Narratives abound describing Portland’s mythical defunding of its police force in 2020. As straw man arguments about the lack of police and increased crime reverberated in the public square, the numbers show Portland Police Bureau, or PPB, remained fully funded year after year with a brief exception, consistent with cuts across the board, in 2020.
The bureau’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget is a record-high $295 million.
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series examining data regarding Portland crime rates. Read Part 1 here.
PPB’s annual budget increased by 42% — nearly $88 million — since 2016. The city’s population increased by about 3% in that timeframe, according to PSU’s Population Research Center. PPB’s sworn personnel, however, is about 7% lower than it was in 2016. At times since 2020, PPB’s sworn personnel was nearly 20% below 2016 staffing levels.
And yet, PPB’s data never shows a resulting crime wave. Only in limited instances and short time frames did reported crime increase, even since 2020, and there’s no concrete evidence tying decreased police staffing to those short-term spikes in specific types of crime.
In short, PPB’s own data challenges the narrative that more funding means less crime, or that fewer police means more crime. While that information may seem almost unbelievable to some, it comes as no surprise to others.
“There’s no real evidence I’ve seen that indicates more police means less crime,” Melissa Thompson, a criminologist and PSU sociology professor, told Street Roots. “In fact, I would say I’ve seen more evidence to indicate the opposite relationship.”
Despite that evidence, Thompson cautioned there isn’t a neat relationship between police staffing and reported crime in either direction. There is, as Thompson indicated, a wealth of evidence supporting her position that more police doesn’t mean less crime, including much more than PPB’s data.
A 2016 historical systematic review conducted by University of Cincinnati school of criminal justice professors YongJei Lee, John E. Eck and Nicholas Corsaro examined 62 studies and 229 findings of police force size and crime, from 1971 through 2013.
“The overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant,” the researchers found.
A 2019 investigation by The Marshall Project found the number of U.S. police per 100,000 residents dropped by 10% between 1997 and 2016. Throughout that time, the number of violent crimes per 100,000 residents dropped by 37%, according to FBI data. Despite the drop in crime, leaders throughout the country began sounding the alarm about decreased police staffing, leading to a new push to elevate and maintain police force sizes, The Marshall Project found.
The lack of connection between the number of police and the prevalence of crime is simple, according to Thompson. In general, police don’t prevent crime, they respond to it.
Proponents of proactive policing — those who advocate for more funding, more staffing, more police visibility and more police stops — argue police could and should prevent crime if only they were given the resources.
However, for Thompson, relying on police to prevent crime is a losing game anyway.
“You would need so many police to actually prevent crime, you would have to have a police state,” Thompson said. “Who wants to live in a police state? I know I don’t.”
Thompson returns to the relative consensus on what drives most criminal behavior for prevention — a complex matrix of individual, social, economic and systemic factors. None of those causes include “not enough police.”
Thompson doesn’t discount policing can be part of reducing crime, but said rather than more funding and more police officers, the focus would need to be on different strategies starting before police treat people as suspects. The University of Cincinnati researchers reached a similar conclusion.
“This line of research has exhausted its utility,” they concluded about the correlation between police force size and crime. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.”
Unintended results
Aaron Roussell, an associate sociology professor at PSU and an expert on policing, said adding more police also likely comes with unintended and adverse consequences. Roussell studied law enforcement homicides from 2000-2016 in which officers shot and killed someone. Roussell found police shootings accounting for an increasing number of homicides while civilians accounted for fewer.
“I wrote a paper in 2022 looking at police homicides across the country,” Roussell said. “As far as we can tell, they’re rising, which also goes hand-in-hand with a general increase in the number of police.”
In addition to studying instances of police killing people, Roussell’s academic work delves into community policing, a form of proactive policing that posits increased police presence and familiarity with a community will prevent what is conventionally understood as “crime.” Roussell said evidence suggests increased police presence does little, if anything, to directly prevent “crime.”
His research, in collaboration with Luis Daniel Gascon, a University of Massachusetts, Boston assistant sociology professor, found community policing increases tension in racialized communities, provides cover for militarized policing and “utilizes community discourse in a way that increases police power and limits and channels civilian power.”
Racial profiling and state violence are not included in per capita crime rates, the most common type of crime statistic used when arguing in favor of more police. To Roussell, that makes those crime rates, and their usage in trying to measure harm occurring in a community, problematic.
“When we talk about crimes, and dividing them by … population to make a rate, that is not the same thing as measuring harm,” Roussell said. “I think we make a grave mistake when we do that. Some of the work that I do, has been, for example, an attempt to measure state violence. Come to find out, when you look at police homicides, or jail deaths, or prison deaths, or executions — acts that the state takes to end human lives — those things, no matter the circumstances, do not end up in the crime rate. It is a poor measure of harm in that sense, as well.”
Roussell is also skeptical of the utility of crime statistics in general because they’re generated, recorded and published by police.
