Hillsboro Police Department

The Hillsboro Police Department is the municipal law enforcement agency of the city of Hillsboro, Oregon, United States. It is a regionally accredited agency with 127 sworn officers on the force. As of June 2016, the chief is Lee Dobrowolski in a city of over 90,000 residents west of Portland, Oregon, in Washington County. With 169 employees as of 2014, the department is the second largest police force in the county and seventh largest in Oregon.HistoryThe Hillsboro Police Department grew to five employees in 1947, and expanded to 31 employees by 1976. In 1980, officer Gerald H. Erickson became the only officer in the department to die in the line of duty. The department hired Ron Louie as chief of police in 1992. The department had grown to 54 sworn officers in 1994.In 1995, Hillsboro police partnered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Intel Corporation to start the Oregon High-Tech Crime Team to investigate and prosecute computer based crimes. Intel donated $100,000 to the program. By 1999, the department had seven officers assigned to the team. In 2003, the unit was dissolved after 93 arrests and the recovery of $208 million, after private funding ended and a new FBI lab was opened.The department became the first police agency in Oregon to collect racial information from traffic stops in May 2000. The information was collected to train officers to not target minority groups. Hillsboro PD examines the data monthly to analyze any numbers that appear disproportionate to Census data. By 2001, the department offered increased pay for officers who could speak Spanish. In 2006, police chief Ron Louie and one other officer were appointed to a six-person, statewide task force to analyze racial profiling along with the American Civil Liberties Union’s top person in the state, and former Oregon Supreme Court justice Edwin J. Peterson.