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Nancy in PDX's avatar

Thanks again Curtis excellent reporting!

I took a look for comparison to similar cities and here’s what I discovered:

Portland has by far the weakest patrol presence — about 3x fewer patrol officers per resident than Denver, and likely less than Seattle too.

• Portland: ~0.51 per 1,000 (316 patrol cops for ~615k people)

• Denver: ~1.47 per 1,000 (1,053 patrol cops for ~716k people)

• Seattle: ≤ ~1.24 per 1,000 (real patrol number likely much lower)

⚠️ No wonder Portland feels lawless. Fewer cops, more crime.

Crime rates:

• Portland: 7.23 violent + 59.76 property = 66.99 per 1,000

• Seattle: 7.77 violent + 51.10 property = 58.88 per 1,000

• Denver: 5.3 violent + 40.1 property = 45.4 per 1,000

📉 Portland’s crime stats are fake comfort — the city looks “safer” on paper only because citizens are too burned out to bother reporting what never gets addressed.

Mayor Wilson talks about rebuilding the police with more funding and recruitment, but there’s no clear plan to put more patrol cops on the street. His public safety and homelessness strategies sound good at a high level but are light on specifics, timelines, and accountability.

Bottom line: The leaders elected to keep our community safe are failing the very people who voted them in.

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David Mitchell's avatar

When I chaired the Livability and Safety Committee of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association in the late 2010s, I investigated where Portland ranked in police officers per capita compared with other cities of Portland’s size, as our committee could not understand why the Pearl District neighborhood seldom saw a Portland police officer on foot or why the response time to non-emergency calls often took hours. The data showed that Portland ranked dead last in this category of police staffing.

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