Visualize Justice: Which Oregonians suffer bias crimes?

And why are is the hotline data so different from the police data?

Author

Ann Leymon
September 18, 2025

Which Oregonians suffer bias crimes?

Today we’re looking at Oregon’s Bias Response Hotline (BRH; data and full report here) from 2024. I have three main takeaways - scroll down to read them.

Column chart of Oregon bias crime victims by race in 2024, overlayed on Oregon's Census Demographics

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.

Nearly every racial category other than white was more likely to report a crime to the BRH compared to the data from Oregon State Police.

BRH fills a VERY important gap. Whether this is because different individuals are reporting their experience as victims of a bias crime to BRH, or because the same individuals are reporting their experience in both places (but receiving different race labels due to different data collection policies and procedures) - we need this BRH data to get the full picture. Note: more than half of BRH victims didn’t report their race, which is a big data quality issue.

Folks who are Black, Asian, or another race (e.g., Middle Eastern) have experienced bias crimes at several times the levels of these populations in the state.

The magnitude of these differences means that in Oregon, we continue to suffer from racism so extreme that people commit crimes of prejudice against people of color, due to their race or other identities.

We really do need racial data that is comparable.

Without being able to calibrate these categories against the statewide demographics, it’s much harder to see where things are not as expected. With this data we can see that Black people are overrepresented as victims of bias crimes at about 15x the statewide population level.

And if OSP changed their racial categorization practices to reflect current norms, we would know why the BRH data has higher representation from folks who are Asian, Hispanic, and another race.

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Let’s keep working for a more peaceful system.

Kindly,
Ann

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