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Even cops can see that the results of locking someone up over a petty, drug-addiction–fueled crime are not always particularly stirring.
Portland Deputy Police Chief Brian Hughes says he often encounters people emerging from jail, a few days of sobriety showing on their faces. “‘What are you going to do next?’” he’ll ask. “‘Are you going to, you know, hit up an N.A. [Narcotics Anonymous] meeting? Or head back into Old Town and continue?’ And most of the time, it’s ‘Head back into Old Town.’”
Yet one of Multnomah County’s major alternatives—a program to divert drug users facing arrest into treatment—has also left few inspired.
Updates in recent months have offered inklings of promise. But even now, almost two years after its launch, a project that could be essential to solving one of Portland’s most intractable social problems still looks like little more than an inchoate, dreamy pilot program.
As one of the numerous jurisdictions that took state “deflection” funds as part of the repeal of Oregon’s experiment to decriminalize drug possession, Multnomah County has since 2024 poured millions of dollars into retrofitting, renting and running an old building just off Southeast Sandy Boulevard where, in theory, police could take people found with drugs on them for treatment as an alternative to jail.
In practice, this has happened little. Even after the center became operational 24/7 and added broader capacity as a sobering facility—open to referrals from nonprofits and social workers as well as police—an average of just one or two people ended up there per day.
And that’s just counting people who arrived for the start of their supposed journey to sobriety. As WW has documented, despite the county’s uncommonly low standard for “successfully” completing its deflection program, very few people who entered deflection ended up going to get the service—such as treatment—that was ostensibly required of them.
In short, most just ended up back on the streets.
“The system was initially designed to be deflection out of the criminal justice system, but not to anything in particular,” says one critic, County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards, adding that she has heard from law enforcement of a growing disenchantment with the program for which they were supposed to be the primary source of referrals.
To be sure, Hughes of the Portland Police Bureau recalls successes too. He speaks of people on the street flagging down bike officers and telling them of the good the deflection program did for them. “Everyone we take over there—it gives somebody hope,” he says, “and one thing I’ve found in this business is: You never want to deprive anybody of hope, because it may be all they have.”
Still, as reports emerged documenting underwhelming use and completion rates, officials began getting antsy last fall for better results.
Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez said he would start charging people who did not successfully complete the deflection program’s requirements. County commissioners passed a resolution soon after that. In sum, officials sought to (slightly) expand the pool of people eligible for deflection, intensify the requirements for completing deflection, lengthen the period in which one could satisfy those requirements—from 30 days to 90—and improve coordination between the health department and the DA.
Further change is afoot. The health department just hired a new contractor to run its deflection program out of the rented building on Sandy, known as the Coordinated Care Pathway Center. And the county is building a permanent deflection, sobering and detox center—set to open in 2027.
But that’s all down the line. For now, officials insist they are learning. Multnomah County interim behavioral health director Anthony Jordan says programs often look ugly in their early days, and notes that many people know what it’s like to start something new and have all its early flaws on full display: “But eventually you worked it out. You figured it out. And then you didn’t make the same mistakes.”
A few months after officials pledged to get the deflection program back on track, WW decided to check on their progress.
Did the announced changes actually get implemented?
Officials say yes, they mostly did. But there has been some debate on this point. County commissioners had a spirited hearing in May, jousting over whether County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson had promptly enacted the measure passed months before.
But the health department tells WW that, while some aspects of the county resolution were still being implemented, “the key elements” had “been operationalized”—including the enhanced completion criteria, the longer deflection period, and coordination with the DA’s office.
The DA’s office confirms this last point—which is essential if it’s going to carry out its pledge to prosecute people who do not complete deflection.
That pledge was set to go into effect Jan. 5. A spokesman for the DA says most people (41 at last count) who entered deflection since then are still within their 90-day deflection period, so it is hard to judge the initial impact. But the policy does appear to be in motion. The DA’s office recently told WW it had completed criminal reviews of nine deflection cases that flamed out—seven resulted in charges against people who did not complete deflection, and two saw no charges because of evidence-related issues.
Meanwhile, the DA spokesman noted, 14 cases await review. And he said the DA’s office expected further tranches of information from the health department on the status of many additional deflection cases.
Are people completing deflection at a higher rate?
Again, it’s early, but the county’s first report since the changes began rolling out says the rate of engagement of people referred to deflection—meaning they took at least one initial step after being referred—was 90%, up from a historic baseline of 70%. Meanwhile, it reported that 43% of people referred to the program completed deflection, up from a historic baseline of 24%.
That 43%, however, encompasses just nine people. Which raises another important question…
Are more people actually getting deflected?
