After months of delays and two missed deadlines, Portland State University announced last week that its campus police force would patrol without firearms this fall — a move that could make the Oregon institution one of the first to disarm its patrol officers. University officials said they hoped Portland State could serve as a model for other campuses.
But what might seem like a victory for police-reform advocates has instead been called a “media stunt” by DisarmPSU, a coalition of students, faculty, and staff members that is calling for the complete disarmament of the campus safety office. The office, with about 15 police and public-safety officers, will still have guns on hand under the new policy. And that’s putting Black and brown lives at stake, activists say.
They’re not alone in their frustration: In the wake of a wave of protests against police brutality and anti-Black violence, colleges and universities across the country pledged to change, examine their histories, repay old debts. But institutional bureaucracy, among other things, has left many of the activists’ demands unfulfilled.
A DisarmPSU organizer, Katie Cagle, a staff member in the university’s School of Social Work and a Portland State alumna herself, said she did not trust that the disarmament would occur by September 1. Though she thinks the announcement was made with good intentions, she’s dismayed by bureaucratic delays.
“It’s a multistep process,” she said, “and these announcements were made with no plan in place for that to happen.”
This was not the first time the 25,000-student public research university, which spans 50 acres in downtown Portland, had publicized a plan to disarm the police patrol it created in 2014. In August of last year, following nationwide and campus protests against police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the chief of Portland State’s Campus Public Safety Office, Willie Halliburton, called for officers to carry “less-than-lethal devices,” such as Tasers, instead of potentially deadly weapons.
The proposal to disarm the police patrols reflected statements by Portland State’s president, Stephen Percy, that his first priority was racial justice. Since last summer, the university has formed five task forces to make racial-equity recommendations, hired seven scholars to its School of Gender, Race, and Nations, and convened a virtual summit, among other initiatives.
Yet the disarmament did not happen last fall. In October the university said in a statement that the process had been delayed, in part, by the resignations and retirements of three sworn officers and a legal review. In January, Halliburton said all officers would patrol without arms by the end of the school year. The university did not meet that timetable, either.
“We are unaware of any other police agency in the nation that has shifted from armed to unarmed patrols by sworn officers,” Percy and Halliburton wrote in the October statement to the university community. “Agencies across the country are contacting us, wanting to know how we are going about creating this new reality. The shift requires updating hundreds of policies and procedures.”
On Friday, Percy announced that those new policies had been created, reviewed by the University Public Safety Oversight Committee, and put in place. The oversight committee, appointed by the president, advises university officials on campus-safety issues.
A Test Case
Julie Caron, a Title IX coordinator and chair of the oversight committee, said the reaction from students had been largely favorable.
“There have been a few students who might be expressing concern regarding their safety of not having an armed [patrol], but really the campus community has been very positive with their response,” Caron said.
Yet members of DisarmPSU are far from satisfied. The organization is one of dozens of members of the Cops Off Campus Coalition, which, according to its website, is “an abolition network to get cops off campus and cops off the planet.”
The coalition was born from the racial-justice movement of last summer, when colleges across the country faced calls to disarm or abolish their police. Since then, the number of petitions, protests, strikes, sit-ins, and student-government resolutions has only grown.
For those pursuing reforms, Portland State could serve as a test case.
Disarmament is “one plank of a much more comprehensive abolitionist focus,” said Nick Mitchell, a professor in the departments of feminist studies and of critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and an organizer with Cops Off Campus.
He said the movement to abolish the campus police had not gained traction with the Santa Cruz administration, despite being popular among student organizations.
“While I think it’s a major win to get the PSU police [patrol] disarmed,” Mitchell said, “I think we as people who have been supporting DisarmPSU are going to be looking to activists on that campus to see … how policing on that campus continues in the face of disarmament.”
‘Never Say Never’
Calls to disarm the Portland State police began in 2014, when the force was created. It was one of the last urban universities in the country to form an armed police force, said Percy, the president.
The calls reached a fever pitch in June 2018, when campus police officers shot and killed Jason Washington, a Black man who witnesses said was trying to break up a fight at a bar.
“Those students who were leading that charge in 2014 predicted the death of Jason Washington” at the hands of the campus police, Cagle, the DisarmPSU organizer, said.
A grand jury declined to charge the two officers who had shot Washington after determining that they had acted in self-defense, the defense of a third person, or both. Last June the university committed to creating an art memorial and a scholarship to honor Washington, but neither has been set up yet, to the ire of activists.
“We want to do this in consultation with the family,” Percy told The Chronicle. “We have begun working on a process to consider the art installation. I want to start the scholarship. There’s questions about funding, but I have committed $25,000 right now, so we will be able to start the fund.”
In mid-2020, renewed attention to police brutality made the university’s administration rethink its public-safety protocols, Percy said.
“We became aware that many Bipoc members of our faculty, staff, and students felt uncomfortable with people in authority carrying weapons, and that created a less-safe climate,” Percy said, using an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Patrol disarmament was among the outcomes. Another was the creation of a “Reimagine Campus Safety Committee,” charged with making recommendations to Percy and the university’s Board of Trustees on safety and racial justice.
The ad hoc committee, which has student, staff, faculty, and community members, is slated to present a report to Percy this fall. The university has not ruled out the possibility of complete disarmament, Percy said.
“The Reimagine Safety Committee has been given full ability to consider any and all options,” he said. “Their report is not completed. I am not going to speak in hypotheticals about that, but never say never.”
Percy said that with disarmament, the university could create a new model for safety and security.
“My sincere hope,” he said, “is that we can come together as a campus community and feel safer and create a climate that is innovative.”
