Records are public when police officers are punished, Hawaii’s high court rules

The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled Friday that the public may see the disciplinary records of police officers when they are terminated or suspended for wrongdoing, potentially clearing the way for increased transparency surrounding how officers are held accountable.

The ruling came after the court considered a lawsuit by the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers challenging a Circuit Court decision to release the arbitration records of Darren Cachola, a Honolulu Police Department sergeant who was seen in a 2014 viral video brawling with his girlfriend in a restaurant.

The state Uniform Information Practices Act was enacted to promote government transparency and accountability, and “while a police officer has a significant privacy interest in their misconduct records by statute, the public has an interest — often a ‘compelling’ one — in public accountability for the police,” the justices wrote in a unanimous 70-page decision.

“Preliminarily, we hold that there is no private cause of action to prevent, as opposed to compel, the release of public records under UIPA. The Circuit Court of the First Circuit … correctly dismissed SHOPO’s UIPA claims for that reason. It erred, however, by conflating the constitutional privacy right with the statutory privacy interests codified in UIPA; the core protections of the Hawaii Constitution remain unaltered when the legislature chooses to extend greater protections than article I, section 6 requires,” read the ruling.

“Nonetheless, we hold that UIPA requires the release of the requested records.”

SHOPO officials and interim HPD Chief Rade K. Vanic did not immediately respond to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser request for comment.

Megan K. Kau, a Honolulu attorney who has represented police officers, does not think the ruling will influence officers’ behavior.

“The majority of HPD are good officers. They are good people with good intentions. A few of them become bad or become jaded … (and) whether their rec­ords are public or not public is not going to change that,” Kau told the Star- Advertiser. “People don’t understand that on a daily basis people spit in officers’ faces, threaten them, swear at them, call them out and eventually, some of them grow callous and start defending themselves. That transition is not going to be effected by releasing disciplinary records. Darren Cachola was going to do what he was going to do no matter what his records said.”

Hawaii Supreme Court ruling… by Honolulu Star-Advertiser