PORTLAND, Ore. — When people in high-profile positions move on, willingly or unwillingly, it gives the public a chance to evaluate their tenure in the position — looking not just at performance, but at progress. When it comes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Oregon chief, that covers a great deal of territory.
Kieran Ramsey came to Oregon from the East Coast, taking up residence as Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Portland field office in January 2021. That was just about three years ago. Now he's being promoted, taking him back to Washington, D.C.
Earlier this week, The Story's Pat Dooris sat down with Ramsey for a 30-minute discussion of the challenges that he encountered when he arrived in Oregon, plus the challenges that the state continues to face.
Portland's gun violence
"As I first got here, we had significant issues with gun and gang violence," Ramsey said. "The fact that we weren't all even talking about the same issue or in the same way was a huge concern and there was a lot of inability by 'Team Law Enforcement' writ large — not just the FBI — to do something about it."
After a rebrand of Portland's controversial Gang Enforcement Team in 2019 failed to shake the group's reputation, the city disbanded it amid rising pressure from racial justice protestors in 2020. That said, Portland soon produced two new groups focused on gun violence: the Focused Intervention Team and the Enhanced Community Safety Team.
"I think Portland police have made tremendous strides and they're doing, you know, the lion's share of the work at this point," Ramsey said. "But one of the first things we were able to get off the ground as I got here was the Metro Safe Streets Task Force, which was really the first comprehensive effort with federal, state and local authorities to come together and say, 'OK, we have a major gun violence issue here. A lot of it is driven by gang violence. What are we doing about it?' And that's come really a long way since we started."
Now, Ramsey said, homicides have fallen roughly 30%, and shootings are down about 30% as well. About 12% of shootings, he added, are related to gang activity.
"Those are numbers that we're seeing that are trending in the right direction," he continued. "Admittedly, it's no reason for celebratory slaps on the back and 'Hey, we did it' or anybody to take credit for anything yet. But the numbers are trending in the right direction, and it needs to continue."
Portland saw a dramatic rise in gun violence over 2021, but things do indeed seem to have plateaued, at least. According to Portland Police Bureau data, there were 413 shootings in 2019, rising to 919 in 2020, then peaking at 1,315 in 2021. They dropped slightly to 1,309 in 2022.
Numbers for this year haven't yet been finalized, but it's possible to look at the year in part. Between January and October, shooting incidents climbed from 2019 through 2022, but they fell 21% over the same period this year.
Homicides in Portland follow a similar path, moving up from 57 in 2020 to 88 in 2021, then up to 97 in 2022. There have been 77 homicides in Portland so far this year.
Ramsey took charge in Portland just as gun violence was spiking. That was also at the tail end of the pandemic, when cities around the country were having similar challenges. But Portland still stood out — Seattle, for example, had rising homicides through 2022, but the larger city actually had far fewer of them, 52 compared to Portland's 97.
Dooris asked Ramsey what made the difference in attacking the problem and beginning to turn things around. According to him, local political leaders were not supporting police.
"We needed the backing of elected officials at even the local level. And I think we've come really a long ways from where there were even issues of the inability for, let's say, the city to really have good (communications) and good collaboration with the FBI," Ramsey said. "That's gone away — I mean, I have great relationships with the city council, with the mayor. He's been to my office a number of times.
"I think everybody understands what the problem is and what we need to do about it ... and be it, you know, through Multnomah County DA's office or sheriff's office or Gresham or even our surrounding county partners and between ourselves and the ATF and others, everybody understands that this amount of gun violence (in) Portland, or for the Metro region, has to be stopped. It has to. It has to turn around. ... I'm hopeful we're on the right track."
Having been in Portland for 33 years, Dooris remembers the city as always having some sort of gang violence problem. So, he asked Ramsey, what makes the present problem any different?
"Well, back three years ago, people weren't even allowed to acknowledge that it was a gang violence issue, which was astounding to me — and I used the term 'gang' not as a prejudicial or pejorative term, and I understand that there are people in the community that feel it is a prejudicial and pejorative term, but it's written into federal law, and that's in fact what it was," Ramsey said. "I mean, we had plenty of folks telling us, 'No, this this is gang violence.'
