New chief buoys hope for finer HPD

Honolulu can exhale a bit, in what may be a sigh of relief. But then residents must hope that the city’s police force takes a deep breath and moves in a new direction.

The Honolulu Police Department has been hobbled by a protracted series of accusations that just culminated in the indictment of the former police chief, Louis Kealoha, along with his wife and several other HPD officers.

A great deal more pain will be unleashed as that case moves forward — but at least another, more forward-looking narrative will be established on a parallel track. That, the city hopes, will be the story created by Maj. Susan Ballard, who on Thursday was selected as HPD’s first female police chief by the Honolulu Police Commission.

From all initial reports and based on the evidence of her leadership service to HPD, this appears to be a wise decision. Ballard knows the department well in her 32 years with the force. Most recently she has helmed the Central Receiving Division but also has led the Windward and Kalihi district patrol divisions, as well as the training and finance divisions.

That’s quite a lot of leadership experience, and she is going to need to draw on it. Ballard is charged with turning around a department that has been roiled by all the controversy, healing divisions that it has caused.

That would be no small feat, and there are sure to be hurdles to overcome. After all, the 60-year-old incoming chief may not have been at the top of the power elite whose course now needs correcting, but she has spent most of her working life within it and surely has some corrections to make herself.

HPD is by long practice a rather secretive agency as a whole, not just the covert operations that came under scrutiny during the Kealoha investigation.

Undercover operations of course must continue, but the department itself needs a wholesale change in that culture, being more forthcoming with information when things go wrong, as well as when there’s success.

It needs a re-evaluation of its transparency in disciplinary matters, and its accountability. The media often have raised this criticism, as representatives of the public; it’s the people who deserve to be kept in the loop.

There is reason to be optimistic, fortunately. Ballard has pledged to some key aspects of this public accountability. She has endorsed the utility of officers wearing body cameras, for example, which ought to provide needed documentation of what the officers see and hear — and what they do.

And she has committed to more aggressive investigations of cases involving wayward officers: This is certainly encouraging.

By and large, HPD has a history of “community policing,” in which law enforcement officers become well acquainted with the specific neighborhoods where they serve. Ballard rightly observed that HPD should reinforce that approach, starting with training that will “move away from the warrior mentality and more to the guardian mentality.”

There is another relationship that will require careful adjustment: the one between the police commission and the chief. The commissioners expressed enthusiasm for Ballard, as wholly expected.

But the panel also must maintain a professional distance. For too long, this was lacking in the panel’s chummy dynamic with Kealoha. The chief and the commission providing oversight share a mandate to protect the public; fulfilling that well can re-establish public trust.

Ballard is on a rising national trend line for women leading police departments. Female police chiefs in major cities have been on the increase in the past decade, the result of their years gaining experience and expertise.

Adding that perspective, one more element of diversity, can only help HPD effectively deliver the “integrity, respect, fairness” promise that’s stated on every police car.