Yesterday’s post looking at the boundaries of the city’s (still-unenforced) gun-crime exclusion zones, and the data used to determine those lines, brought a solid point from commenter Number Six:
I can’t see all the details on the map, but the northern zone looks like they have managed to capture the historically black neighborhoods of Portland pretty well. Was that the goal? Maybe the Mercury could add to Mr. Woboril’s charts and get the census track data for those areas.
The U.S. Census Bureau has the most recent data, from last year, but told me it couldn’t map it yet. So I turned to the New York Times, which has assembled interactive maps using data from smaller Census surveys, taken in 2005-09.
And here’s how the North/Northeast gun zone matches up to where most of Portland’s African American residents are clustered.
What’s surprising, actually, is how much the zone doesn’t capture. Nearly all the tracts in the zone, except for the tract at its southern tip, are majority/supermajority white (with the caveat that, because the zone straddles some census tracts, whiter neighborhoods west of Interstate Avenue, outside the zone, could be throwing off some of the numbers.) Also interesting: In all of Portland, there’s only one other tract with the same concentration of black residents as in the map above, a small pocket bounded by I-84, NE 122nd, NE 141st, and NE Sandy.
But that doesn’t mean we should be watching this unwarily. Because bigger questions on racial profiling remain: Who, precisely, will wind up excluded? And, once that list is generated, will people of color find themselves cited for trespassing at a disproportionate rate? One way to keep an eye out: Demand that Mayor Sam Adams make the list public.
After the jump, check out a map that elegantly paints Portland’s demographics, based on 2000 Census data. Click here for a look at how rapidly the Albina neighborhood grew in the middle of the 20th century, after the Vanport flood.
- Eric Fischer/Flickr
Denis,
1) Please stop pretending you didn’t want to make the race point with your first post on this topic.
2) In your first post, you called the zones “random.” Except for that weird nubbin’ of a zone out Gresham way, one look at the map of Portland shootings should demonstrate that the downtown and N zones aren’t random at all – that’s where many shootings are. Combined with the cops’ reasonable explanation that they wanted the first zones to be a) manageable in size and b) easy to describe (thus understand), they aren’t random at all.
If you want to say it’s a dumb policy, say so. If you want to say it’s also either racist, or likely to be enforced in a racist way, say so.
As another person who has a dot next to their house and lives near the N zone: while I don’t have any day to day fear of gun crime, I’m OK with the police in my area being proactive in areas where shootings occur most often, and I understand that they are doing what they can with limited resources.
It’s an interesting question and we’ll have to see how it pans out. But from that map the zone doesn’t match the racial numbers presented.
I’m still curious about the actual numbers though, as the map’s legend has the 0-20% category as the lowest possible number despite the county’s population being what, 5.5% black? Seems like a bit of a disconnect since a neighborhood where the black population presence is double or triple or even almost four times the average in the county still shows up in your map as the lightest color and lumped into ‘Less than 20%’.
I’m confident this issue will be solved however, as the issue will no doubt be a matter of concern to all of the the African-American city councilors, Black city attorneys and the many police officers of color that will be reviewing this in the future. Wait, what? Oh. Are you sure? No blacks on city council or in the city attorney’s office? Almost none in the criminal defense bar or civil rights bar either? Huh….
@CC: That actually *wasn’t* the entire point of the first post. When I said “random” was my *first impression,* it was a reaction to the general spread of shootings and attempted gun murders. Seems you could draw a lot of little boxes on the map of Portland based on where those little dots have clustered. And, yes, I do think there’s a sizable risk this will be enforced in a racist way.
@Number Six: Click on the link to the NYT interactive map. Using another view, you can pull out the numbers for individual census tracts. And using yet another view, you can get a one dot=25-200 people picture.
Eric Fischer’s updated map using 2010 census data shows the emerging (and not exactly unpredictable) pattern of “black flight” out of Albina:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/556…
The cops know to leaves whitey alone because in Portland white people shoot cops.