HPD chief should step aside, for now

A retired police officer’s guilty plea to federal conspiracy charges in a court case connected to Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha underscores the need for the city’s top cop to step aside until the matter is fully resolved.

The longer Kealoha remains on the job, the more the department’s integrity suffers, with questions swirling about HPD involvement in an alleged effort to frame Gerard Puana, uncle of Kealoha’s wife, Katherine, for the theft of a mailbox from the couple’s Kahala home.

It’s also time for the Honolulu Police Commission — the citizen panel tasked to investigate anything that seems amiss at HPD, and can hire or fire a police chief — to take a hard look at the case, which it has previously declined to thoroughly probe.

Police Commission members Loretta Sheehan and Steven Levinson were in the U.S. District courtroom on Friday when former criminal intelligence unit technician Niall Silva pleaded guilty to falsifying documents and altering evidence, lending support to the assertion by Puana that he was framed for the theft of the mailbox in June 2013.

After the hearing, Sheehan told news reporters she intends to provide the charging information against Silva and his plea agreement to the commission and ask Chairman Max Sword for an emergency meeting to discuss the panel’s next steps. Haste is in order as more police officer indictments are a clear possibility.

According to the criminal complaint brought by a San Diego-based special attorney for the U.S. attorney general, Silva did not act alone. While no co-conspirator is named in documents, one says “co-conspirator No. 1” falsely reported the theft of a mailbox in front of the residence. In order to “conceal and alter evidence of the alleged theft,” co-conspirator No. 2, a police officer, retrieved the hard drive from the residence’s security camera before the theft was reported.

Also, the complaint said co-conspirators wrote false and misleading police reports and that one of them falsely identified Puana as the person taking the mailbox based on a partial hard drive recording of the security system.

Puana has alleged the theft case against him took shape three months after he filed suit against Katherine Kealoha regarding her handling of his mother’s assets. Although the case is tied to a family squabble and Chief Kealoha has not been officially tagged with any wrongdoing, the documents surfacing through the ongoing U.S. Department of Justice corruption investigation, are sounding alarms about police department leadership.

On Wednesday, Puana filed another civil lawsuit against Katherine Kealoha, the chief and five other police officers, contending that he was wrongfully arrested and denied his constitutional rights in two criminal cases, in 2011 and 2013. It also alleges that his niece abused her position as deputy prosecutor to keep Puana incarcerated for 72 days.

First Assistant Federal Defender Alexander Silvert, who is representing Puana in the mailbox case, described Silva’s guilty plea as a vindication for Puana.

During a TV news interview last week, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell, who had previously refrained from weighing in on the matter, said Chief Kealoha needs to speak out publicly to defend his name. That has not happened. And so the Police Commission should now meet with the police chief to assess how to move forward.

While the chief has not been singled out in the investigation, he is involved in the supervision of officers who are identified as co-conspirators accused of misconduct. Plus, of course, the case is a tangled family dispute and a certain distraction to HPD operations.

For the sake of public confidence in the police department, it’s time for a change in leadership in the chief’s post, at least until the family-related investigations and serious links to officer misconduct are put to rest.