Unlike many police agencies across the country, the Honolulu Police Department excludes violent crimes from the public mapping service it provides online, giving residents only a partial picture of the types of offenses happening in their neighborhoods.
While people can visit HPD’s mapping site Opens in a new tab to see whether any burglaries, thefts or other property crimes have happened near their residences, businesses or other Oahu locations within the past six months, they cannot check on violent crimes.
HPD does not plot assaults, robberies, homicides, weapon violations, drug deals, rapes and other such offenses.
That practice goes against the grain of what police departments elsewhere, including on Maui, provide to their communities.
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser checked the websites of more than 150 departments around the country and could not find one that limited mapped offenses to nonviolent crimes.
And several national experts in crime mapping told the newspaper they were unaware of any department besides HPD that excludes violent crimes.
“This is the first time I’ve ever heard of an agency barring a whole class of crimes,” said Derek Paulsen, an Eastern Kentucky University criminal justice professor who has written books on crime mapping. “By not showing that information, you are in a sense providing a skewed version of what’s going on in your community.”
HPD launched its crime mapping site in December 2010, around the time many police departments nationally started embracing the practice. A web user can type in an address and check the types of crimes that have happened within a certain distance of that location and within a certain time frame, typically up to six months.
Pin placements appear on the map, giving general locations, such as the 1200 block of Smith Street, not precise addresses, and the time and date of the offense.
But from the get-go, HPD limited what was shown to the public.
“Crime mapping was initially adopted in response to the public’s requests for neighborhood crime stats,” HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu wrote in an email response to Star-Advertiser questions. “At the time, most residents were interested in property crimes such as car thefts, home break-ins and vandalism.”
Yet even when residents expressed interest in getting violent-crime information, HPD did not change its practice.
Members of the Makakilo/Kapolei/Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board several years ago began questioning HPD representatives on why the department stopped including violent offenses in its monthly crime statistics provided to the community panels. The questioning triggered lively debates, board members said.
“It got really heated,” said Kalani Capelouto, who went so far as to write the Office of Information Practices to try to get HPD to release the data.
At the Makakilo board’s May 2014 meeting, an HPD captain told the panel that violent-crime statistics would be included in upcoming HPD reports to neighborhood boards and available on the department’s website. “HPD hopes to begin reporting violent crime statistics within a month’s time,” the minutes say.
More than two years later, that has not happened, according to Capelouto.
In her written responses, HPD’s Yu said no changes are planned for the mapping site but that the department is open to suggestions. She also said HPD will consider adding violent crimes to the site.
Yu noted that HPD provides on its website monthly reports of crime statistics by district (Oahu is divided into eight districts), including data on violent crimes.
But the reports give no indication where the crimes occurred within the district — the main benefit of a crime mapping tool.
In 2015 HPD recorded 2,437 serious violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) on Oahu, up 7 percent from the prior year. Those are among the crimes the federal government tracks nationally to identify trends and make comparisons.
Joshua Chanin, a San Diego State University assistant professor who researches criminal justice issues, said he didn’t know of any other police department that maps property crimes but not violent ones.
Public demand for crime data tends to be strong, and sharing such data with the public engenders goodwill, Chanin said in an email to the Star-Advertiser.
Putting the information online is relatively cheap and simple to do technologically, and the risk for the department is relatively low, unlike with use-of-force statistics and other potentially damaging information, according to Chanin, a 1994 Punahou graduate. “It is a bit puzzling that HPD would actively omit violent crime,” he wrote.
Evelyn Souza, chairwoman of the Makakilo board, said “there’s no sound rationale” for HPD to keep such mapping information from the public. “If there’s anything you would want to know about your neighborhood, it’s crime data,” she said.
HPD pays $100 a month to a vendor, Omega Group, to maintain the mapping site, according to the department. The site has remained basically unchanged for the past six years.
It is believed to be popular with the public, though the department did not have use data.
“The crime mapping information on the website is for anyone who is interested in checking on criminal activity on Oahu,” Yu wrote. “I don’t have specific numbers, but we know that the info is used regularly by the general public, particularly neighborhood boards and neighborhood security watches, as well as elected officials and the media.”
