Honolulu police chief says department doesn’t need reforms despite recent spike in fatal shootings by officers

Despite the long list of changes in the works to comply with a presidential executive order and the anticipated passage by the state Legislature of police reform bills, Police Chief Susan Ballard said she doesn’t think those measures are necessary at the Honolulu Police Department.

Calls for police reform are “a knee-jerk reaction for things that are going on on the mainland,” Ballard told the Honolulu Police Commission on June 17. “We’re not perfect, but when we realize our mistakes we’re going to take action … . The nation is behind, but can you at least leave the 50th State alone? We’re kind of doing OK here.”

Ballard condemned the deadly knee-to-neck assault of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25 that stretched over 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Bystander videos showing Floyd’s agonizing death sparked worldwide protests and calls for deeper scrutiny of policing tactics.

But the chief has consistently defended HPD officers who in 2018 and 2019 shot 20 people, killing 10.

Those fatal shootings came in clusters and fast — some weeks, days, even hours apart.

HPD sent seven of the cases to the Law Enforcement Officer Independent Review Board, an HPD spokeswoman said.

Still, Ballard is not in favor of measures such as requiring the naming of officers suspended or terminated for misdeeds.

“We are different,” Ballard told the Police Commission. “I mean, OK, you had a spike in officer-involved shootings. We had eight in a year. I mean what are we comparing this to? I mean, yeah, it’s fine for Honolulu, but in general for any other major police department that’s nothing.”

While Ballard might argue HPD had relatively few fatal shootings compared to mainland cities, Honolulu generally has a “remarkably low violent crime rate” compared to the rest of the country, said Paul Perrone, the state Department of Attorney General’s chief of research and statistics.

In 2018, 24 murders were committed on Oahu and in 2019 there were 28 — roughly 2.4 to 2.8 murders per 100,000 people in Honolulu, according to the AG’s statistics.

Yet in 2018 and 2019, Honolulu saw a disturbing jump in law enforcement shootings. Police officers shot 12 people and killed six in 2018. In 2019, police shot eight, with four fatalities. Two other people were killed by public safety officers, one by a state prison guard and the other by a state deputy sheriff.

“A lot of shootings here would have risen to the level of protests (on the mainland),” said Ken Lawson, a University of Hawaii law professor. “Here, people get upset for a day or two.”

In March 2019, a couple dozen human rights activists and academics marched in front of HPD headquarters in protest of the numerous shootings they saw as unjustifiable.

Under investigation

Whether the law enforcement shootings on Oahu were justifiable is unknown since police have not provided any results from investigations into those cases.

After repeated requests from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser over a year and eight months, HPD earlier this month provided the results of the investigation into the Oct. 7, 2018, fatal police shooting of a 39-year-old mentally ill homeless man on the grounds of the state Department of Health.

Ballard granted the Star-Advertiser and other news media 10-minute interviews on June 12 to ask and answer questions on police reform in the wake of the George Floyd case. During the interview, she defended the 2018 police shooting, and an HPD spokeswoman said she had just learned that day the report on the case was releasable.

According to the report, sheriff’s deputies called HPD after talking to Tison Dinney for 20 to 30 minutes after he allegedly threatened a man with a machete. The fatal shooting was the first to be captured by HPD body-camera footage, which showed Dinney cornered between a wall and the side of a large utility box, with garden shears at his feet. He appeared to be posing no imminent threat.

Once on scene, police officers rushed Dinney from behind rather than confronting him directly and informing him he was being arrested. Eight minutes after the officers arrived, Dinney was dead.

Before he was shot, Dinney asked the HPD officers why they were chasing him and trying to trick him.

The footage showed officers telling him they weren’t chasing or tricking him, but just wanted to talk to him and asked him to come over. One of the officers is heard telling another to keep Dinney talking while three officers lined up to rush him from behind.

As soon as the officers came up from behind, Dinney is seen picking up the pair of garden shears. One officer jumped out of the way, while a second with handgun drawn fired five shots that hit Dinney. A third officer behind him fired a Taser at about the same time.

Ballard defended the police shooting, saying Dinney swung the garden shears at the first officer, who was uninjured.

“We didn’t force anybody’s hand,” she said. “We have to plan for the fact that he’s probably not going to give up … . He made that choice to pick up the garden shears of his own free will … . He was given plenty of chances to give up. He refused. He’s mentally ill.”

