Name in the News: Susan Ballard

Susan Ballard never planned to be a police officer.

“It wasn’t even on my radar,” she said. “Matter of fact, when I was a kid I was always getting in trouble. I mean, you know, I was just kolohe … in the olden days, you ring the doorbell and run. Just kolohe things like that.”

Nothing that would have gotten her arrested, of course. The 33-year veteran of the Honolulu Police Department is now its first female chief; Thursday marked her first anniversary in the post. Putting things in order is the mandate now.

Ballard was born in Virginia and raised in North Carolina. She earned her master’s in health and physical education from Tennessee Technological University, and a bachelor’s in health and physical education from Appalachian State University.

Working in the P.E. and sports medicine fields took Ballard to California and then to Hawaii. In her early years here she worked in management for McDonald’s and made friends with officers she met playing racquetball at Central YWCA. Following their urgings, she took the police application test.

HPD called with the job offer while Ballard was in the throes of frustration with a supervisor, so she said yes. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Ballard found work in the various divisions of HPD to be satisfying. Now — even with the end of the turmoil of the past few years, when her predecessor stepped down amid criminal allegations — there are new challenges for police grappling with the effects of poverty, drugs and homelessness. Nevertheless, she said, she’s touched by the embrace of the community.

“They want us to succeed,” Ballard said. “The community is behind us and they support us. They’re just ready to put all that behind them.”

Question: One of your concerns when you first started was a staffing shortage. You want to talk about where you are with that, why it’s hard to fill the positions?

Answer: You know, it’s hiring all around — it’s not just the police department … obviously when the economy is good, it’s harder to get people. But one of the things that was happening, and it was hard for us to get people, is that before it took like almost a year from the time they apply to the time that they were given a position in recruit school. So most people aren’t going to wait a year to get a job …

What we’ve done is we’ve taken the process away from the city because they have so many other things to do. … We have initiated early online applications and we’ve consolidated some of the hiring, like doing the background checks and the interviewing, and things like that. So we’ve actually gotten it down to about six to seven months now, which is a huge improvement. …

Our class starting in December … instead of classes with about 20, which we’ve been getting, this class should be starting with about 50. …

So, I think speeding up the process, and the fact that I think before people were not joining because, you know, there was sort of like a dark cloud. Now that’s in the past and we’re moving forward. …

And we’re doing a lot more recruitment — we are even going out to (University of Hawaii). We have ads in the UH paper. We’re trying to hit the populations that wouldn’t even think about being a police officer because our job is so changed, in even the last five years.

Q: In what way, in particular?

A:We’re more into social services — I mean, with the homeless issues. People, if they can’t solve something, automatically they call 911, and it becomes a police issue. So officers now have to be psychologists, doctors, nurses, they have to be a specialist in DV (domestic violence). They have to know about mental illness, they have to know what social services are available.

They need to know how to talk to people who are upset and angry. … Before, you had to know a little bit about everything, but now you have to know a lot about even more stuff.

Q: Are you going to reach a point where it’s too much to expect of a police officer? How is the adjustment being made?

A: You’re right … they become a jack of all trades and a master of none. And we do need the generalist out there, you know, as the first responder.

Now what we’re doing is we’re trying to break away, like what we’re doing with HELP Honolulu — I affectionately call it my social services unit. …

We’re bringing in our crisis intervention teams, the training’s going to start in January. What happens is that the entire department over a two-year period of time is going to be trained in what we call mental health first aid.

Q:I had heard about the unit, but I thought it was to help the officers cope with their stresses.

A:We’ve done that, too. It’s resilience training. … It’s not just the officers, but our dispatchers as well as our civilian staff. Wellness, physical fitness, because we recognize that they have to take care of themselves too, mentally as well as physically.

But at the same time, … because of this issue with mental illness, homelessness and what-not, we got a grant — not a money grant, it’s a resource grant — so that people are coming in from the mainland, experts. So we’re going to train all the officers, they get eight hours of training on mental health first aid. That’s for the generalist officers.

And then another team of group is going to be trained as our crisis intervention team. … This team goes out to the homeless camps and where the homeless people are.

They still are going to enforce if they need to, but our primary goal is to try and get them the services they need or to try and get them into housing. And we’ve actually been pretty successful. …

Q: Is there a linkage between the recent shootings by officers and increasing homelessness and drugs on the streets?

A:There were a couple. But the majority of them are not. I mean, they are linked to drug use or gambling, or a mental illness. It just runs the gamut.

And, why such a spike? We’re seeing it, basically, as a society, there’s just less respect for authority. There’s less respect for the police officers out there.

If we go someplace and you point a gun at the officers, they’ve got to make a split-second decision. It’s not like they can go, “Oh, well, yeah, let’s see: Are they going to shoot me or not?” …

We just tell people when the officer asks you to do something, just do it. But there’s just a lack of respect in general.

Q: So, pulling a gun on a police officer, or a machete, I guess you’re seeing that kind of behavior out there?

A:That … and people when they’re in a stolen car, they run. I mean, that’s just common occurrence now. They take off, because what do they have to lose? …

Q: In one case, police used both a Taser and a gun. Is there any training so that the Taser is used more effectively instead of the gun?

A: You’ve got two officers, and one of them had their Taser drawn. But as soon as another officer, in the front, realized what was happening, based on their training and what they knew, this is when they pulled their gun instead of the Taser.

Because there are times that the Taser doesn’t work. A lot of times it’s because the officers are too close. And for the Taser, the probes actually have to be kind of far away from each other. …

For the electric gun, we’re actually going to be looking into a model that is now coming out that is more effective in close quarters. …

Q: How do you think the body camera project is working out?

A: I think it’s going very well. We’re actually starting to speed up the implementation. … We’re hoping that within the next year to year-and-a-half that we’ll have everybody in the police, all the patrol units as well as traffic, with the body cams. The big thing is just the officers getting used to it. …

I think it’s good for the officers as well as the public, because the public sees that there’s a camera on them, and a lot of times they think the camera’s only recording the officer. And it’s like, “No, it’s actually recording you, too.”

Q: Is it too soon to say whether it’s changing behavior of the police and the public?

A: Well, I don’t know about the public; I think for the officer, they are more cognizant of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. … But once they get into it, I think they’re going to be fine.