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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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National trends down, but yes, every place is different with different reasons behind the decline. Unfortunately it's quite difficult (albeit not always impossible) to find the covariates responsible for these trends.
You can point to some policy changes, public sentiment, how police are run those years, economic changes due to COVID-19, and so on, but usually it's going to be qualitative evidence at best. There just isn't the multiverse version of Portland where X, Y or Z was slightly different, providing an experimental conditions to test policy and natural experiments only go so far (i.e. Portland compared to other midsized, liberal cities, is still going to ignore a ton of factors).
What makes Portland special after the pandemic? My first instinct is always check what jobs were impacted, but as an outsider, I don't know what Portland has aside from really good coffee and higher than average propensity for handlebar mustaches.
The biggest change is Oregon passed ballot measure 110 in 2020 which took effect Feb. 1 2021, decriminalizing all drugs.
What followed was gangs from Honduras rolling in pushing fentanyl and all the associated violence that comes with that.
https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2023/03/25/whos-running-downtown-portlands-open-air-fentanyl-market/
It doesn't help that the cops, when faced with actual accountability, just threw up their hands and stopped even the appearance of law enforcement.
Stopped doing traffic stops:
https://bikeportland.org/2023/08/08/portland-police-bureau-officer-admits-no-traffic-enforcement-messaging-was-politically-motivated-377939
Disbanded the gun taskforce:
https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/06/09/mayor-ted-wheeler-agrees-to-disband-the-portland-police-bureaus-gun-violence-reduction-team/
Stopped answering 911 calls:
https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/portland-police-will-stop-responding-in-person-to-calls-that-arent-life-threatening-citing-coronavirus-concerns.html
Fewer calls, fewer arrests, more force:
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/04/portland-police-responded-to-fewer-calls-made-fewer-arrests-in-recent-years-but-used-force-in-greater-percentage-of-arrests-data-shows.html
Two of the big open air drug markets are literally blocks from police HQ.
Hmm, looking at the data the rise started a few years before the decriminalization, peaked the year after, and has begun to decline, or at least plateau, again. It seems more like the the financial and societal stress of the pandemic, which took place during the same time, is probably a more likely factor. This happened all over, however things are beginning to decline, which is why the crime wave cries aren't justified. Things are slowing down again after a high seen at the end of a world wide stress factor. We shall see how the next couple years plays out, will it continue to decline, plateau, or rise? Looks like things are moving in the direction of declining again.
The cops being babies probably had some affect on it. How much we wont know for a few years. Other places where the police had similar reactions are now in criminal decline again, after a peak at the end of the pandemic, such as Minneapolis. Seattle seems to still be on a rise, but there are more confounding factors than less police. Also, while a lot of these places had the highest straight numbers of things, the amount of crimes per capita is still significantly lower than in the 80s and early 90s, as the populations of most of the cities, that saw the worst increases, and the US as a whole, has increased greatly since.
But yeah, there are police departments all over the US who are either refusing to do a lot of their job after having regulations on the tightened, or even had their whole departments just quit. This, even though the general amount spent on police has actually been on the rise. The defund the police talking points aren't really holding up due to this and, when you really start looking into the things said by the police, city officials, and communications/paper work filings, about their decline in number, it usually has more to do with them not liking growing transparency rules, less internal control over their investigation and penalties, and reduced protections offered by qualified immunity.