Top 3 Sites for Portland Crime Data and Safest Areas

When purchasing real estate in a Portland, personal safety is likely to be relevant to any home buyer’s decision. Unfortunately, doing a Google search often comes up with headlines and news stories about recent robberies, fires, and other tragic events, which don’t give an accurate representation of how safe life is – or isn’t – in that neighborhood.
So how is a home buyer to determine whether a neighborhood is safe?

As your Portland real estate and home buying experts, we recommend going to statistical data versus anecdotes and news stories. Getting an overall data based picture of how many crimes have occurred in a specific time period will be much more helpful in your home buying decision.

Then again, it’s important not to look at the numbers alone but to get clear on what they actually mean. For instance, a specific block may be reporting high property crime, however upon closer examination, most of the incidents might be vehicle break-ins at a long-term parking lot. This may not indicate that the neighborhood is actually more dangerous than any other.

Top Websites for Portland Neighborhood Crime Data

There are three reliable and accurate websites for checking out crime data for a specific neighborhood, and comparing nearby areas.

1. Portland Police Bureau: Monthly Neighborhood Offense Statistics
   This website collects all offenses that occur within the city and totals them up for each neighborhood. Users can click a Portland neighborhood to see offense counts, and look at historical data back to May 2015. The default view shows the offense counts for the entire city.
2. Portlandmaps.com: Property Details
   This interactive map is a treasure trove of information for anyone doing real estate research. Enter an address or click the map for all city records and neighborhood info, including Public Safety. Click the tab for statistical crime data by category displayed by dots on the map, and get an idea of how the 1/4-mile grid section compares to neighboring sections by zooming out.
3. Portlandmaps.com: Crime Reports Map
   The City of Portland also produces this map to show reported crimes only (without all the other property details). The key difference is that this map allows the viewer to access a summary of the crime report associated with each dot.

Safest Communities in Oregon: How does the Portland Metro stack up?

Oregon overall is a very safe place to live. According to the latest FBI crime report, living in this state makes you 34% less likely to find yourself the victim of violent crime compared to the national average.

Portland, like every big city, has a slightly higher rate of crime than surrounding small towns and rural areas. In 2016, per 1,000 people living in Portland, 28 were the victim of property crime and 2.76 were the victim of violent crime.
But the Portland metro area is also home to some of the lowest-crime areas in Oregon. In fact, out of the Top 20 Safest Cities in Oregon, five are within a stone’s throw of Portland.

5 Safest Cities in Oregon close to Portland:

1. Sherwood (#1 safest city in Oregon!)
   Violent crimes per 1,000: 0.67
   Property crimes per 1,000: 11
2. Lake Oswego (#3 safest city in Oregon!)
   Violent crimes per 1,000: 0.80
   Property crimes per 1,000: 11.5
3. Newberg
   Violent crimes per 1,000: 1.26
   Property crimes per 1,000: 17
4. Beaverton (with a population of nearly 100,000!)
   Violent crimes per 1,000: 1.36
   Property crimes per 1,000: 14
5. Milwaukie
   Violent crimes per 1,000: 1.39
   Property crimes per 1,000: 21