Deschutes County: Among Oregon’s Most Frequent Users of Red Flag Law
- Editor's note: This article was first published on March 12, 2023.
- Deschutes County is among the Oregon counties that use the state's "red flag" law most often, according to Oregon Judicial Department figures compiled by The Bulletin in Bend.
- Washington County had 606,378 residents in 2022, according to the map's population column, nearly three times Deschutes County's 207,561.
Editor’s note: This article was first published on March 12, 2023. Its original text was lost when Focus Hillsboro rebuilt its website, so it was rewritten and re-checked against the primary sources linked below on Oct. 24, 2026.
Deschutes County is among the Oregon counties that use the state’s “red flag” law most often, according to Oregon Judicial Department figures compiled by The Bulletin in Bend. Judges granted 79 extreme risk protection orders in the county from 2018 through 2022, the Bulletin’s county map shows, second only to Washington County’s 91.
Washington County had 606,378 residents in 2022, according to the map’s population column, nearly three times Deschutes County’s 207,561. Multnomah County, the largest at 810,242, recorded 64 orders. The map’s county rows add up to 508 granted orders statewide over the five years (our calculation), in line with the “500-plus” granted orders The Bulletin reported on March 12.
What a red flag order does
Oregon’s version is called an extreme risk protection order, created by the Legislature in 2017. Under ORS 166.527, a law enforcement officer or a family or household member may ask a court for one. ORS 166.525 defines that group as a spouse, intimate partner, parent, child or sibling, or anyone living in the same household.
A judge must hear and decide the petition the same day it is submitted or the next judicial business day. The order issues only if the judge finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that the person “presents a risk in the near future” of suicide or of injuring another person. The findings may not include a mental health diagnosis.
The order is not limited to guns. It bars the person from owning, possessing, buying or receiving any deadly weapon, and ORS 166.537 requires the person to surrender those weapons, and any concealed handgun license, within 24 hours to police, a gun dealer or an eligible third party.
The person may request a hearing within 30 days of being served, and it must be held within 21 days of the request. Without one, the order lasts one year from the date it was issued unless a court ends it sooner. Renewal requires another hearing under ORS 166.535.
Knowingly possessing a deadly weapon while bound by an order that has been confirmed, continued after a hearing or renewed is a Class A misdemeanor under ORS 166.543. So is filing a petition to harass someone or with information the petitioner knows is false.
How Deschutes compares
The Bulletin’s map lists the Oregon Judicial Department as its source and breaks down granted orders by county and year. Deschutes County had one order in 2018, then 16, 19 and 25 in the next three years, the most of any county in 2021. In 2022 it tied Washington County at 18.
| County | Orders granted, 2018–2022 | Yearly average per 100,000 residents |
|---|---|---|
| Washington | 91 | 3.00 |
| Deschutes | 79 | 7.61 |
| Multnomah | 64 | 1.58 |
| Clackamas | 59 | 2.74 |
| Josephine | 40 | 9.02 |
Measured per resident, Deschutes ranked fourth statewide on the map’s yearly average, behind Lake (14.55), Josephine (9.02) and Crook (7.64). Among the 10 counties on the map with at least 100,000 residents, Deschutes had the highest rate (our calculation, sorting the map’s population and rate columns).
The county started with few cases. A 2018 summary prepared by the Oregon Judicial Department counted 74 petitions statewide that year, two of them in Deschutes County. For January through August 2019, the next summary listed six Deschutes petitions, tied with Clackamas and behind Washington’s 17 and Multnomah’s nine.
Why local officers turned to the orders
The Bulletin reported that Jake Chandler, an investigator in the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office and a former Bend police officer, said the law took effect as his department’s Community Response Team was responding to two deaths. Once the team learned the orders were available, he told the paper, “our team really started pushing that.”
The same story, citing judicial department data, said most granted orders in Oregon included concerns about a person’s risk of suicide. It also said about 20% of petitions had been denied since 2018, most often because a judge did not find clear and convincing evidence of risk or because the person did not have access to a weapon.
Update, Oct. 24, 2026
In written testimony to the Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee dated March 5, 2024, Chandler said Deschutes County filed 43 extreme risk protection orders in 2023, more than any other county, with Multnomah next at 21, citing the Oregon Judicial Department. Those are filings, not granted orders.
Statewide, an OHSU-PSU School of Public Health fact sheet updated in May 2026 counts 1,039 petitions from 2018 through 2024, of which 813 (78%) were granted at the initial hearing.
Top image: File photo, 2007: the Deschutes County Courthouse in Bend. Photo: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).
