Of course, disgraced former police chief Louis Kealoha and his wife, who were convicted on federal conspiracy and obstruction charges, have no one except themselves to blame for crashing from crime fighters to convicts.

While much has been said about Katherine Kealoha’s part, the police chief should not be forgotten.

Questionable cops with sketchy ethics and a sliding scale of what is right and wrong are not new, and Honolulu has seen the results.

Perhaps the most amazing case I found was that of Honolulu Police Chief William Gabrielson, who presided over the local police during World War II. Even before the war Gabrielson was someone who saw ethics as “situational” at best.

John Jardine, a 45-year veteran Honolulu police detective, in a 1968 20-part Honolulu Advertiser series edited by the late Honolulu Advertiser reporter Gene Hunter, told how Gabrielson handled a case of a young cop who had killed his wife.

Gabrielson first told investigators that it was a suicide, not murder, although eventually the young officer was indicted and convicted of murder.

Jardine and his police partner are credited with breaking the police scandals of the 1940s. Dirty cops taking money from wartime Honolulu’s gambling and prostitution rings were notorious. In Gabrielson’s case, one police officer went to prison, others were indicted for taking bribes and Gabrielson forced to resign. The chief was later indicted but not convicted. His punishment was irrelevancy. He worked for a bit as a deputy sheriff in Northern California and then as a clerk for a plumbing supply company and died in 1978.

So now, where does the HPD go from here? Honolulu’s new chief, Susan Ballard, appeared before the Honolulu Police Commission last week to discuss the Kealoha case and HPD’s future ethics.

Essentially she said the Kealoha disgrace is on the old HPD and the old police commission; both are changed.

“We have a completely new direction and we have a completely new command. I am certainly not Kealoha,” said Ballard, in a Hawaii Public Radio report.

The forces in charge at the time of Kealoha didn’t want to investigate or listen, Ballard said.

“When asked should we settle for $250,000 (HPD’s payment to Kealoha upon his retirement), we expressly said ‘no,’ and we were ignored,” she recalled.

“We said he should not be allowed to retire in good standing and the commission overrode us.”

Even when members of the department complained, Ballard said, it was not acted on.

“There were signs all along … we came forward on many, many different occasions: we went to the Ethics Commission and that was shut down, we wrote letters and they were ignored. I myself brought it up to my assistant chief and I was told basically to shut up,” Ballard said.

Even for a new chief like Ballard there is a worry that things may not change.

“What happens when you have these people (who are) allegedly unethical and making these bad decisions; it is going to happen again?” Ballard warned.

The solution?

“All I can say is that you make sure that you do everything the right way for the right reasons,” Ballard told the police commission.

I would have hoped she had included something about sunshine being the best disinfectant, because HPD needs to seriously open the windows and let the public know what it does. But Ballard’s remarks are a beginning.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.