Memorial marker for Jason Washington unveiled near Portland State University

Five years after the shooting death of Jason Washington by Portland State University campus police, community members continue to call on PSU leadership for changes to public safety practices and more accountability.

Roughly 50 people attended an unveiling ceremony at PSU’s downtown campus Thursday evening for a plaque dedicated to Washington, a Black man who campus police shot and killed in 2018 while he tried to break up a fight at a bar near campus.

Attendees walked a few blocks from Montgomery Plaza on PSU’s campus to College Street where Washington was shot five years ago to the day on Thursday. There they laid flowers, sang songs and heard from speakers, including Washington’s widow, Michelle Washington.

“Thank you so much for continuing to show up for our family,” Michelle said. “It really means everything to us that there’s still this many people here after five years.”

Only a life-size replica of the plaque, which marks the location and details of Washington’s death, was unveiled Thursday, but members of PSU’s Jason Erik Washington Art Committee said the real plaque will be installed later this summer. Organizers said the plaque serves as an “accountability marker.”

“It marks this location as a new axis around which we recommit ourselves as a university to making sure that the lethal racial profiling that took Jason from us never happens again,” said Patricia Schechter, PSU professor and chair of the art committee.

PSU president Stephen Percy also spoke, thanking Washington’s family for their continued community involvement over the years.

“It is my greatest hope that these steps we take together today help us to begin to move forward with sincere remembrance,” Percy said. “We must remember and we must learn from Jason Washington’s life. We recognized early on that we could not let his tragic death be ignored or forgotten.”

Numerous calls for changes to public safety measures followed Washington’s death, coming from PSU students, employees, Washington’s family and other people in the wider community.

PSU announced that it would roll out unarmed campus security patrols in the fall of 2021, though some officers remained armed, with the approval of campus safety leadership.

Earlier this year, Willie Haliburton, chief of PSU’s campus safety office, made the policy change to let campus officers carry firearms at their own discretion during patrols. Multiple groups on campus expressed disappointment, including the university’s faculty union, as well as Disarm PSU — a group of campus community members that has been urging for the disarmament of campus officers for about a decade.

“I believe it is reasonable that as staff, my workplace do everything that it possibly can to prevent another tragic death,” said Katie Cagle, a member of Disarm PSU and a longtime university staff member. “And I hope you agree with me that that’s reasonable and it’s something we can go after.”

The university hasn’t significantly changed its policy around arming officers since then, according to PSU spokesperson Christina Williams. But there have been other efforts in the works to make campus safety procedures more transparent, Williams said.

The Campus Public Safety Office recently began posting a log of weekly incidents on its website. Williams said the office is also planning to hire someone to handle its communications, separate from the already-existing communications team at PSU. The university is also giving PSU’s Public Safety Oversight Committee more responsibilities around reviewing and approving policies.

Along with the installation of the plaque in the coming months, PSU president Percy said the Jason Erik Washington Art Committee is also selecting an artist to memorialize Washington further through an art installation on campus.