The Honolulu Police Department is doubling the amount of classroom time that officers receive annually on domestic violence issues and is working closely with victim advocacy groups on developing more stringent policies on how they should approach cases involving law enforcement officers as potential suspects, HPD Chief Louis Kealoha and other police brass say.

The HPD briefing Tuesday to the City Council Public Safety and Economic Development Committee offered the first public interaction between Council members and Kealoha since the public uproar in the wake of the high-profile case involving an HPD sergeant who is seen on surveillance video punching his girlfriend at a Waipahu restaurant last month.

Last week an Oahu grand jury declined to indict police Sgt. Darren Cachola, who is seen in the Sept. 8 surveillance video. The girlfriend has insisted that she and Cachola were engaging in horseplay. An internal administrative investigation into Cachola’s actions and as well as how officers responded to the scene, however, is ongoing.

In response to the case, Council Public Safety Chairwoman Carol Fukunaga urged police brass to give an overview of their domestic violence policies, procedures and training.

Lt. Brian Look, head of the HPD Criminal Investigations Division’s child abuse and domestic violence detail, said officers are trained to gently coax potential victims to come forward but cannot press them. Look said that in response to a flurry of recent changes to laws and policies regarding domestic violence, the annual recall training required for officers holding the rank of lieutenant and lower has been upped to two hours from one hour.

Training on domestic violence cases for recruits is going up to "four hours, possibly more," from two hours, Look said. "That’s just classroom … in-class training," he said.

Following the recent uproar over the Waipahu case, Look said he has also incorporated into his training domestic violence involving police officers. "Police officers are very different,"Look said. "Victims of officer abuse are sometimes more scared to come forward because ‘my husband’s a police officer and look at all his friends who are coming to my house are police officers.’"

Maj. Lester Hite, who heads CID, said the Cachola case "provided us with a great opportunity to interact with our advocates in domestic violence (and) take a critical look at our policy, look for opportunities to improve working with the advocates to find out what are our primary training needs."

Hite said an HPDteam met with several victims’ advocate leaders Oct. 7 where police "asked for their assistance, because they are in tune, nationally, with what resources are out there"in terms of training.

Kealoha said there is a list of criteria that can lead to a domestic violence arrest, but "a lot of these investigations aren’t clear-cut, they’re very messy, so when we go into it, we have to make sure we meet one or more of these elements, and if we don’t have that, then we cannot arrest and we have to develop the case which may allow us to arrest in the future."

Fukunaga said Council Chairman Ernie Martin has introduced Resolution 14-251 to create an advisory committee consisting of herself, Councilwoman Kymberly Pine and Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi that will look at "issues that impact women."