By Diego Pajuelo
While PSU made headlines in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement when they claimed campus police were disarmed, this was never true. It is less true now that even partial concessions have been rolled back. Since 2023 the police have been fully re-armed.
In the midst of all this, the university still has a mural in the Smith building and a memorial on the street where Jason Washington was killed. In effect, they maintain symbols meant to give a sense of justice and remembrance to Jason Washington, but deny him any actual justice. Students at PSU are left in an oppressive setting, with 57% of BIPOC students saying they didn’t feel safe talking to campus police in a survey in 2020.
PSU Backstabs the Disarm Movement
In 2018, Jason Washington, a black man, veteran, USPS worker and community member at Portland State University was shot at 17 times (with 9 hitting him) by Portland State University campus police after trying to break up a fight.
In the aftermath of his death, a movement to disarm the campus police arose, with a great deal of support from the PSU Student Union (PSUSU), the Students United for Palestinian Equity and Return (SUPER), and from a number of professors working within the Disarm PSU coalition.
A number of demonstrations would be held between 2018 and 2020, including a non-violent occupation of the Campus Public Safety Office in 2018, and marches which blocked traffic. Despite the numerous demonstrations of significant public support, PSU never truly disarmed. However, due to the size and organization of the movement, PSU offered one major concession: campus police would start a few unarmed patrols.
Campus police, even during the unarmed patrols period, kept access to their guns, and the Disarm movement began to suffer loss of momentum. The year after, the PSU Student Union dissolved and SUPER dissolved in 2025. The Disarm coalition shifted focus toward PSU’s ties with the Boeing weapons manufacturer, but the group also became inactive by 2025.
More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement went into decline after 2020. The economy recovered and a new president was elected.
In Portland specifically the Black Lives Matter movement experienced setbacks, with the re-election of pro-cop mayor Ted Wheeler, and the defeat of a number of progressives on the city council.
Combined, the lack of organization, drop in momentum, and illusion of partial victory resulted in the Portland State University administration in 2023 choosing to completely drop the partial victory of “unarmed patrols” and bring back armed patrols.
The Youth Wing of the Socialist Party
In academic year 2025-26, a number of students started building a YDSA chapter at PSU. Much of our membership comes from a place of fighting against the dictatorship of the capitalists, the oppression of LGBTQ+ people, and the brutality of racist police. Like the rest of DSA, we align ourselves with the Workers Deserve More program adopted by the organization in 2024, and while not everyone in YDSA is necessarily a worker in a classical sense, we all align ourselves with a working-class program: fighting for union power, college for all, and most importantly in this case, against mass incarceration and police brutality.
During the Winter term we set the priority of disarming campus police. Such a task is crucial in our fight for a worker-run society. In the history of the United States, the police have played the role mainly as strike-breakers and scabs, with the most notable example in recent history being the NYPD breaking up the picket line of the Amazon Labor Union strike in December of 2024.
They have also historically played a role enforcing an order of white supremacy, not just during the era of Jim Crow, when segregationist and white supremacy were more open in the law, but also during the modern day, by utilizing the war on drugs as a cover. For many, and especially Black communities, the police are known not as peace-keepers, but as weapons of mass destruction. They keep communities impoverished through the mass imprisonment of Black people, making it harder later in life to find jobs, and through economic exploitation of incarcerated and enslaved workers.
At PSU, the campus police are subservient to a completely unaccountable oligarchy: the Board of Trustees and the President. They serve to protect not students, but the PSU administration from any sort of agitators. Campus police are often hired from the regular police, and they carry with them the norms of structural racism, and enforce it here at PSU. To many at PSU, the murder of Jason Washington remains a reminder that we are not exempt from the racism which plagues the entire country, and which forces Black people into the most exploited sections of the working-class.
Our Demands
As a first step, we call on students at PSU to join us in petitioning to PSU to completely disarm campus police, including so-called “less-than-lethal” weapons. We also demand within the petition for all future decisions regarding the armament and funding of campus police to be subject to a vote by the students, professors and staff at PSU. No decisions on the campus police should be made unilaterally by the President, Board of Trustees, or whatever force acts without the consultation and consent of students.
The petition is itself only a first step, as we know it may not change the opinions of the administration. Furthermore, the administration has an active interest in keeping its own police force, not to protect students but to protect their own interests, to ensure that students fall in line with their rule rather than take any substantial moves to change.
While we acknowledge limits to this petition, we do not abandon the fight to disarm PSU, but instead fight further on it, and actively organize students and student workers to fight for a program of working-class liberation. We call on those students, who seek action further than a petition, to join PSU-YDSA, and fight for an anti-racist society for the working class.