When HPD released the video of Tom Berg’s run-in with security officers at the APEC conference, it was like, Oh goody. This is gonna be fun! It’s always entertaining when elected officials are caught on tape behaving badly. But this wasn’t fun at all. It was hard to watch because Berg’s conduct was so shameful.
The video shows Berg behaving like a petulant minor celebrity, demanding that people be fired and shouting the word "Ma’am!" so many times and with such venom it starts to sound like profanity.
The video also shows the security team of Secret Service agents and Honolulu police officers being supernaturally patient and professional.
They just let Berg rant on and on, and though he escalated and tried his best to provoke them, they never lost their cool.
Maybe they should have. Somebody needs to tell this guy that he’s way out of line. Somebody needs to tell him that even though he is a Very Important Councilman in office less than a year, he still needs to follow rules.
Most troubling is that even after he sobered up, Berg still felt he was right. He apologized, rather perfunctorily, but then said, "I tried to defend what I thought was my ability to do something very simple … to retrieve my phone."
As anyone who has been through an airport in the last 10 years will tell you, if you forget something in a secure area, you can’t just go running back to grab it. Berg’s civil rights weren’t being abused and he wasn’t defending the rights of anyone else by screaming at security staffers who were doing their jobs to protect international heads of state.
And that is the bottom line of the whole sickening incident: He was berating, taunting, belittling people for doing their jobs. What about his job? He wasn’t elected to be the new town clown now that Rod Tam is off to his miniature prison sentence.
Even on the Honolulu City Council, there is an expectation of decorum, and though sometimes it is appropriate to fuss and fight and argue, you have to have more than that one setting.
But this is Berg’s pattern. He gets loud, won’t listen, disrupts the process and then claims he’s simply fighting for the people. No, he’s just fighting.
Clearly, he loves every minute of an extended rant.
Things started to go wrong for Berg that night because of his own mistake. In a similar situation, most of us would humbly, apologetically try to enlist the help of security officers. Instead, Berg clicked into his standard mode: abusive and unhinged. Perhaps he did get special treatment that night. Anyone else would probably, should probably, have been arrested.
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Reach Lee Cataluna at lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
