Honolulu Police Chief Arthur “Joe” Logan recently received a scolding from Mayor Rick Blangiardi for the handling of the New Year’s Day manhunt, which resulted in police shooting and killing the suspect after an islandwide chase that also left two officers injured.
The problem was not the police action as much as Logan’s unilateral and tone-deaf response.
“They (HPD) don’t get to be a separate country,” Blangiardi said in Honolulu Star-Advertiser story by police reporter Peter Boylan. “They don’t get to make up their own rules. Fundamentals that they are really required to do … they are not doing, and I don’t know how else to say it. It’s an unacceptable situation. The next time we have a conversation on this matter, I may be able to tell you what got resolved, but at this point, right now, I could not be any more dissatisfied.”
Politicians, especially those as high ranking as mayor, make news; they don’t expect to be surprised by the day’s news.
Blangiardi, who is expected to run for a second term, certainly was caught off guard.
As the paper recounted: “Blangiardi also took exception to learning from the media 17 days later of a lawsuit claiming that during the manhunt an HPD officer allegedly hit a 25-year-old man with a car and beat him while restraining his father.”
Allegations of police brutality are one thing. But for the police chief, appointed by the Honolulu Police Commission, to essentially skip a day without comment, shows plain ignorance of the police chief’s responsibilities.
“I can understand the mayor’s frustration with certain incidents, and I have assured him that I will be addressing those issues,” Logan said. “We have made adjustments to our internal and external communications, including posting information on multiple social media platforms.”
Of course that is not enough — and despite Logan’s assurances of an open operation, no one is pulling back any government curtain.
All of this happens in a city operation that has had years of police leaders who didn’t cut it.
The police commission acts as a buffer between the politics of City Hall, and the military chain of command and life-and-death law enforcement powers of the police. The police and the pols don’t tell each other what to do, and the voters should have one less thing to worry about.
Logan doesn’t really have a lot to model his behavior on. The chief of police before him, Susan Ballard, left after being criticized by the police commission, which said she showed poor communication skills. Before that was the infamous Louis Kealoha, who is now serving a seven-year prison sentence in Oregon after being convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, along with his then-wife Katherine and three other police officers.
This trio of chiefs has certainly not been the definition of a police meritocracy. But pioneers like a Francis Keala and/or a leader like Doug Gibb, revered former chiefs, don’t come along frequently enough to provide HPD the models it so desperately needs.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
