HPD transparency, oversight lacking

When a police officer makes the split-second decision to fire on a suspect, usually to defend his own life or the lives of others, that officer is wielding the government’s ultimate authority — serving as judge, jury and executioner as a crime unfolds.

Some U.S. jurisdictions recognize that each time such a shooting occurs — even if the lethal force is justified — the very highest standards of investigative transparency and integrity must be met. Public trust in the criminal justice system is at stake.

Honolulu, unfortunately, is not among those jurisdictions. That’s got to change. It will take statutory changes — action by elected officials — to override the extreme secrecy that shields the Honolulu Police Department and to designate an independent agency to investigate shootings by police officers.

Those two elements — police transparency and outside oversight — are vital to ensure ongoing community trust in the police after an officer shoots someone. Such protocols best serve the police, too, by ensuring that department policies are followed, standards are met and misconduct is neither tolerated nor covered up.

In Colorado, for example, Denver’s district attorney and manager of safety separately review every officer-involved shooting and publicly report their findings. As the Denver DA’s website states: "Officer-involved shootings are not just another case. Confrontations between the police and citizens where physical force or deadly physical force is used are among the most important events with which we deal. They deserve special attention and handling at all levels. …"

In Georgia, an independent, statewide agency investigates shootings involving Atlanta police and officers from smaller departments throughout the state. This is done to ensure thorough, fair investigations that can spur improved training and protects police departments from the suspicion that strictly internal investigations invite. (The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also co-publishes an open-records guidebook for law officers that concludes that "law enforcement officers should remember that the general rule for open records compliance is one of public disclosure.")

There are many other examples throughout the United States that prove police can successfully carry out their duties while disclosing important information to the communities they are sworn to protect, not to mention the taxpayers who fund their work. This issue is of growing importance in Hawaii.

Honolulu police officers have fatally shot eight suspects in the past five years, two of them in the past two weeks: A drunken-driving suspect shot to death on a busy Waikiki street on July 30 and a suspected car thief shot to death in Pacific Palisades on Aug. 6. Police said both were shot because they endangered officers with their cars as they tried to flee. On July 24, a Honolulu police sergeant fired on a man driving a stolen car in Red Hill, but that suspect got away.

HPD’s protocol in such cases is wholly internal. Absent alleged misconduct, an officer involved in even a fatal shooting is debriefed by a department psychologist, placed on paid administrative leave for a maximum of three days, and faces criminal and administrative investigations conducted by the department.

The officers’ names are not released, and details of the internal investigations won’t be either, unless one results in an officer’s firing — unlikely in these recent fatalities given that police brass described the shootings as justified. The city prosecutor went to the scene of both fatal shootings, as is his practice, but the results of those investigations won’t automatically be made public either, serving mainly as a check on HPD’s work.

This simply isn’t good enough.

Other urban police departments manage to be more transparent and accountable as they uphold the law, sometimes violently so. HPD should, too. Amid the backdrop of competing conversations about an alarming militarization of American police departments and the real dangers community police face from heavily armed career criminals, let’s focus on the idea of police as peace officers who use deadly force as a last resort. Given the spate of Honolulu shootings, that conversation seems overdue.