Here, for instance, is the homicide trend in Portland vs Boston (the Boston chart doesn't include 2022, but the year ended just one higher than the year before.) pic.twitter.com/6285enQsTw
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) April 8, 2023
Good question.
From CDC data:
Portland, Oregon and Boston, Massachusetts are almost identical in population in the 2020 Census.
Weirdly, homicides of residents of Portland’s county didn’t increase as much, but murders of people in Portland’s county exploded. Usually, I just graph homicides of residents of states or counties, rather than homicides within states or counties, because… well, why not? They seldom diverge, probably because most people who get themselves murdered are homeboys. In Bonfire of the Vanities, a Bronx detective describes a lowlife as having “never seen the Atlantic Ocean.” But in the case of Portland’s murder surge during the Racial Reckoning, a lot of the victims appear to be out-of-towners. This might mean something, it might be a fluke, or it might just be a methodological problem.
But it’s interesting that in academically elite Boston, there wasn’t much of a surge in homicides in 2020-21, despite Boston being 23.5% black in the 2020 Census. My impression is that Boston has a lot of immigrant blacks, plus a lot of semi-blacks from Brazil and Cape Verde—how they self-identify, I don’t know. In contrast, Portland is only 5.6% black, so it should have a much lower murder rate, as it did in its whitopian past.
My vague impression is that Boston has a useful combination of smart whites and tough whites. The conflict between the two is memorably portrayed in William Monahan’s script for The Departed when Mark Wahlberg interviews state police applicant Leonardo DiCaprio:
You got 1400 on your SATs, kid. You’re an astronaut, not a Statie.
But occasionally Boston benefits from the combination of the two, as exemplified by Dorchester native Bill Bratton, who is the most successful police chief of the last generation.
