On January 29, 2010, a Portland Police Bureau sniper named Ron Frashour shot and killed Aaron Campbell.
The day before Campbell was murdered, his brother, Timothy Douglass, died of renal failure in a Portland hospital. Overwhelmed by grief, Aaron Campbell began drinking. By the next day, he’d frightened his family with talk of harming himself so much that Campbell’s kids’ grandmother called 911 to ask that someone check on him. At that time, there was no city-managed alternative response program, and the county’s Project Respond was not — and today is still not — dispatched by 911.
As routinely they do, the 911 call-taker asked the grandmother if there was a gun in the house. She said yes, and added that the legal handgun was in a sock, in a box, in the closet, in the bedroom.
Police arrived at Campbell’s apartment en masse. They cleared out the surrounding apartments before contacting him. They staged in the parking lot and street. They brought a sergeant with a radio to supervise and a sniper with a rifle to shoot Campbell.
Negotiators sent Campbell a text to tell him to come out. First, Campbell sent the three children out of the house. At a safe distance, Frashour removed his earpiece — his connection to his supervisor. Then Campbell, still intoxicated but at the direction of police negotiators, came down the outside stairs willingly, hands above his head. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, an officer shot him with a “less lethal” weapon, causing Campbell to suddenly twist. Frashour took that movement as reason to shoot and kill Campbell.
Campbell had not committed a crime. He was not suspected of committing a crime. His family wanted him to get help. What he got was killed.
The Multnomah County District Attorney did not file charges. Police Chief Mike Reese fired Frashour in November 2010, but a neutral labor arbitrator from the Employment Relations Board — later affirmed by a state court — concluded that Frashour did not violate the city’s use-of-force policies. Frashour was rehired. No discipline was taken by the police bureau or the city administration. The city did not change its use-of-force policies. The state issued a critical ruling but allowed Frashour to keep his certification. Frashour stayed on paid leave of absence until 2016: five years. He remains a Portland police officer today.
A week later, members of the Albina Ministerial Alliance joined together to hold a memorial service for the two brothers at Maranatha Church. It was Feb. 7 and the pastor was T. Allen Bethel, chairman of the Albina Ministerial Alliance. As I remember, the ministry invited both Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to speak at the memorial. Sharpton had a prior commitment, but Jackson was willing to come out on short notice — if he could get good tickets to watch the Blazers versus the Chicago Bulls game that evening. Tickets were secured and Jackson was on his way.
People started arriving two hours before the memorial would begin. Notably Dan Saltzman, at that time a city commissioner and police commissioner, was in a front pew, alone, head bowed. Hundreds of congregants, neighbors and family, police watchdogs and just general Portland people filled the pews — probably most of whom had never been inside Maranatha before.
In an empty Maranatha classroom behind the chapel, the ministry gathered together and with Jackson. The ministry prayed a bit and sang a bit, and then Jackson stepped up for a pep talk.
It’s important to remember who Jesse Jackson was at the moment. It was Jackson on the balcony in Memphis when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. It was Jackson marching in the streets in a hundred cities with tens of thousands of people — for labor, for civil rights, for better schools, for human rights. Jackson had been in Portland before, notably during his 1988 presidential campaign, when he spoke to a raucous crowd at the Portland State University basketball gym. He was a man of faith, of determination, greatly respected, with charisma and personal charm, but also a skillful and fearless negotiator.
Surrounded by attentive Portland ministry, Jackson spoke, quiet and direct. He said he’d travelled the country for years meeting people in trouble in many cities. And in many cities there were issues where city leaders had failed to make progress and where the advocates had given up. In Chicago, the Fire Department was immovable — they would not hire Black men to be firefighters, and advocates had withdrawn from the fight. They’d given up. In Washington D.C., the public schools were terrible and caused whites to flee to the suburbs, making things worse. No one believed the D.C. schools could be made better. In Baltimore, drugs and gangs ran the town and parents despaired. In Los Angeles, homelessness was skyrocketing, systemic and thought of as unfixable. In these cities people — leaders, advocates, those with strong voices — had given up. And when they gave up, those problems would not be solved.
In Portland, Jackson said, “I see a bright light.” In Portland, he said, people haven’t given up. There’s nothing wrong about Portland which can’t be fixed — and that is the wealth of the city. People are moving to Portland, in part because the city hasn’t conceded to the blights which attach to other cities, and where advocates — by which Jackson meant ministry — had given up the fight. People come to this city — to Portland — because they believe that here in this city bad things can be made right, because here hard problems can be corrected, because in Portland people can walk on an illuminated path to justice.
It was a short talk, but the message was clear. It is the business of the ministry to explain how bad things can be changed, how hard problems can be made right, and to shine a bright light on the path to justice. It is the business of the ministry — Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim, and all the configurations of we who fight for racial and social justice — to keep hope alive.
Later, in the chapel with hundreds of friends and strangers, we all helped the family of Aaron Campbell and Timothy Douglass put their sons to rest, to remember them in their best days, and to have faith that there would be change that would protect a future Aaron Campbell, and his family, from murder and impunity at the hands of the police.
Soon after the service at Maranatha, members of the Albina Ministerial Alliance wrote a letter to Representative Earl Blumenauer and Senator Ron Wyden, asking them to request an investigation of the Portland Police Bureau for violations of the civil rights of people the police had harmed and killed. Commissioner Dan Saltzman concurred — an investigation of his police bureau was warranted. A year later, the investigation concluded with a written finding from the U.S. Department of Justice that the Portland Police Bureau had indeed engaged in a pattern and practice of harming people with mental illness — and, perhaps as in Campbell’s case, those perceived to have mental illness. The city conceded that the police bureau was at fault and entered into a settlement agreement in 2013, even creating an additional tax on corporate landlines to pay for it.
The Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform was established and accepted by the federal court as an “enhanced” amicus — Latin for “a friend of the court” — to the case, ably led by the late Pastor T. Allen Bethel, along with Reverend LeRoy Haynes and Reverend Mark Knutsen, and supported by a legal team led by Ashlee Albies. For the last dozen years, inspired by faith and delivering hope, the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform has represented in federal court the interests of the citizens of Portland — of Black and brown men, women and children — and of people whose constitutional rights have been violated by the Portland police.
Here is the message: We make miracles happen. We do it with hard work — through organizing and compromise, with honesty, passion and integrity. But when we begin the work of grinding out a miracle, the outcome — the result — seems impossible, irrational, maybe illegal and almost always inconvenient. It takes an act of faith to push past the facts and press on toward what is right and just. And that work — that making and sharing of faith — is spiritual work. It is important work. And it was the work of Jesse Jackson.
This article appears in February 25, 2026.