. And so you end up with things like everyone reading headlines about three months of one year compared to three months of another year, when the larger more accurate picture is kind of left in the shadows.
Miller: What’s your recommendation then? Or what did you hear from criminologists or sociologists about a better way for all of us, whether it’s elected leaders, law enforcement leaders, the media, to think about and to talk about crime and public safety, and a sense of safety in a more, both realistic and accurate way?
Rambo: That’s a great question. Specificity was one thing that came up. When we’re talking about, let’s say PPB’s increase in the average number of reported crimes, it’s a 9.7% increase from that data. That’s roughly 5,800 more reported crimes per year. But about 4,000 of those can be attributed to reported vandalism. About 2,200 can be attributed to reported car thefts. I think if you talk about this increase in crime, but you don’t provide that additional context – what type of crime is actually increasing in any way that’s statistically significant – the average person, myself included, would see or hear about an increase in crime and think about things that are public safety concerns. Whereas something like vandalism, there are differing opinions on it, but it’s not, I think, something that is genuinely frightening to people.
The other thing that we heard was just doing the type of work that Jeremiah Hayden and I did on this story, which is getting beyond those initial narratives, getting beyond those initial data pieces, and really assembling a larger, more concrete body of evidence to analyze, and try to determine trends and takeaways from.
Miller: We haven’t talked about homelessness at all yet. I want to turn to that briefly. If we’re talking about a public understanding of crime, of public safety, how do you think an increase in visible homelessness affects that public sense?
Rambo: That’s a great question. There are some very widespread and inaccurate narratives about crime as it relates to homelessness. The existing data would show that homeless people are less likely to commit crime, or to be arrested for committing a crime, particularly violent crime, than housed people. And they’re much more likely to be victims of those crimes than perpetrators. So I think there’s kind of a broad misunderstanding there.
As it relates specifically to this story, what we heard from experts was that an increase in that visible homelessness, when a lot of people may associate that with criminality, the more they’re seeing homelessness, the more likely they are to believe inaccurate narratives or inaccurate data about the amount of crimes that are taking place in Portland.
Miller: K., thanks very much.
Rambo: Thank you.
Miller: K. Rambo is the editor-in-chief of Street Roots.
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