If downtown Portland is going to cease to be a showroom for the plywood industry and the overnight work of Kennedy Restoration, the city needs to change its response to the occasional protests and coincident property damage. The police force's nonviolent responses to two recent anti-Biden protests that turned into vandalism is encouraging (here are stories about the response on February 28 and March 11), as it resulted in a number of arrests for actual vandalism instead of the weaker charges of "interfering with an officer" that plagued the city's response to last year's anti-Trump riots. Still, there is room to improve. Isaac has a few modest suggestions.
Nearly everyone who is arrested at a riot is booked and released the same night. One person arrested on February 28 was released almost immediately because of Covid-19 restrictions at the jail. The jail is not in fact empty, despite Covid-19. If the county is willing to keep a few beds open at the jail, then at least a few of the persons arrested at riots could be held overnight or until the prosecutors can bring or drop charges, usually for constitutional reasons within 72 hours. The city's and county's current policies allow situations such as the one on March 11 in which a homeless man, newly arrived in Portland, was arrested by Portland police at 3:03 p.m. for causing damage at a bank office, booked into the jail at 4:00, released at 8:30, and then arrested at 10:45 p.m. by federal agents for slamming a scooter into a window of the federal courthouse.
The metric to apply is that the number of persons held overnight or through the weekend will be equal to, but not more than, the number of windows broken in a particular protest. If no windows are broken, then no one will be held overnight. (Actually, if no windows are broken, no one should be arrested for breaking windows, but that may be too logical to implement.)
I've come around to cautiously supporting the Portland police technique of waiting until protesters break windows, and then "kettling" and identifying those that are in the group that includes the culprits.
I came to this conclusion, still rather hesitantly, after reading the essay of Professor Daniel S. Nagin, entitled "Deterrence," that appeared in volume 4 of the report "Reforming Criminal Justice" in 2017. Professor Nagin used as his starting point the conclusion of Milanese criminologist Cesare Beccaria in 1764 that "one of the greatest curbs on crime is not the cruelty of punishments, but their infallibility. The certainty of punishment even if moderate will always make a stronger impression." Nagin's refinement of Beccaria's theory was to add that it is "the certainty of apprehension, not the severity of the ensuing consequences, that is the more effective deterrent." Lengthy prison sentences, he said, are an inefficient way to prevent crime; "crime-prevention policy should instead focus on bolstering the certainty of apprehension." Given the county's reluctance to prosecute crimes of minor vandalism, the most effective way to deter those crimes is to increase the certainty of apprehension, even if the only punishment is a weekend in the lockup.