"I think also when we took a step towards the community. There are a number of great organizations out there like Love is Stronger and March Against Murder and all these other organizations that were trying to do something from the grassroots level. And we actually stepped towards them and said, 'Hey, what do you think? What what can we do to partner with you? How can we help this situation, recognizing historically, perhaps, our office wasn't a partner with them?' And I think that's turned around tremendously at this point."
Top threats in the Pacific Northwest
Gun violence has primarily been an issue in Oregon's biggest city, but Ramsey has had a much larger-scale role as the FBI's top cop in Oregon. Some of the threats handled by the FBI are ones that the public may not be as aware of day-to-day.
So Dooris asked him about the top three threats in the region.
"Right off the top: cybercrime," Ramsey said. "It continues to plague the entire U.S. — it really plagues, globally, everybody. The fact is we have some very big, important companies here in the state of Oregon. They are being targeted every day, and we have a lot of public sector entities that are being targeted — and then we have everybody else. And when we think about things like ransomware, that continues to hit us here in Oregon and how busy our cyber team is here ... it's really something that is not going away anytime soon and is going to continue to really take up a lot of bandwidth and really require a lot of expertise so that we're effectively combating it ... not just in Oregon, but around the entire country."
Many Oregonians have experienced the fallout this year of massive data breaches, some involving public agencies. Dooris is one of the millions who had to change his Xfinity password after the company announced this week that hackers accessed the personal information of as many as 36 million customers.
The second major threat, Ramsey said, is one that's more likely to come from within.
"You know, I use the term domestic terrorism, but I understand that's a very weighty term," Ramsey began. "But that anti-government, anti-authority violent extremist ... We can go back to the summer of 2020 and remember what we saw there — and I'm not talking about the thousands of people that protested lawfully, that exercised their First Amendment-protected activities in a very lawful, legitimate way. I'm talking about those hundred or hundreds of people that sought to hijack that entire thing by looting, by committing arson, by assaulting police officers and continuing to do it today for whatever the flashpoint is ... they'll take whatever issue they can and then seek to destroy, seek to disrupt, seek to hurt people and businesses through serious, violent, criminal conduct."
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Dooris asked if this kind of domestic extremism is in any way unique to Oregon.
"I wouldn't say it's necessarily unique, but Oregon has pretty much every type of character," Ramsey said. "Within this umbrella, we have again on the one side, the anti-government, anti-authority violent extremist. On the other, we have this racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremists. So you can think of the extreme, extreme, extreme left and the extreme, extreme, extreme right — they're all here in Oregon, and unfortunately, we see activity by those two types all around the state, but certainly here in the metro area, and that is going to continue to concern us all.
"I think as we come into this 2024 election cycle, the concern that we all have — and I say 'Team Law Enforcement,' let alone the FBI — in terms of political violence, the threat of political violence is pretty significant when we just look at the rhetoric that we see out there, be it in the media or in social media, the rhetoric continues to get more specific and it continues to increase its calls for violence. That's concerning."
That ties into what Ramsey sees as the third major threat facing Oregon: hate crimes. He said that they are happening, but often do not get reported.
"The big problem, though, is we're just not seeing the reporting of them because we know so many people are intimidated or afraid or worried about coming forward to law enforcement," Ramsey said. "And that's something that we've worked on extensively. Even right now, as we sit here, we have an entire ad campaign running through PDX airport with billboards, as well as billboards down in the Eugene and Medford area ... We partner with the Oregon Department of Justice's bias hotline and our partners, again, across the state. But unfortunately, we know that under-reporting of hate crimes continues."
That under-reporting is a problem in that it can allow hate crimes to continue, perhaps even grow.
Ramsey said that he's enjoyed his time in Oregon, and when he retires in the not-so-distant future, he plans to return and settle down here. As far as who will replace him as the FBI's top cop in Oregon, that has not yet been announced.