Column: After troubling pattern of shootings by HPD officers, reform is necessary

Killing by police is a much larger problem in the United States than in other developed nations. Per capita, American police kill five times more people than their counterparts in Canada, 20 times more than police in Australia, and 140 times more than police in England and Wales. These are huge and disturbing differences.

For many years the Honolulu Police Department did not accurately report how many people its officers kill. In fact, during the decade of the 2010s HPD understated the true total by nearly 40%. The failure to accurately report the number of police killings was a failure to care how many people police kill. It was also a failure of political will to hold police accountable for their performance.

We now know that from 2010 to the present, HPD officers shot and killed at least 26 people, and another eight people died in police custody or through other police uses of force. Under Susan Ballard, who became HPD chief in November 2017, killings by HPD surged. Honolulu’s per capita rate of police killing under her leadership is even higher than America’s extremely high national average.

These local realities are all the more troubling because in the rest of the country the most common precipitating circumstance of killing by police is a person in possession of a handgun. More than half of the people shot and killed by American police had a firearm at the time they were shot.

Firearms pose a threat to police far less often in Honolulu, in part because gun controls in this city are strict. Yet under Chief Ballard, 14 people have been shot and killed by Honolulu police, and only three of them possessed a gun at the time of the shooting. Many of the rest of the killings were of people who posed little immediate danger to police or the public: They were in a vehicle, or had a knife, or had no weapon at all.

There are troubling racial patterns as well. Since 2010 more than 60% of the people killed by HPD have been Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. This is more than double their share (25%) of Oahu’s population.

Chief Ballard will retire on June 1. A search for her successor is underway, and many people believe her replacement should be an insider. That’s a baffling stance to take about leadership of an organization that is plagued by serious problems.

The Honolulu Police Commission needs to hire a new chief who will foster a culture of policing that tries to preserve life whenever possible. In recent years this has not been a high priority.

As for criminal accountability, no Honolulu police officer has been charged in an officer-involved shooting for at least 30 years. There are many reasons for this pattern of impunity, including a system of prosecutorial review of police shootings that was designed to fail.

Steve Alm, the city’s new prosecuting attorney, has promised to reform that rotten system, but change will be hard. Nationwide, criminal law and judicial precedent are protective of police, prosecutions are rare, and convictions are few and far between.

There is no simple cure for what ails HPD, but to decrease the number of unnecessary and avoidable deaths, we ought to focus on the heart of the reform matter: police leaders who believe in the preservation of life, and a police culture that cultivates a commitment to this value.

David T. Johnson is a sociology professor at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.