Gun violence report summarizes 2022 statistics

The Portland Police Bureau’s Strategic Services Division is releasing a new report that outlines shooting incidents and firearm homicide statistics for 2022 as well as rolling year and annual comparative stats from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2022. The report also includes charts showing trends in firearm homicides, shootings, and case clearances. The report can be found at https://www.portland.gov/police/open-data/shooting-incident-statistics

Some of the report’s highlights include:

• The 94 homicides in 2022 was a 6% increase over the previous year. Homicides were up 61% over the previous three years.

• Of the 94 homicides, 76 of the victims died by firearm, which was a 12% increase over the previous year.

• Last year there were 1,306 total shooting incidents, down 1% from the previous year. Total shooting incidents were up 48% over the last three years.

• The month with the highest number of total shooting incidents in last 3 years was March with 147.

• Investigators cleared between 8 and 18 shooting cases per month last year.

The information is being released as part of PPB’s ongoing effort to empower our community with public safety information. In addition to this data, the Portland Police Bureau offers an interactive Shooting Incident Statistics dashboard. The dashboard is available here: https://www.portland.gov/police/open-data/shooting-incident-statistics

The dashboard includes:

• Neighborhood shooting incident map
  On the ‘Neighborhood Incident’ tab, select a neighborhood from the dropdown menu to see a graduated point map of shooting incidents occurring in a neighborhood. Points represent locations at the block level with a shooting incident. The point size increases as the volume of shootings at the location increases.

• Tool tips
  Users can hover over data points to see additional statistics, such as percent change from prior time period or volume of shootings by type at the location.

• Additional open data fields
  The number of casings recovered during the incident and the time of the shooting (2-hr interval) have been added as field in the open data download.

More detailed information regarding the features of the Shooting Incident Statistics dashboard can be found on the dashboard’s menu under the Visualization Walkthrough section.

The Police Bureau continues to work with partners to reduce the number of shootings. Solving crimes related to shootings takes help from the community, including witnesses and bystanders to come forward and provide information to police. This can be very difficult for people to do, but is often necessary to start the process of holding shooters accountable, and interrupt the cycle of violence in our neighborhood streets.