Before this year's behind us, here's a rundown of our editorial crew's favorite stories from '18 (Can we call it that? We're calling it that).

———————

Texts between the mayor's office, the Portland Business Association, and Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle—obtained by the Mercury—found that Mayor Ted Wheeler had promised Boyle to keep the homeless off the sidewalks in front of Columbia's downtown headquarters. After we made those messages public, Boyle and Wheeler backpedaled.

A city audit discovered that Portland Police Bureau's gang enforcement team disproportionately pull over people of color for petty crimes—on the simple assumption that they might be in a gang.

A day after 17 people were gunned down at a Florida high school, Oregon representatives successfully passed a bill expanding prohibitions on possessing guns for those who stalk or abuse their partners.

A group of high school students in St. Johns protested the rising rate of gentrification in their North Portland neighborhood.

A federal judge ordered staff at Sheridan Prison to allow lawyers inside after hundreds of immigrants seeking asylum sat for months without access to legal aid or any communication to the outside world.

Politicians and developers tried (again) to turn an isolated, abandoned jail into a homeless shelter. Actual homeless people, advocates, and providers shut the idea down (again).

Portland votes elected predominantly female, non-white politicians to lead the region in the May primary elections.

We reminded the Oregonian that Joey Gibson, the leader of alt-right extremist group Patriot Prayer, does not deserve our sympathy.

A citizen oversight committee ruled that lying to a member of the public isn't the best way for a cop to de-escalate a tense situation.

A county court agreed with constitutional lawyers that TriMet's mass fare inspections violate passengers' First Amendment rights.

We debunked the myth of homeless people being "service resistant"—an comfortable excuse conservative neighborhood groups use to abuse and criminalize their neighbors who don't have a home.

Burgerville became the country's first fast food chain to have a federally-recognized union (despite Burgerville management's grumbles).

Students, faculty, and other community members called to disarm Portland State University (PSU) campus officers after the school saw its first fatal shooting.

Pushback from civil rights experts and politicians kept Mayor Wheeler's rushed fixes to the city's protest policies from moving forward.

City council approved a policy requiring landlords to submit their properties in a city registry to start creating order in the city's tangled renter system.

We found that the process in which police investigate hate crimes in Portland is riddled with gaps that favor perpetrators. Shortly after the Mercury covered this, the police department created a new public database to track hate crime cases.

Oregon finally finished testing the state's 5,000 backlogged rape kits. We're already feeling the implications in Portland—a number of recently identified suspects in rape cases are (finally) headed to court.