Police use of force is an important issue in Hawaii and the rest of the country. We recently released a report about police use of force in Honolulu, and this essay highlights two main findings.

First, the number of use of force incidents recorded by the Honolulu Police Department (HPD) rose from 706 in 2010, to 2646 in 2021 – an increase of 275%. It is difficult to compare use of force frequencies across different police departments because definitions and reporting practices vary, but we know of no police department in which the number of use of force incidents has risen as rapidly as HPD. In some departments, including Seattle and Minneapolis, the number has declined markedly in recent years.

Why the big increase in Honolulu? In an interview, an HPD official told us there are two causes: HPD is reporting better than it used to, and HPD is using force more frequently than it used to. On this view, improvements in police reporting about the use of force followed the department’s change to a more automated case report system in November 2016, and the more frequent use of force is being driven by an increase in people’s resistance to police authority.

These seem like plausible explanations, but the increase in police use of force started long before the 2016 change in HPD’s reporting practices (use of force incidents doubled from 2010 to 2016). Similarly, we have not found evidence that people in Honolulu resist police more than they used to.

Another main finding is that a large proportion of police force is used against people who are socially marginalized. Between 2010 and 2021, more than 40% of the people subject to force were unemployed at the time of their encounter with police. During this same period, the city’s unemployment rate fluctuated between 3% and 4%.

People under the influence of drugs or alcohol also figure prominently in HPD’s use of force statistics. From 2010 to 2021, 60% of the people subject to use of force were reported by police to be under the influence, and in one year the figure reached 88%.

We could not find data for recent years about how often police use force against homeless people, but we do have evidence from 2010 and 2011. In those years, homeless people were 30 to 40 times more likely to be subject to police use of force than the average person living in Honolulu.

We also found large racial and ethnic disparities in HPD’s use of force data for 2021, for Micronesians, Samoans and Blacks. Most strikingly, Micronesians were about 3.5 times more likely to experience police force than whites, and 25 times more likely than people of Chinese or Japanese ethnicity. Disparity does not necessarily mean discrimination, but the disparities found in HPD’s data raise important questions about the impact of policing on people in these marginalized groups.

Police are often asked to respond to social problems that cannot be cured with coercion. The recent police shooting of Nathaniel Naki on Molokai seems to illustrate this truth. Many of the matters police are expected to address are really problems of public health and social welfare. As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown observes, “We are asking cops to do too much in this country … Every societal failure, we put it off on cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it … Policing was never meant to solve all these problems.”

In the end, solving the problem of police force requires us to reimagine the police role and public safety.