HPD told the Star-Advertiser it would provide a redacted police report on the shooting at a cost of $260, without the findings of the internal affairs investigation and with the officers’ names blacked out. The report has been sent to the state Department of the Attorney General for review, but the results are unknown, HPD said.

Calls to the AG’s office were not immediately returned.

Reforms underway

As part of recent reforms, HPD began a pilot program with social workers riding along with officers to calls involving people who are mentally ill.

Dinney’s shooting death calls into question whether the homeless and mentally ill, as well as certain ethnicities in Hawaii — where Blacks make up just 2% of the population and where other minorities such as Micronesians face prejudice and discrimination — are treated equally and receive justice.

“We don’t have the same type of problems we see on the mainland,” Lawson said. “We have problems with shootings. A lot of them could be prevented with better training. Not being transparent leaves more skepticism to what’s going on.

“Everybody should be wearing body cams,” he said. “It protects officers from false allegations, so why not have them on?”

While Dinney’s shooting was the first captured by body-worn cameras and came two months after the August 2018 rollout of the cameras to some patrol officers, nearly two years later not all patrol and traffic officers have them.

Ballard said the department may consider outfitting officers in its Crime Reduction Unit with body-worn cameras once all patrol and traffic officers get them. CRU officers, who are often undercover and in plainclothes, assist patrol officers and detectives on calls.

On Feb. 20, 2019, CRU officers at a Mililani Walmart chased down a shoplifter who tried to flee in a pickup truck. They shot and killed him and critically injured two passengers.

Ballard told the commission that CRU officers will receive formal training in de-escalation of force.

“Right now they basically carry a gun,” she said. “It goes from touch to ‘bang’ and no options in between.”

Police officers will soon be issued less-than-lethal options and other officers also will receive annual de-escalation training.

Push for transparency

Ballard said the department will continue to provide as much information as possible following police shootings “if it doesn’t affect the investigation.”

“When we do these press conferences, it’s based on the information we know at the time. If there’s something questionable at the time, we’ll say we’ll take a look at that. It’s not defending the officer.”

“We’ll continue like we have been,” Ballard said. “It’s going to be on a case-by-case basis. If we can, we will release it (body-cam videos) if it doesn’t affect the investigation. I think we’ve done a pretty good job with officer-involved shootings and we’ll continue down that path.”

HPD’s selective release of body-cam footage has left questions in at least one recent case.

In December, Ballard told the media that a moped rider with a knife lunged at a police officer at Campbell Industrial Park. But the released footage shows Dana Brown, 27, trying to restart the moped to flee as the officer clearly fires his weapon — no lunging or any knife were visible on the footage.

“A kid is dead,” Lawson said. “What was the training? The kid was going to keep riding a moped. Why do you shoot somebody just because they’re trying to get away?”

He said the Brown shooting is similar to the June 13 police shooting in Atlanta of Rayshard Brooks, 27, a Black man who had been sleeping in his car at a Wendy’s drive-thru. Prosecutors said Brooks was not a deadly threat when he fled after taking a Taser and fired at police. Two Atlanta police officers have been charged in the case, one with felony murder.

Lawson is a former Cincinnati attorney who won a class-action lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati seeking transparency and the ability to obtain police records. The lawsuit resulted in a federal consent decree and led to major police reforms, including having an independent civilian review panel on police misconduct that had the authority to subpoena officers.

“It’s a good time to go back and review what are procedures and policies,” he said in regard to HPD. “Why can’t we look at disciplinary records?

“It would become very apparent that this police department needs to get some uniformity in training and responding to certain situations when it comes to use of force, when it comes to killings,” Lawson said.

Ballard said whenever officers face discipline, there is a grievance procedure. It must first be reviewed by the Law Enforcement Officer Independent Review Board within the AG’s office and then goes to the city prosecutor’s office for review.

The independent board was created in 2017 to review and evaluate the fairness of criminal investigations conducted by law enforcement agencies of officer-involved deaths. The board also determines whether criminal prosecution or further investigation is warranted.

“There’s a lot of different layers that goes into an officer-involved shooting. It’s not just we investigate and then we give out the report and we mete out discipline,” she said.