By JESSICA ANDERSON
I’ve spent several of the last few articles talking about different aspects of incidents – reporting, collection, and sharing. This installment will share with you a message from the Portland Police Bureau and provide a link to a PPB flyer and its collection of bias crimes and incidents. It’s not a well-known source of information but PPB has dedicated itself to increasing awareness about the site as well as its processes investigating these incidents. 
Here’s a message Sgt. Matthew Jacobson of the Detective Division’s Major Crimes Unit asked me to share with the community:
The City of Portland continues to see a year-over-year increase in reported Bias Events, which include Bias Crimes, non-criminal Bias Incidents, and Bias Unfounded reports. The Portland Police Bureau continues to evolve and update our response to these events, which have far-reaching traumatic impacts in the community. 
PPB recently updated our policy around response to Bias Events (Directive 640.80 – Response to Bias Events) which among other things, codifies best practice for a holistic response to these traumatic circumstances. Included in this policy is a mandatory referral for any reporting parties to the Oregon Department of Justice Bias Response Hotline, which is a policy which goes further than state law requires. The updated policy also confirms our previous requirement to document non-criminal Bias Incidents in police reports. 
PPB is one of two Law Enforcement agencies in the State who have the requirement to document all types of Bias in a report. The PPB Detective Division reviews every Bias Crime, Bias Incident, and Bias Unfounded event to ensure these events are properly screened and tracked. PPB publishes up-to-date statistics via a public dashboard on our Open Data Portal. We have created the attached informational flier with the hope of having it posted in public areas to provide information to our community members. Please contact me with any questions at Matthew.Jacobsen@Police.PortlandOregon.Gov. 
A link to PPB’s flyer can be found here.
PPB’s Reported Bias Crime Statistics webpage can be found at portland.gov/police/open-data/reported-bias-crime-statistics and from there, you can click on the box labeled “Launch Dashboard.” On that page, you can view incident numbers by year or jump to the “Bias Crimes & Incidents” tab which will take you to a dashboard where you can manipulate data to show incidents by time frames and incident type. As an example, below is a snapshot of the data for Jan 2023 through March 2024. There’s a lot of information to be found on this site and I encourage you to review it. 
As always, I can be reached at janderson@securecommunitynetwork.org or by cell at 872-273-9214. Registration for my online safety training as well as an ongoing list of local incidents can be found at jewishportland.org/security.