A spike in car thefts has impacted thousands of Portlanders over the last few years. Now, it seems that trend has been reversed.
PORTLAND, Ore. — It’s no secret that the problem of stolen vehicles has plagued Portlanders for the last couple of years. But now, it appears the trend has been reversed.
Portland police reported that over the last 12 months, stolen vehicle operations have consistently delivered results in reducing vehicle theft rates. In March 2023, officers said there were 747 vehicles reported stolen. A year later, in March 2024, it was 442. That’s a 40% decrease.
Officers in Portland are finding and recovering more stolen cars with more accuracy. Police officer Michael Terrett, the lead officer of the stolen vehicle operations, said this is a big win.
“We’re noticing that it’s actually getting more challenging to find stolen vehicles, which is a good sign,” he said.
Admittedly, Portland police said they couldn’t do this alone.
“I mean the numbers speak for themselves. It is a unique collaboration, but one that works,” Terrett said.
One of Portland police’s unique partners is Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute. Scientists and data analysts help officers hone in on what’s working during stolen vehicle operations, and turn that into a formula to help them better identify occupied stolen cars.
“The goal is, if we can minimize the amount of stops we do, but get better outcomes in the sense that we take an active stolen vehicle out of the community, return the vehicle, and also we’re able to prosecute the person, that is really what this program is about,” Terrett said.
Even with this focused approach, officers can’t see everything all the time, but with the help of community — specifically the PDX Stolen Cars Facebook community — their reach extends.
“There’s such a level of eyeballs on that information, that they’re able to really point us in a very precise direction,” Terrett said.
Titan Crawford, the founder of PDX Stolen Cars, works with his team of volunteers independently, but alongside, officers.
“The more eyes and the more ears, the more cars were going to find,” Crawford said.
A group of four people work on each stolen vehicle mission.
“We take our own cars and we go out into the area that police are looking for a stolen vehicles, and what’s different about those is the resources available. You’ve got officers from Clackamas County, Multnomah County, Gresham — even Vancouver participates — and when you find stolen vehicles, they’re able to respond in a minute’s time.”
Even when not on a formal mission, the members of the group are always on the lookout, crowdsourcing by snapping and posting pictures of what they believe to be stolen vehicles, while cruising around or even on their own street. With 20,000 members in the Facebook group, they cover a lot of ground and provide information to police.
Both Crawford and Terrett said the car thieves that are out there are getting craftier.
“Sometimes, they are hiding in plain sight. It used to be if you heard a catalytic converter that was removed from a car or you saw a car driving with a broken window and no plate, that was an obvious clue that that was a stolen vehicle,” Crawford said.
Terrett said some car thieves find a license place from a matching vehicle to use.
“There are tricks that we’re seeing to help de-identify the car or make the car not stand out as much,” Terrett said.
Now the work continues to stay ahead of the curve and they’re confident the trends will continue, seeing how well their partnerships have paid off.
“We certainly had a hope and a belief that if we looked at this in a in a very specific way —if we go outside the box and if we applied best practices from outside industries, from the private sector, from the medical industry and we leverage their methodologies — that we could improve our results. That was the goal,” Terrett said.
