Portland police stopped drivers and pedestrians far more often in 2023 than the previous year, according to newly released traffic-stop data.

The Portland Police Bureau’s traffic division has quickly returned to form after a two-year hiatus. Former police Chief Chuck Lovell mothballed the division in 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, reassigning its officers to other divisions. The traffic division was reinstated in 2023, and the numbers in the bureau’s most recent Stops Data Collection report, published Friday, show that its officers have been busy.

Portland traffic cops stopped people 6,429 total times last year, compared to 3,028 times in 2022 — a 112% increase, city data show. There are now 15 officers dedicated to traffic enforcement, according to the bureau’s report. They usually patrol the city’s “High Crash Network” — 30 Portland streets and intersections that account for a disproportionate amount of serious road accidents.

Though the number of traffic stops in Portland grew dramatically last year, it still paled compared to the division’s output several years ago. In 2019, for example, the traffic division made 14,532 stops — 126% more than in 2023.

While the return of the traffic division is a big reason for the 2023 increase, traffic stops by officers in other divisions still accounted for the majority overall, bureau data shows. The traffic division’s stops added up to only 38% of all the 17,113 traffic stops in Portland last year.

A key reason the bureau has been analyzing and publicizing this data is to identify, understand and address potential bias in traffic stops. While the bureau’s officers have consistently stopped people of color at rates higher than their share of the Portland population — including last year, when Black people accounted for 19% of traffic stops — the bureau claims the disparate rates don’t actually indicate police are disproportionately stopping drivers of color.

The correct benchmark is a population measure derived from racial data pulled from injury accidents, according to the bureau — not the share of the population that each race is. By the bureau’s preferred measure, called the Injury Collision Benchmark, no perceived races or ethnicities were over- or under-represented in traffic stops last year, according to the report.

That approach uses injury accident data to get a racial distribution of an area’s drivers, according to a 2018 Oregon Criminal Justice Commission report on analyzing police-stop data. According to a 20-year-old University of South Carolina study, cited by the commission and the bureau, such analyses give “a reasonably accurate estimate of the racial composition of drivers on the roadways at selected intersections and within areas of varying racial composition.”

The percentage of white people stopped by police has steadily dropped since 2019, the bureau’s data show, falling to 59% last year, down from 65% in 2019. Hispanic and Latino people accounted for 14% of stops last year, compared to 10% five years ago, while Black people accounted for 19% of stops last year, up from 17% five years ago.

The nonprofit Partnership for Safety and Justice, which advocates for criminal justice reform, said the raw increase in the number of stops of Black and Hispanic or Latino drivers shown in the data reflects “serious bias in profiling.”

“Any increase in traffic stops among people of color in Portland is a step in the wrong direction,” Senior Policy Manager Babak Zolfaghari-Azar said in a written statement. “When almost every stop is solely for a traffic violation, crimes aren’t being solved and communities aren’t safer. They’re causing more harm and trauma to communities of color.”

— Fedor Zarkhin is a breaking news and enterprise reporter with a focus on crime. Reach him at 971-373-2905; fzarkhin@oregonian.

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