City cracking down on drug houses by utilizing civil law

The Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office is ramping up efforts to shut down drug houses around Oahu by using restraining orders to remove drug dealers from the properties.

For the past month, Mark Miyahira, deputy prosecutor, has been visiting every neighborhood board on the island, asking residents to call him if they are concerned about a drug house in their community.

"There are drug houses in all kinds of neighborhoods," he said. "Wherever there are people who are using drugs, there are always going to be drug houses supplying them. It’s not like everybody’s driving to Chinatown to buy their drugs."

Miyahira, the state Attorney General’s Office and the Honolulu Police Department did not immediately have information on the number of suspected drug houses on Oahu.

But Miyahira said drug houses bring a host of problems, such as noise, late-night activity, fights and theft.

"Drug houses are like a magnet for all of these people," he said. "They bring with them all of these crimes."

Miyahira said he was hired this year by the prosecutor’s office to go after drug dealers using a civil law that allows a court to kick out a person selling or making drugs so he can’t use the property as a front for business.

When the law was passed in 1996, legislators thought that places being used for drugs, prostitution or pornography were major factors in the decline of neighborhoods.

In a statement to the Star-Advertiser, Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro said nuisance-abatement laws empower communities and help them mobilize against drug dealers in their neighborhoods.

Miyahira said the civil law is a tool to be used along with criminal laws, which sometimes have limitations. In some criminal cases, police may enter a property with a search warrant and arrest people possessing drugs, but the primary people selling drugs might remain in the house and continue dealing.

Other times, the owner of the property might be too scared to confront the tenant and lose control of what’s happening at the house.

He gave one example of a successful eviction of a drug dealer from a house in Halawa Heights. People from the drug house were accused of trying to light a neighbor’s house on fire twice within two weeks, apparently in retaliation for the neighbor trying to help police curb the drug problem.

Miyahira, who was working with the state Attorney General’s Office at the time, said the office took legal action in 2005, targeting one individual, a family member of the property owner. Eventually the person was ordered off the property, and the family came down to change the locks.

"The problem never rose again," he said.