Mapping Crime in Portland, Oregon

This suite of maps grew out of my volunteer work as Board Chair of Safety and Livability for the Argay Terrace Neighborhood Association in Portland Oregon.

Much like citizens throughout the city, my neighbors and I witnessed a sharp increase in violent crimes, property crimes, and a generally increased sense of lawlessness that continued to intensify with over 100 consecutive nights of protests and violent rioting in the streets of Portland following the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis as the expanding COVID-19 pandemic continued to grip the world.

In order to understand what was happening, and where, I began constructing maps of our neighborhood and of the rest of the city using publicly available data downloaded from the Portland Police Bureau Strategic Services Division through its Open Data Portal.

While these maps provide a geographical context for the patterns of crime throughout the city, they are not 100% accurate due to the fact that location data for certain "crimes against persons" is not released to the public in order to protect the identity and privacy of victims. That being said, the areas that show the highest concentration of criminal activity are readily identifiable to the average viewer, regardless of their knowledge and experience reading maps.

My current goal is to construct a series of maps that depict an overview of evolving crime patterns throughout Portland as a whole in relation to those within each individual neighborhood throughout the city.

New maps will be uploaded as they are completed.