Trends in the Public’s Calls for Service to the Police Before and After Drug Decriminalization

• In Event: Policy Panel: Measure 110 Research Findings: Assessing the Impacts of Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Law

Abstract

Calls for service (CFS) data, or the public requests made to 911, provide a unique window into a community’s concerns and the demand for police resources across a variety of incident types. Given the perception that M110 had increased crime from our qualitative interviews with law enforcement, we conducted a secondary analysis of CFS data to understand the effects of M110 on crime and community concerns. We use CFS data from Portland and Eugene (Oregon) and publicly available CFS data from comparable cities in the region (e.g., Seattle, Boise, and Sacramento) to identify the potential impact of M110 on overall 911 utilization, violent, property and drug crimes, as well as quality of life / disorder calls. This amounts to about 16.4 million CFS between 2018 and 2023. These data are assessed using an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) interrupted time series approach to understand trend differences before and after enactment. Early descriptive analyses of these data found that the trends in overall CFS and crime measures in Oregon were similar to comparable states, demonstrated normal seasonal variability, and showed no evidence of M110 responsible for an increase in crime. We anticipate presenting full ARIMA results.

Authors

• Sean E. Wire, RTI International

• Josie Caves Sivaraman, RTI International

• Hope Smiley McDonald, RTI International

• Alex Kral, RTI International

• Barrot Lambdin, RTI International