All caught up

It was a rough Fourth in Portland. The fireworks noise, all now illegal, was as muted as I can ever remember, but the gunfire noise was depressingly normal.

Various sources are quick to point out when the murder rate in Portland is down from the previous year – "slightly" down, we've been told over and over, in the past few months. Well, as of this morning, meter watchers, we appear to be not "slightly" anything, but instead exactly where we were last year.

The pace of homicides in Portland in 2023 now matches that of last year at this same point. In 2022, the city had a record-breaking 101 homicides for the year.

With the population declining, the murder rate is actually increasing. If you figure there are 630,000 residents in town, your odds of being killed this year is 1 out of 6238. Another way of looking at it is that in a capacity crowd at a Blazer game, three people will be killed over the next 12 months.

That's too many for a town whose calling card used to be safety.

In New York City, they reported 433 homicides in 2022. The population there is more than 13 times Portland's, but they saw only 4.3 times Portland's number of killings. On a per capita basis, by my math, your chances of getting killed are three times higher in Portland than in the Big Apple.