More than 30 apply to be the next police chief

More than 30 qualified candidates have applied to become the Honolulu Police Department’s next chief, the Honolulu Police Commission said Wednesday.

Monday was the deadline to submit applications, but the commission is expecting to see a trickle of additional entries arrive via mail — with a postmark no later than Monday, in the coming days, commission Executive Director Dan Lawrence told the six members present.

So far, about 25 applications have been vetted and determined by the Department of Human Resources to meet minimum qualifications, Lawrence said. About another 10 applications have yet to be submitted to the department, commission Chairman Max Sword told reporters after the discussion.

Asked by commission Vice Chairwoman Cha Thompson how many of the applicants are from out of state, Lawrence declined to say.

Sword told reporters after the discussion that he couldn’t provide details about how many applications are from in-house or out of town because he had not seen them. The actual number of applicants received will be made public by early next week and the commission will give a few more details about the makeup of the pool of applicants then, he said.

“We’re not going to look at the list until all the candidates are there and in front of us, and we’ll know then,” he said.

The next step will be to hire a consultant who will organize and lead the next phase of the hiring process, Sword said. That person will work with a community advisory team to derive assessment tests for the applicants, including background checks and a psychological evaluation. After the testing is done, the community team and consultant will rank them in order of preference, he said.

The commission will then be given that information and make a final selection “around July,” Sword said.

Candidates’ names will not be released until there is a finalists’ list, he said, out of courtesy to those applicants currently with other jobs who may be left in precarious positions if their interest in the chief’s job were publicly disclosed.

Each of the seven commission members is being asked to submit the names of two people they would like to see on the advisory team. From that list, the commission members will at their next meeting vote for their top five candidates to be on the team, Sword said. The five with the most votes will then be on the team, assuming they can attend all meetings, he said.

The names of those on the advisory panel will not be disclosed publicly, he said, so neither applicants nor their supporters can lobby them. Sword clarified his initial statement with reporters afterward, and said the names of the advisory panelists will be made public after a chief is selected.

Personally, Sword said, he wants to see a chief who is willing and available to be out in public. “If somebody gets shot, you’d like to see the police chief talk about the issue,” he said. “Because then the community feels a lot safer when the chief is talking about it.”

As criticism against his administration — and its handling of a slew of indiscretions by police officers — increased during the latter part of his seven-year tenure, former Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha’s appearances at news conferences following major criminal incidents became noticeably less frequent.

Kealoha retired, effective March 1, after being notified in December that he is a target in a federal criminal investigation. The investigation was triggered by questions about HPD’s handling of the 2013 theft of the mailbox in front of the Kahala home where then-Chief Kealoha and his wife, Deputy City Prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, were residing. A grand jury has been meeting for more than a year on the matter.

In related news, the commission voted to OK an anonymous, electronic survey of HPD’s estimated 2,000 officers to determine their views on the department’s policies.