Getting Started
So this Portland safety thing keeps popping up, right? Saw some wild headlines yesterday claiming downtown’s a warzone. Felt that familiar itch to actually dig into the numbers myself, instead of just swallowing what folks scream online. Figured I’d tackle the “how many murders” angle head-on. Grabbed my coffee, sat down at the computer thinking it’d be straightforward.
The Official Source Mess
First stop, Portland’s shiny official city website. Searched like crazy for a simple “murder statistics” page or report. Felt like I was clicking through layers of bureaucratic nonsense. Found some yearly PDFs… from like 2020. Useless. Then stumbled across a “crime dashboard” that looked promising. Filled with vague maps and confusing categories. Found one graph titled “Aggravated Assault”, but “murder”? Nope. Couldn’t get a clear count for recent months anywhere. Kept thinking, “How hard should it be? Just give me a damn number!” The official path turned out to be a dead end wrapped in red tape BS.
Pivoting to Police Data
Felt frustrated but shrugged it off. Official sites flaking out? Happens more than it should. Remembered some police departments publish raw incident data logs. Took a deep breath and hunted down the Portland Police Bureau’s open data portal. Scrolled through endless categories: theft, vandalism, suspicious vehicles… scrolled some more. Bingo! Found “Homicide” tucked away.
Clicked it and bam, wall of text. Dates, case numbers, vague locations – dumped into a massive spreadsheet. No summary, no pretty charts. Just row after row. Okay, fine, old school it is. Fired up my trusty spreadsheet program, imported that data monster. Started filtering. First, filtered for “Case Type” – made sure only actual homicides showed up. Then hit the motherlode: filtered strictly for murders reported in the last six months. Watched the list shrink down to something manageable.
The Real Number & My Takeaway
Started counting the filtered rows. One… two… three… Got to the end. The total for half a year? Way lower than the fear-mongering memes would have you believe. I double-checked the filtering. Tripled-checked. That was the number staring back at me from my laptop screen. Let me tell you, it was a number that felt… almost anticlimactic after chasing it through city hall nonsense. Doesn’t erase the tragedy, of course, but context matters.
Felt relieved and annoyed at the same time. Why is finding basic public safety info like pulling teeth? My main takeaway from this whole hunt-and-peck exercise:
- Don’t trust panic headlines. Go hunt the raw logs yourself.
- City portals often suck. Bypass the fluff, go straight to the police data source.
- Numbers tell a story, and this one was quieter than the noise machine wanted you to think.
Coffee’s cold now, but I’ve got actual facts. That beats random internet fear any day. Stay smart out there.
