HPD circumvents community efforts to gain crime data

Many of your neighbors want more useful information about crimes happening in their communities. Some have asked the city for the information multiple times since 2014.

But the Honolulu Police Department largely has ignored the requests.

The contentious issue of how much crime information HPD shares with the residents it serves escalated last week in the wake of a Honolulu Star-Advertiser story revealing that the department excludes violent offenses from its public crime mapping site online.

HPD was the only department among more than 150 that the newspaper checked nationally to limit its mapping to nonviolent crimes. The other agencies included violent and nonviolent offenses, allowing residents in cities from California to Florida to go online to see the range of crimes happening within 2 miles of their homes or businesses.

The issue received attention last week at a Honolulu Police Commission meeting and among neighborhood board members critical of HPD’s practice.

The department limits the information not just on the public mapping site. In monthly presentations to neighborhood boards, HPD excludes violent crimes from its statistics reports, focusing largely on property crimes, including thefts, burglaries and vandalism.

“You gotta figure people are a lot more concerned about crimes which threaten their safety as opposed to property crimes,” Dale Kobayashi, chairman of the Manoa Neighborhood Board, wrote in an email to the Star-Advertiser. “It makes no sense at all for HPD to exclude the most important crimes from the site.”

Crowding the map

When commission member Loretta Sheehan inquired at last week’s commission meeting about any downside to posting all crimes, HPD Assistant Chief William Axt told the panel that one drawback is the map would be difficult to see if too many crimes are included.

But the ability of users to limit to as little as one day the time period for which crimes are displayed and to zoom in on specific neighborhoods would largely make moot the concern Axt raised.

“Their reasoning of making the map look too busy is ridiculous,” Kobayashi wrote. “Not a problem for the other 150 departments around the country.”

Members from multiple boards around Oahu told the Star-Advertiser that HPD has become more stingy with information since the beginning of 2014, when the department switched to a new system for reporting crime data to boards. The information became more generic and less useful for spotting trends in particular neighborhoods and still excluded violent offenses, they said.

The Makakilo/Kapolei/Honokai Hale, Downtown/Chinatown, Hawaii Kai and Koolauloa boards have been among those that have unsuccessfully sought to get police to report more comprehensive information.

“The monthly reports given at our board meetings are so generic we can’t even tell what communities are being hit with what crime!” said Verla Moore, chairwoman of the Koolauloa board, in an email. She described the reports as “useless” and said requests to return to the old system have been made to HPD “all to no avail.”

Makakilo board members who protested the reporting change were told at their May 2014 meeting by then-HPD Capt. Timothy Boswell that violent crime statistics would be included in upcoming reports to neighborhood boards and be made available on HPD’s website, according to the meeting minutes. The police hoped to make the changes within a month, the minutes said.

More than two years later, neither has happened.

Increasing secrecy

Alvin Au, chairman of the Downtown/Chinatown board, said in an email to the Star-Advertiser that the police have become more protective of information the past few years, and board members have become frustrated by the negative replies from HPD when questions are raised about the monthly reports.

“It seems that HPD comments are always coded, that their response is confidential and classified, and there is no need for the community to be part of the solution to improve the criminal activities in the area,” Au wrote.

Representatives from nearly a dozen boards told the Star-Advertiser that they would like HPD to start providing violent crime information on the mapping site and to the community panels.

“Bottom line is this information should be shared with the public,” said Natalie Iwasa, chairwoman of the Hawaii Kai board, stressing that she was speaking for herself, not the board. “When information like this is not provided, people may question what HPD is trying to hide.”

An HPD spokeswoman told the Star-Advertiser that the department has a positive working relationship with neighborhood boards, and at least one officer attends their meetings.

Among the reasons HPD launched its mapping service six years ago was to standardize responses to requests from boards and to enable their members to check current crime information without having to wait until the next meeting, according to the agency.

HPD has the ability to add violent crimes to its mapping site but intends to get community feedback before making any changes, Axt told the newspaper in an interview after last week’s commission meeting. Among the groups police want to talk to are the Hawaii Women’s Legislative Caucus, the visitor industry and neighborhood boards.

Victims’ rights

Besides the concern about obscuring the map, Axt said there are other reasons not to plot all categories of crime, such as to protect the rights of victims and to avoid hurting business. He said plotting the location of violent crimes, such as rapes, might discourage victims from making police reports, and plotting assaults could have the unintended consequence of hurting foot traffic at nearby businesses.

“We want to be transparent,” Axt said. “We want to provide the information to (the public) and have it available to them if they need it. We have nothing to gain by withholding any information.”

For sex assault and domestic violence crimes in particular, victim advocates have raised concerns about mapping information being too specific, potentially jeopardizing victims’ safety.

Other cities have attempted to work around that concern by limiting the location information to just the street name, rather than a particular block, such as the 1200 block, which is the common practice for plotting most crimes. The pin on the map is placed in the general area.

The Hawaii State Coalition Against Domestic Violence said its position on mapping violent crimes will depend on the type of information shared, including how the offenses are labeled and whether the times, dates and locations are too specific.

“While we understand that it is important for the public to have information about violent crime in their neighborhoods, as well as the need for communities to see the prevalence of criminal issues, safety of victims and survivors is always paramount,” Janelle Oishi, the group’s director of systems and communities, said in an email.

While critics of HPD’s practice described victim safety as a legitimate concern, they noted that other jurisdictions have been able to address that without keeping vital information from the public.

And they scoffed at the notion that violent crimes should not be mapped because of the potential for hurting foot traffic to nearby businesses. That concern puts the economic interests of businesses ahead of the safety interests of the public, they said.

“That’s just ludicrous,” said attorney Earle Partington, a frequent critic of HPD. “Any competent police agency should be mapping violent crime.”