Events & Campaigns

At PSU, the University has an operation of Campus Public Safety Officers (CPSO), who for the most part act basically as PSU's special police, with the authority to patrol, make arrests, and even shoot people.

While PSU likes to proclaim its diversity as a great value within the city of Portland, the reality is that PSU makes the campus hostile to students of color and queer students by taking state violence and implementing it in our university.

In aftermath of the death of Jason Washington, a Black man killed by campus police, a mass movement was sparked at PSU to disarm the campus police. Later during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, energy was renewed in the effort to disarm the campus police.

Despite the massive, non-violent protests of students at PSU, the campus police were never disarmed. PSU implemented "unarmed patrols" but still allowed police to carry "less-than-lethal" weapons and some access to guns.

In 2023, after the Disarm movement had died down and the University felt there was little to worry about in the way of students protesting their actions, the University ended unarmed patrols and brought back armed patrols.

While police walk around carrying guns, the memorial of Jason Washington's place of death and the mural of him in SMSU are still up. Hypocrisy at PSU could not be clearer. PSU acts in the interests not of the workers who may face intimidation from the police, not of the students who may face racial discrimination, but the big business owners on the Board of Trustees who feel students must fall in line.

We acknowledge that the police are utilized not as a genuine tool of keeping people safe, but as a tool to repress working people who demand change, and a force of racial oppression which keeps workers segregated and pushes people of color into the most oppressed sectors of the working-class.

We align ourselves with Portland DSA's Workers Deserve More program, which advocates for a fight against police brutality and the demilitarization of police. We at PSU-YDSA also demand that all future decisions on changes regarding the practice of policing be subject to a vote by students, staff, and faculty at PSU.

Written by YDSA Vice Chair Diego Pajuelo