Oregon’s decriminalization law has transformed large parts of Portland’s downtown into an open-air drug market.
Officer Daniel DiMatteo is a 24-year police veteran—ten years with the Chicago P.D., then 14 years and counting with the Portland Police Bureau. He’s worked on gang crime and gun violence. And now, he spends much of his time trying to deal with Portland’s drug crisis.
On the day I met him, in March 2023, DiMatteo was patrolling a stretch of downtown around Washington Center, a decommissioned shopping mall that has become a hot spot for drug use. Not long afterward, cops swept the area after it saw 11 overdoses in one night. But on this day, it was full of people, many of them homeless, most using drugs in broad daylight.
