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If you watch television news or read the daily paper, it's easy to get the impression Portland is a dangerous place. One presidential candidate would like people to believe that's the case as well.
Here's how GOP nominee Donald Trump put it at his party's convention in Cleveland earlier this summer:
"Our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen," Trump said.
But a new study from the Marshall Project, an outfit that specializes in reporting on criminal justice, shows that Portland is not only dramatically safer than most other large American cities; it's dramatically safer than the Portland of 40 years ago. The numbers are drawn from FBI figures on murders, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies.
An interactive chart the Marshall Project constructed allows you to see crime rates in 68 urban areas for each year since 1975.
The numbers show that Portland experiences far less violent crime—about 2/3 the rate of cities such as Boston, San Francisco and Salt Lake City and small fractions of the crime in cities such as Detroit and St. Louis.
Related: Portland murders on pace for record lows.
The data also show a dramatic drop in crime here over time. In 2014, the last year for which there are FBI figures, for example, Portland reported 472 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. That's less than half the rate—1,092 per 100,000 residents—the city reported in 1975.
The take away: Despite the near-daily anecdotal examples of violent behavior, crimes against people have been and remain in a significant, long-term downtrend.
Here's what the Marshall Project authors concluded:
Willamette Week