Black drivers stopped at a disproportionate rate in Portland

PORTLAND, Ore. — Data released by the police bureau in Portland, Oregon, shows Black people were much more likely to be stopped by police in 2019 than people in other racial groups despite being a small part of the city’s population.

Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that of the 33,035 vehicle stops Portland police made in 2019, 18 percent were for Black drivers and 65 percent were for white drivers. White people make up 75.1 percent of the population, while Black people make up 5.8 percent.

The discrepancy is greater for nonmoving violation stops, a category for which the report says officers have more room for discretionary judgment. Black people accounted for 22.6 percent of those stops, compared with 62 percent for white people.

Police Chief Chuck Lovell said that this is the first year African Americans were not stopped at a disparate rate, a calculation based on a “disparity index” the bureau uses to estimate expected values.

Rather than relying simply on census data, the bureau uses a complicated set of benchmarks to determine what outcomes they would expect to see in their stop data.

The police bureau’s methodology might have some merit if there were a large Black population that commuted into Portland every day, changing the city’s demographics for certain hours of the day, according to Elliott Young, a professor at Lewis & Clark College and the co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing.

“What does crime victimization data have to do with the number of drivers in the community?” asked Young. “(The Portland police bureau is) simply fishing for benchmarks to justify disproportionate policing of Black people.”