OK, enough already. Everybody back to their corners and breathe a bit while this thing plays out.
A bad habit has taken over the community in the age of social media. We believe everything is up for debate and that a debate is won by those who scream the loudest. Or tweet the meanest. Or write all in caps with lots of exclamation marks.
Even when there is no real argument to be won or action to be taken, there’s online rantings and all-caps and snarkfests. It’s become habit. It’s become sport.
So Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha successfully negotiated a partial buyout to leave his job, and armchair debaters are going extra rounds.
As chief, Kealoha was an executive with a contract, and, like many in that position, he could negotiate the terms of his departure. Kealoha’s buyout isn’t excessive or even all that favorable. He wasn’t planning to go, but he agreed to retire under pressure. He even agreed to give the money back if he is indicted in the next six years. He is not currently facing criminal charges. He has not been indicted. He’s retiring amid a mess but not amid formal charges.
The part about whether he should remain as police chief while he and his wife sort through the tangle of family and legal troubles they are facing — that part is fair game for public debate because a troubled chief can affect the entire department and a troubled police department can affect all of us.
But Kealoha’s $250,000 settlement check on top of his retirement package is small potatoes compared with the beefy chunk of money the city would end up spending if the police commission had decided to stiff him and he had decided to fight through the legal system.
Compared with the long list of losers who blew through the University of Hawaii, quickly got bounced when they couldn’t cut it and left after a couple of years with a big, fat check, Kealoha put in 33 years of service on the police force.
Kealoha’s $250,000 payout is cabbage next to the $600,000 slab of kalua pig UH football coach Greg McMackin got in 2011 to go away. It’s less than the $312,000 UH athletic director Herman Frazier got in 2008 when he was booed out of office by Hawaii fans. Men’s basketball coach Gib Arnold negotiated $344,000 to have UH buy out the final year of his contract in 2014 (and then got more later.) Tom Apple, who was Manoa chancellor for, like, all of
two minutes, got $100,000 and a teaching position to go away.
So it’s not unprecedented. It’s not a waste of money. Whether it’s undeserved in terms of conduct has yet to be determined. And it is a reasonable price to have the police department unshackled from Kealoha’s troubles and able to move forward away from whatever drama is playing out in the chief’s life.
