Portland cannot say how much crime occurs on its transit system
For years, debate over safety on Portland’s public transit system has been driven by anecdotes, viral news, and political claims. Riders describe feeling unsafe. Others insist crime is rare and the transit system is a model. Officials point to enforcement efforts or overall changes in citywide crime. But one basic question has gone unanswered:
How much violent crime actually occurs on TriMet?
After months of public records requests across multiple law enforcement agencies, the answer is clearer. And the reason it was unclear reveals a deeper problem.
No public agency tracks violent crime across the TriMet system as a whole.
TriMet operates across multiple jurisdictions, and crime reporting is fragmented among several police agencies. Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office Transit Police handles many cases, including incidents in Portland. Gresham Police handle cases in their jurisdiction. Hillsboro Police report for Washington County transit policing, including Beaverton. Each agency tracks its own cases, but no one agency aggregates systemwide totals.
The city has been flying blind. In other words, every piece of the data exists, but no one puts it together.
So we did.
Using federal violent crime definitions and official offense records from Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, Gresham Police, Portland Police Bureau, and Hillsboro Police, violent crimes on TriMet in 2024 were counted across all jurisdictions, perhaps for the first time. For this analysis, violent crime follows FBI classifications, including homicide and attempted homicide, rape and sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and kidnapping. Other crimes that may be violent in nature exist, but they weren’t included here.
TriMet reported approximately 62.9 million passenger boardings in 2024, producing systemwide rates of approximately 1.25 violent crimes per one million rides, 4.7 property crimes per one million rides, and 27 total reported offenses per one million rides.
Property crimes are defined here as theft and larceny offenses, burglary, motor vehicle theft, theft from vehicles, shoplifting, and vandalism or criminal mischief, excluding robbery, which is counted under violent crime.
Total offenses are defined here as all criminal offenses contained in the TriMet-related records produced by law enforcement agencies in response to public records requests, regardless of offense type.
While this data is notable as a point-in-time, perhaps the larger finding is the lack of aggregation, and in this case it may matter more than the numbers themselves.
Public debate over transit safety has been happening without a reliable metric. Politicians, advocates, and media reports regularly cite individual incidents, but no public body maintains or publishes a unified violent crime rate for the system. Agencies meet federal reporting requirements individually, but those reports are organized by police department, not by transit network. TriMet itself is not a law enforcement agency and does not aggregate crime statistics across jurisdictions.
The result is a system where everyone has part of the answer, but no one has the whole picture.
This fragmentation also makes it difficult for the public to see how safety changes over time. Without a unified annual metric, it is hard to determine whether violent crime on transit is increasing or decreasing, to compare one year’s safety conditions to another, or to compare this transit system’s performance to that of a comparable system.
The absence of reliable system data has practical consequences as well.
Decisions about transit policing budgets, security deployment, and rider safety investments are debated without a clear baseline. Riders deciding whether to use transit cannot easily judge risk relative to other modes of travel. And policymakers lack a consistent measure to evaluate whether safety initiatives are working.
This helps explain why perceptions vary so widely. Riders experience isolated incidents while others point to broader crime trends, but without systemwide data, discussions often rely on incomplete information.
Transit safety remains an issue for riders, and perception can be driven as much by the lack of information as the presence of it. Violent crime influences how people feel about using public transportation, but understanding its risk requires more than anecdotes. It requires data.
The data here shows violent crime on TriMet occurs at a measurable rate. And it shows that no one in government currently tracks this metric in a way the public can easily access.
This begs obvious questions about governance, transparency, and safety. The next question is whether agencies will ever publish systemwide transit crime statistics themselves so policy decisions and political debates occur within a factual baseline — or whether riders and reporters will continue to assemble the numbers by hand, one jurisdiction at a time.