Portland Gun Crime Prosecutions Rise Dramatically as Violence Surges

Posted

A new tool from the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office shows what many community leaders and law enforcement officials have been saying for the last two years: Gun violence in Portland is rising sharply and disproportionately affecting people of color.

The Firearms Data Dashboard, unveiled Thursday, tracks a dramatic increase in gun violence prosecutions over the last three years. In 2019, prosecutors filed charges in 109 cases, an average of nine per month. That number more than doubled to 281 cases last year, a 158% increase, for an average of 23 per month. This year continued that upward trend with charges filed in 285 gun crime cases through August, an average of 35 per month.

Portland has seen more than 840 shootings through the month of August, according to police records, and the city has already recorded more homicides this year than any other year since 1987, when 70 people died in homicides.

District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s office debuted the dashboard saying it will allow the public to view all gun crime prosecutions by the office for the last three years. The dashboard is searchable by date, location and race and gender of both victims and alleged perpetrators.

Statistics for the last three years show 24% of victims in prosecuted gun violence cases were Black, despite just 8% of Multnomah County’s population identifying as Black alone or in combination with another race, according to the most recent census data.

Black people were also overrepresented among defendants in gun cases, amounting to 39% of all defendants, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Black leaders in Portland have long decried the escalating gun violence and have publicly called for a comprehensive school and community response to turn young people away from guns. They also have called on Black residents to get involved and work from within to address gun violence.



The spike in violence has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the repercussions have fallen unequally on communities of color, said Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal.

”Black, Brown and Immigrant communities are disproportionately impacted by gun violence,” she said in a statement. “This is a deadly symptom of systemic racism and disinvestment, exacerbated by the global pandemic which has hollowed out our schools, limited the activities of our crucial community based organizations and shuttered other critical services that our communities depend on.”

Schmidt’s office noted that gun sales nationwide increased by 65% in 2020 and the trend continued into this year. The district attorney has been “allocating all possible staff time to gun violence,” his office said, as well as participating in a task force with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and working with community leaders to understand the underlying causes of gun violence.

Rachel Saslow, a volunteer with the Oregon Moms Demand Action, said she hopes the new dashboard will provide the impetus for lawmakers to take more aggressive action to curb the violence, which she described as a “public health crisis.”

“This Firearms Data Dashboard is more than just numbers and data,” Saslow said in a statement. “This dashboard allows everyone from community members to lawmakers to see not only how gun crime affects our communities and families, but how these numbers continue to rise.”