From Philadelphia to Portland to Los Angeles, killings and gun violence are rising. At the same time, officers worn out by the pandemic and disillusioned over the calls to divest from policing are quitting or retiring faster than they can be replaced.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Five years after Brian Spaulding’s parents found him fatally shot in the home he shared with roommates, his slaying remains a mystery that seems increasingly unlikely to be solved as Portland, Oregon, police confront a spike in killings and more than 100 officer vacancies.
Departments are scrambling to recruit in a tight labor market and also rethinking what services they can provide and what role police should play in their communities. Many have shifted veteran officers to patrol, breaking up specialized teams built over decades in order to keep up with 911 calls. Portland logged a record 89 homicides last year — roughly three times its historical average — and is on pace to top that this year after already tallying more than 50. A report completed for the city last month by the California Partnership for Safe Communities found it had the largest homicide rate increase among similarly sized cities and 75% of homicides in 2020 were by gun. The city has seen nearly 800 shootings this year.
“The problem is you see cities where they didn’t do any of those things where crime also went up and you’ll see rural areas where crime also went up as well,” said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. “He turned around and pulled a pistol out and I didn’t see it. I didn’t feel anything at first but 10 seconds later I could hardly breathe,” King said as he sat on street after three nights in the hospital. “I thought I was going to pass away.”
Conversations around police reform are “important work and it’s an opportunity for us to better serve our community … but that said, as you transition to any of those new programs — which takes a while sometimes — you still have to be providing the basic services,” Gullberg said. “Right now, because of the the spike in violent crime, we’re only able to investigate murders,” child abuse and sex crimes, he said. “We’re triaging.”
Understaffed departments sometimes shift detectives to patrol because of political pressure, but research shows solving violent crime depresses crime rates more effectively than putting rank-and-file officers on the street, Lopez said.
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