Enforcement of beach closure hours starts Friday in Waikiki

Enforcement starts Friday for the newest Waikiki Beach early morning closure period, which went into effect earlier this month at the Royal Hawaiian Beach to address a range of problems associated with overnight campers.

The Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association on March 1 implemented a three-hour closure period from 2 to 5 a.m. daily for the iconic stretch of sand that extends from the Royal Hawaiian groin to the start of Kuhio Beach Park beyond the Moana Surfrider.

Rick Egged, president of the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association, said Tuesday at the Waikiki Neighborhood Board meeting that for the past two weeks “we’ve been providing warnings.”

Egged said permanent signage now indicates the beach section has closure hours that are consistent with the city’s nightly beach closure of adjacent Kuhio Beach Park and at Fort DeRussy Beach. The public will still be able to transit the closed area to go to the ocean or walk through the beach; however, during beach closure hours people will not be allowed to loiter, stand, sit, lie down or store personal items.

Enforcement of the new hours will fall to the Honolulu Police Depart­ment and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement.

“We’ve been asked under what authority this is (allowed). Because this is private property with public access, we are saying that the public access is just closed for those hours from 2 a.m to 5 a.m.,” Egged said. “Anybody who violates that will be guilty of trespassing, and so it’s the trespassing law that we will use to prosecute people who are on the beach during the time that it will be closed. We are looking forward to being able to use that time to clean the beach, which is hard to do when there are people camping there.”

Egged said those violating the closure hours will be given a notice that they are trespassing, which will subject them to an arrest if they return. He said those who refuse to leave will face arrest.

He thanked the Waikiki Neighborhood Board for its support of the move, adding “we are getting a lot of expressions of concern over the increase that we have had in homeless in Waikiki.”

“I think it’s time for another renewed effort to progressively try to be able to provide services to as many homeless as possible and get as many people off the streets of Waikiki that are in that homeless situation as possible,” Egged said. “A high number of those homeless have mental impairments or substance abuse issues, so we have to work on those situations. Each homeless situation is a little different and so it takes a lot of work.”

Waikiki stakeholders, including hotel management and beach concession operators, have said the absence of closure hours on Royal Hawaiian Beach, when nearby city beaches were closed, has drawn overnight sleepers and created unsafe, unsanitary and sometimes dangerous situations.

Waikiki Neighborhood Board Chairperson Bob Finley told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Wednesday that this newest closure, which is backed by an amendment to the Waikiki Beach Management Plan, has broad community support. He said the board championed closure hours for the Royal Hawaiian Beach multiple times and that the process took about a year.

“It’s our early morning surfers and beach users who have made the most complaints. They come to us and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got to be careful where I step on the beach,’” Finley said. “When they put up the tents and go through the trash and trash the place and use it for toilets, that’s what we are trying to get rid of. We want to prevent it from becoming a huge mess so there’s not needles and broken glass and feces around for our residents as well as the people who are paying big bucks for the hotels.”

He said there also have been discussions about taking beach closures a step further by uniformly closing Waikiki beach parks at midnight instead of 2 a.m. The general feeling, according to Finley, is that setting consistent park closure hours throughout Waikiki would make it easier for people to comply with the rules.

Currently the rules are different from Waikiki park to park. Closure hours in the city’s beach parks in Waikiki range from 2 to 5 a.m. at Kuhio and Duke Kahanamoku beach parks, to midnight to 5 a.m. at Kapiolani Beach Park.

A scan of the online city park closure list at bit.ly/ParkClosureHours reveals that Waikiki’s beach parks appear to be the only ones on Oahu that stay open until at least midnight. Typical closure hours at other parks are from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

“It took a long time to get the Royal Hawaiian Beach closure hours in place so I anticipate it will probably be another year to address the rest of the closure hours,” Finley said. “We have to get all of the people on board — the city, DLNR, the property owners, the beach concessionaires and general public.”

The Royal Hawaiian groin, a privately owned beach area with public access, does not have to follow city hours; however, Egged said the association would consider broadening its new closure if the current dialogue gains momentum.

Nathan Serota, spokesperson for the city Department of Parks and Recreation, said the city has a process for changing beach park hours, and the request should come from the respective area’s overseeing neighborhood board. Once that request is confirmed and sent over to the Department of Parks and Recreation, it requires the approval of the agency’s director.

“We encourage the community to work through their respective neighborhood boards to get a consensus on what closure hours they would like for their parks. That way there is a general agreement amongst the area’s residents, and an opportunity for public discussion on the matter,” he said. “Certainly uniformity amongst this popular stretch of beaches would make it easier for the public to understand and for law enforcement to seek compliance.”

Wookie Kim, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, called the tactics for enforcing beach closure hours “cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Our bottom-line position is that using criminal enforcement and punishment and arrests to address houselessness is not the way forward,” Kim said. “In particular under the current situation when it comes to the issue of houselessness on Oahu, our position is that using criminal enforcement against houseless people for sitting, lying or sleeping in a public place, specifically here on a public beach, is cruel and unusual punishment.”

He noted that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held that “when the number of available shelter beds is far exceeded by the number of unsheltered houseless people in a city, that enforcing criminal laws against houseless people violates the Constitution — the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.”

The 2022 Point-in-Time Count, an annual one-night snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness who are on the street or in shelters, put Oahu’s overall unsheltered population number at 2,355. By comparison, the Vacancy Grid, an intake tool that provides up-to-date information on beds and units available in shelters around the island, showed just 56 openings Wednesday.

“The math doesn’t work out,” Kim said. “This is something that we have considered taking action on. This is an issue that is extremely concerning to us and I think it’s important that the city find different solutions to addressing the genuine crisis that we have around houselessness here in Hawaii, and specifically on Oahu.”

Kim noted that beach closure hours appear to be a “pretty transparent attempt to target houseless people” and could lend themselves to violations of equal protection principles if “tourists or people who don’t look houseless get a free pass.”

He added that efforts to come up with creative new housing solutions are laudable, but said “it’s clear that all of these efforts to crack down in specific geographical locations only leads to houseless people being put more at risk of never getting back on their feet.”

Shayna M., a homeless woman who did not want to give her full name, is living proof that Kim’s concerns are valid. While she works as a cook at an Oahu restaurant, she said crackdowns have interfered with her ability to get a leg up since she fell into homelessness in November for a variety of reasons, including bearing the strain of funeral expenses after her mother died.

She said she struggled after she got a ticket for violating the stored property ordinance and was threatened with the sit-and-lie law for sleeping in a park pavilion. The physical and mental stress of her situation and the lack of sleep has affected her job, she explained.

“I lose concentration. It affects my performance here at work. I don’t really like to tell them my personal business, what’s going on with me, because I don’t need everybody to judge,” she said.

Shayna M. said extending beach closures will just make it worse for people who are trying to get housed.

“They take our property then we have to fight to get our property back,” she said. “You have to show some kind of identification to get your property back. If your identification is in your property that they took, then they can’t give you your property back.”

She added that traveling to Halawa to pick up stored belongings by government deadlines also is troublesome.

“What if you don’t have a car or money to catch the bus? You don’t have access to a lot of things,” she said. “When we do start all over again, there they come again. They just sweep and take everybody’s property again.”