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Visualize Justice: Where in Oregon are bias incidents concentrated?

And what can we learn about bias crimes by comparing hotline data to police data?

Author

Ann Leymon
December 18, 2025

Which Oregon counties have the most bias incidents?

Good morning! Today, we’re continuing to look at bias in Oregon via the Bias Response Hotline (BRH; data and full report here). This time we’ll break it down by county. I want to find out which counties have the biggest bias problem.

Welcome to Visualize Justice: Dataviz insights to illuminate the justice system. Here I use 10+ years of experience in research to make the complicated justice system, and the complexities of its data, easier to understand. The better we understand what’s actually happening, the clearer we are about how we can make our communities safer and do less harm.

Slope chart comparing counties wih high concentration of bias hotlie incidents to counties with high concentration of official bias crime, with Lane and Linn showing up high on both sides

Every county has at least a few BRH incidents, but the number of reports per county gets pretty tiny in less populated areas. I combined all five years of BRH data for bias incidents and crimes in each county to make comparisons work.

Then I scaled the numbers to population size. The left side of this slope chart is the number of reports per 10,000 residents.

But wait. Are bias incidents actually more common in the counties at the top of the chart? Or are fluctuations in hotline use driving these numbers?  

Bias crimes are underreported overall1 , so the question is whether a county is incorrectly appearing higher than other counties, due to uneven reporting to BRH. Straight over-reporting is not a serious possibility.

Differences in reporting is a serious possibility. An organization or agency that works with victims in one county could be super consistent about referring folks to the hotline, which could increase the appearance of bias relative to other counties - especially in small ones. 

But it also could just be more bias. 

To look further, I turned to NIBRS: the official crime-level reporting system that tracks bias crimes statewide. The right side of this slope chart has five-year totals of bias crimes, scaled to the population, just like the BRH side (which includes incidents in addition to crimes).

Do these sources tell the same story?

If all counties with high BRH bias reports also have high rates of NIBRS bias crimes, we would see a lot of horizontal lines. Basically, the two sources would validate each other. We see some of that.

  • Lane and Linn counties have a high BRH incident rate and a high rate of crimes in NIBRS. These counties probably have more bias crime than other counties in Oregon.

  • Josephine and Jefferson counties have a low BRH incident rate and a low rate of crimes in NIBRS. They probably have less bias crime than other counties in the state.

The takeaway is murkier when we see a lot of crisscrossing diagonals – if high BRH counties have low NIBRS crimes, and low BRH counties have high NIBRS crimes.

We know that the people who use the hotline aren’t always reporting to the police, and vice versa. So most likely, the underreporting is skewed towards one source or the other in these specific counties. It could be a self-reinforcing cycle; a lack of official action can steer victims to the hotline, as the only way to create an official record of bias incidents.

  • Tillamook and Columbia counties are in the high BRH - low NIBRS category. This is likely some combination of more hotline reporting and less police resources dedicated to bias crime.

  • Hood River and Sherman counties have low BRH reporting and high rates of NIBRS bias crime. However, their raw numbers are small: from 2020-2024, a total of 14 bias crimes were recorded in Hood River county and four in Sherman county. These fall squarely in the realm of “interpret with caution”.

Overall this is a data puzzle that is still missing a lot of pieces, but there are small tweaks that could make the data more reliable. Let’s keep working at it.

1Pezzella, Frank S., Matthew D. Fetzer, and Tyler Keller. 2019. “The Dark Figure of Hate Crime Underreporting.” American Behavioral Scientist. 000276421882384. 10.1177/0002764218823844.

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Kindly,
Ann

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1  Pezzella, Frank S., Matthew D. Fetzer, and Tyler Keller. 2019. “The Dark Figure of Hate Crime Underreporting.” American Behavioral Scientist. 000276421882384. 10.1177/0002764218823844.