Seen from a certain vantage point, Beaumont-Wilshire is a village.
Small groups of middle-school kids gather on their way to school, utterly ignoring passing adults; proud parents guide smaller ones on their way to their classrooms. Bikes zoom down streets, couples walk dogs. The occasional motorized scooter appears. People generally say hello, often stop to chat.
But B-W isn’t actually a small town; it’s part of a big city, of course, and subject to urban woes.
In the last 2½ years, three people have been shot to death here, and another person was shot in the nearby Cully neighborhood, just two blocks from B-W’s eastern boundary at NE 47th Avenue. That shooting resulted in life-threatening injuries, according to Portland Police at the time.
The recent string of shootings started in December 2022, when an elderly couple, longtime B-W residents, died in a murder-suicide, police said in a Jan. 4, 2023, press release.
Just outside the neighborhood, in June 2023, a man was shot and badly injured in the former Stanich’s parking lot, after reportedly stumbling across the street toward the alleged assailant, who was booked later that day on attempted second-degree murder and other charges.
And in early February, a man was shot and his body left on an otherwise peaceful B-W street. The victim was identified by police as 39-year-old Portland resident Laronn M. Allen.
Not long after the incident, several neighbors happened to be passing by when an aged motorhome stopped nearby. A woman got out and spray-painted sad messages on the sidewalk; she also left a couple of candles burning. A few days later a small group, likely friends or relatives, gathered there to mark their loss.
There’s no reason to suppose from these events, tragic and shocking as they were, that B-W is suddenly a dangerous place to live. Each incident appears to be a one-off event, not part of a broader trend.
According to recent Portland Police Bureau statistics, while B-W had more crime than the nearby Alameda neighborhood, it had significantly less than several other adjacent neighborhoods (see chart below). From January 2023 through December 2023, there were 189 reported offenses of all kinds in B-W, including 10 assaults but no homicides.
A year earlier (January 2022 through December 2022), the total was 261 offenses, including one murder and 20 assaults.
Crimes in Adjacent Neighborhoods — Jan. 2023 through Dec. 2023
| Neighborhood | Reported Crimes |
|---|---|
| Alameda | 159 |
| Beaumont-Wilshire | 189 |
| Concordia | 765 |
| Cully | 1,015 |
| Grant Park | 222 |
| Hollywood | 475 |
| Rose City Park | 524 |
Source: Portland Police Bureau, Monthly Portland Neighborhood Offense Statistics.
Most of the crimes reported in B-W last year involved larcenies, motor vehicle thefts, burglary, and vandalism. From April 4, 2023, to Jan. 20, 2024, there were 19 arrests in the neighborhood, involving 19 unique individuals, police data indicate.
It’s clear from PPB data that Beaumont-Wilshire is not living through a major crime wave; we are living in an urban place, subject to some of the concerns that affect all of Portland and, of course, many neighborhoods in many places.
Nonetheless, as always, it pays to be careful, be watchful, and take reasonable precautions.
Chris Rauber and his wife, Kim Williams, moved to Portland and B-W in the summer of 2022 after many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked as a journalist at the S.F. Business Times and other publications. He was born in Oregon.