“Is there a relationship between the crime rate and numbers of police? Yes, absolutely. Because those numbers come from them directly,” Roussell said. “Is there a relationship between armed people walking around with badges and guns and harm? Yes, I think there’s a connection there as well.”
Kris Henning, PSU criminology and criminal justice professor, is somewhat of an ideological antithesis to Roussell as it relates to proactive policing. Henning argues that while the raw number of crimes being alleged may not have increased much in the last four years, there is a statistical difference between crime counts and per capita crime rates.
With Portland’s population changes over the past decade, controlling for population can reveal different patterns, namely, the number of police officers per capita, Henning said.
“We’re down around 1.1 officers, roughly per 1,000, when the national average for large cities is about 2.5 officers,” Henning said. “We have less than half the number of officers that we would typically see in a city of this size.”
Henning said the lower number of officers, coupled with changes in Oregon law to remove certain policing tools, contributes to a decline in proactive policing as officers only have time to respond to calls for service, or reactive policing.
“We have shifted from a proactive to a reactive model of policing,” Henning said. “Of course, the reasons for that have a lot to do with racial profiling and the perception of disparate contact.”
Citing “Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities,” a 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Henning said reactive forms of policing do not decrease or prevent crime, while proactive forms of policing are associated with reductions in crime. That study noted a common challenge in evaluating policing: Evaluations are often based on short-term studies, examining crime-prevention outcomes or short-term goals for a limited amount of time, often less than a year or two.
Henning said new laws and staffing continue to impact how PPB interacts with the community, and most recent restrictions have been placed on the proactive policing tools in an effort to reduce low-level contacts with police.Oregon search and seizure laws changed in 2022 after the Oregon Supreme Court ruled a police officer cannot search a car without a warrant, barring “exigent circumstances,” in Oregon v. McCarthy, for instance.
“Are there some trade-offs?” Henning said. “Has it reduced disparate contact in traffic stops? Possibly, but there may be a cost that comes with that.”
PPB data confirms Henning’s assertion that police are initiating fewer calls themselves. The annual average number of self-initiated calls decreased by about 50% over the last four years.
However, the number of reported crimes hasn’t substantially increased. In fact, the number of community-generated calls resulting in police dispatch actually decreased over the last four years.
While some studies have indicated more police stops are associated with reduced crime in a given area, the body of evidence is also controversial, as these studies often fail to control for a number of variables like national trends and improving economic conditions.
The National Library of Medicine published a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis including national crime statistics and 40 studies on police stops as a form of crime prevention from 1970 through 2021, resulting in a similar caveat.
“Police stop interventions lead to significant reductions in area‐level crime with evidence of a diffusion of crime control benefits to nearby areas,” the study found. “However, methodological difficulties limit the strength of the causal inferences derived from these studies; further research is needed.”
Proactive responding
Henning said Portland was de-policing prior to 2020, when many people still wrongly believe the city defunded its police force. He said the number of officers remained static over time while the number of residents increased, contributing to the lower ratio of police per resident. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, or UCR, system shows PPB had 957 officers in 2010, or about 1.5 per 1,000 residents, and steadily decreased to 811 in 2023, or about 1.3 per 1,000 residents. (Street Roots used PPB’s annual reports of authorized officer positions for this story and its visualizations, which may differ from UCR data.)
Many Portlanders became increasingly aware of racial disparities in policing during racial justice protests in 2020. The following February, the city launched the Portland Street Response, or PSR, pilot, which worked with Portland Fire and Rescue to respond to mental health and other crises historically responded to by police.
The city expanded the pilot throughout the year and has dramatically increased the number of incidents it responded to since. PSR responded to 875 calls traditionally responded to by PPB in 2021, according to Bureau of Emergency Communications, or BOEC, data. That includes suspicious or unwanted persons, welfare checks and self-initiated interactions — a novel way to proactively resolve issues with people in distress, some of whom may have otherwise gone on to commit a crime.
By 2022, PSR expanded its hours of operation, responding to 7,805 incidents. Over 54% of those calls were welfare checks that police would have otherwise responded to in the program’s absence. PSR saved PPB 13,940 incident calls in 2023, with nearly 53%, or 7,376 calls, being welfare checks. Thus far in 2024, PSR responded to 7,903 calls despite facing significant roadblocks from Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, the commissioner in charge of public safety until Mayor Ted Wheeler seized all city bureaus July 1.
Henning said many of Portland’s challenges can be traced back to deinstitutionalization in the 1990s, when the state closed mental health hospitals, effectively pulling the rug out from under people and reducing access to community mental health services. He said a health approach doesn’t work well when the state does not have enough services, but programs like PSR, or substance use services like those funded by Measure 110 play a role in crime reduction.
“Crime is a multifaceted phenomenon that is impacted by many different things — economic, racial disparities, health access disparities,” Henning said. “A multifaceted approach, of course, is necessary. The police play some role, social workers can play some role, schools can play some role. It’s not just any one thing.”
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This article appears in August 21, 2024.