Portland police officers continued to stop an increasingly higher share of drivers of color in 2022 compared to white drivers, according to new data released by the Portland Police Bureau, continuing a trend first observed by the bureau in 2016 and repeated in every annual report since.
The Portland Police Bureau on Jan. 26 released its Stops Data Collection report for the fourth quarter of 2022, highlighting the perceived race and ethnicity of drivers police stopped between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2022.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 American Community Survey, Portland’s driving age population 16 years and older is 5.4% Black, 8.8% Hispanic and 71.8% non-Hispanic white.
However, between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2022, Black drivers represented 21% of stops by Portland police, up from 16.3% during that period in 2021. Hispanic or Latino people were 14.6% of the people stopped during that period, up from 11.3% in 2021. And white people were 58.2% of stops, a drop from 65.3% in 2021.
The disparity was highest among traffic stops by non-traffic officers, who stopped Black drivers nearly three times more than officers assigned to the bureau’s traffic division during the fourth quarter of 2022.
Among the drivers stopped by traffic officers between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2022, 7.9% were Black, 16.4% were Hispanic or Latino and 70% were white. By comparison, among the drivers stopped by non-traffic police officers during that period, 23.1% were Black, 14.3% were Hispanic or Latino and 56.4% were white.
In July 2022, Julianne Jackson, director of movement building for Partnership for Safety & Justice, an Oregon criminal justice group, said the disproportionate stop rates made people of color in Portland “feel targeted.”
“They know that they’ve been profiled, and distrust grows,” Jackson said. “We need to do more to address racial disparities in traffic stops.”
Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell addressed the disparities at a record meeting July 13, saying they have “held true over several years.”
“We continue to look for ways to analyze this issue and find new ways to combat it,” he said.
— Catalina Gaitán, cgaitan@oregonian.com, @catalingaitan_
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