No. Deflection referrals—i.e., the number of people who enter the program in the first place—still look anemic. In the first three months of 2026, the county reports that 78 people were referred to deflection. That’s fewer than one a day arriving at a building that operates 24/7.
A county spokesperson cautions that this does not reflect the total use of the deflection center, which also now (after considerable delay, Brim-Edwards notes) operates as a sobering facility for people not charged with crimes.
But adding the sobering cohort would not actually improve the data much. Between May 5, 2025, and April 30, 2026, the county counted 168 total sobering visits—about one person every two days.
It seems not many people are going to the deflection center, but maybe the figures are actually larger than they seem?
Maybe! Here, the denominator matters. According to the state, law enforcement in Multnomah County arrested 1,570 people for possession of a controlled substance between Sept. 1, 2024, and June 3, 2026—about two or three people a day.
Meanwhile, in 2025, the first full year after drug recriminalization, data from the Multnomah County DA’s Office indicates it charged an average of one or two people a day with possession of a controlled substance.
Against this backdrop, one or two people a day showing up for deflection doesn’t seem so low.
Still, this number is hardly the whole pool of people who need addiction treatment. First off, someone is unlikely to attract the attention of police solely for drug possession. Yet common co-charges—trespassing, say—frequently render otherwise good deflection candidates ineligible for the program.
In January, Multnomah County made people accused of camping offenses under Portland City Code eligible for deflection. But many jurisdictions, like Washington County, have made a far broader suite of co-charges eligible, like low-level theft and disorderly conduct. And an annual report on deflection statewide strongly recommended expanding eligibility in this way. (Vasquez, the DA, says he supported including the camping charges “and will consider adding additional charges if the data continue to support that this path results in meaningful engagement with treatment with a larger sample size.”)
Secondly—and perhaps more to the point—many, including Vasquez, affirm what Portlanders can quite easily see with their own eyes: Many illegal drug users in Multnomah County do not get arrested, charged or sent to deflection. That is, they don’t show up in the above data at all.
Why not?
The Multnomah County spokesperson cites “law enforcement priorities and capacity” and refers requests for further comment to said law enforcement.
Law enforcement’s answer? Not enough law enforcement. “I am encouraged by the early data coming in from deflection after the changes that I insisted be made to the program,” DA Vazquez said in his statement. “But it is still too early to draw firm conclusions given the low overall utilization rates that you rightly point out. The driver of referrals to deflection are individual police officers on the street.”
The idea, familiar to anyone following the contentious ballot initiative campaign to divert environmental surtax revenue to hire more Portland police, is that the ratio of officers to citizens is insufficient. “With so many other urgent demands on patrol officers’ time, conducting drug enforcement and deflection referral has taken a back seat to other emergency responses,” Vasquez says, and getting more police is “the next piece of this puzzle.”
Not surprisingly, the police agree. “I’ll flat out tell you, if I had a bus, I could drive around right now and fill it up with 200 people right this minute,” says Hughes the deputy chief, who represents the Police Bureau on the committee implementing the deflection program in Multnomah County.
Hughes listed various locations where people with addictions congregate where he would start—a convenience store on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, BottleDrop locations, the South Park Blocks. The reason he doesn’t, he says, is that there is not enough time.
During his phone interview with WW, Hughes narrated the status of various calls to demonstrate the triage that everyday officers must perform. He listed 20 calls citywide holding at that very moment. He added, “It’s been my opinion that the expectations of the citizens of Portland far exceed the staffing levels that I have to deliver that service.”
How seriously should you take this?
Some are skeptical. Brandon del Pozo, a former police officer who now researches deflection programs and related matters at Brown University, notes that Oregon law enforcement deployed a different sort of argument in their fight against decriminalization of drugs.
“Their complaint was, ‘Our hands are tied and we can’t take enforcement action when we see drugs,’” he says. “And now they’re saying, ‘We don’t take enforcement action when we see drugs’? I’d interrogate that.”
Why is this a cop’s job anyway?
Portland is home to a complex and occasionally bewildering soup of government, nonprofit and health care programs directed at the knotted nexus of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction—and some advocates have long called for law enforcement to take a back seat to social workers in dealings with people with mental illness and substance use disorders.
But at the end of the day, there are few who have the authority to detain someone and make them do something like a police officer.
Del Pozo, who has studied Oregon’s decriminalization campaign and its demise, notes that, even as Seattle pioneered the formalized law enforcement drug deflection model less than two decades ago, police’s role as street-level bureaucrats, charged with solving social problems, runs far deeper.
“There are plenty of cases,” he says, “where we can think of cops trying to link someone up to some service or intervention. Or dragging a kid by the ear back to his mom or dad or uncle to set something right without resorting to arrest. Because arrest wasn’t always going to be effective. That’s going back since the dawn of policing.”
