The police officers union panned a University of Hawaii study that showed use-of-force incidents involving Honolulu Police Department officers increased from 706 in 2010 to 2,646 in 2021 while police leadership and commissioners continued to review the findings.

A “very small percentage of all police interactions” with the public involved the use of force, according to the study by David T. Johnson, Nicholas Chagnon and Daniel Jeong of the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Johnson is a professor of sociology, Chagnon is a lecturer in sociology and women’s studies, and Jeong is a graduate student in sociology.

The report is based on the “data set that summarizes all use of force reports submitted by Honolulu police in 2021, and HPD’s unpublished use of force reports for each year from 2010 through 2021,” according to the study. HPD’s use-of-force procedure requires officers to fill out detailing the incident and why they employed the level of force on a suspect that they did are not regularly made public by the department.

Three-quarters of the people subject to police force were male, and one-quarter were female. The average age of all people subject to police force was 36, and there were “significant racial and ethnic disparities in HPD’s use of force against Micronesians, Samoans, and Blacks,” according to the research.

“This reads more like a 86-page op-ed written by anti-police activists than a serious academic ana­lysis of an issue as complex as policing,” said Robert Cavaco, an HPD lieutenant and SHOPO president, in a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “The study’s authors, who are outspoken police critics, do zero analysis as to why or how force is used and under what circumstances, zero analysis on the demographics of criminal suspects in relation to police interaction, and zero analysis on the increase in number of untreated mentally ill and substance abusers who engage in violent behavior.

“Before anyone begins throwing recommendations around regarding policing, they should spend some time with those who do the job and those who are victimized by criminals. The one thing they knew they couldn’t hide is that force is hardly ever used in police and community interactions.”

There was an average of 1.5 use-of-force incidents per officer in 2021, and officers made 25,976 arrests during the same time period, “which is nearly 10 times the number of use of force incidents,” according to the report.

HPD’s “main measure of the frequency of force was the number of police use of force incidents per 1,000 calls for police service.” Depending on the year, this number ranges between 1.5 and 4 use-of-force incidents per 1,000 calls, and the average is around 2.5 use-of-force incidents per 1,000 calls, or 1 use of force for every 400 calls, according to the report.

In response to Cavaco’s comments, Johnson told the Star- Advertiser in a statement that “SHOPO’s response — attack the messengers and change the subject — is predictable but counterproductive.”

“Our report raises important questions about police use of force in Honolulu, including this one: Why did the number of use of force incidents reported by police increase from 706 in 2010 to 2,646 in 2021 — a rise of 275 percent? This question and others described in the report should be the subject of serious discussion in HPD, the Honolulu Police Commission, and the Honolulu City Council,” Johnson said.

“We believe this increase — a rise of 275 percent from 2010 to 2021 — is at least partly real, but even if it is largely a consequence of changes in police reporting practices, the implication would be that HPD has done a bad job of keeping track of an essential index of its performance, and that, too, would be cause for concern. If much or all of the increase is real, then what has happened in Honolulu is consistent with what other observers of American policing report,” read the study.

HPD declined comment on the report’s findings ahead of today’s Police Commission meeting.

“We are still in the process of reviewing the report and plan to discuss it at a future commission meeting,” said Sarah Yoro, HPD spokesperson, in a statement to the Star-Advertiser.

The most common forms of police force were “physical confrontation,” which accounted for 53.4% of all use-of-force incidents, and “deadly force,” which made up about 20.6% of incidents, according to the UH study.

HPD officers used “deadly force” 545 times in 2021, which is an average of 10.5 deadly-force incidents per week, and reported some form of subject resistance in 83% of all use-of-force incidents.

HPD reported that 46% of all people subject to force were “mentally deranged” at the time of the incident, and 45% showed signs of “great anger.”

A total of 371 people were injured and seven people died in encounters with police in 2021, according to the study. Police were not injured in 95% of all use-of-force incidents.

“The UH Sociology Department report is being distributed to all seven commissioners so that we may evaluate and discuss it at a future meeting,” Honolulu Police Commission Chair Doug Chin told the Star-Advertiser in a statement. “In the two and a half years I have served on the commission, I have seen commissioners, in light of national and local incidents, take a great interest in HPD’s use of force policy and even participate in working groups with HPD’s leadership to update it.

“Having objective numbers and data at a local level, if they are accurate, will help us focus the important conversation on what is actually happening right here on Oahu and give the Police Commission a benchmark to hold the chief and his leadership team accountable for their performance going forward.”

More than two-thirds of all deadly force was used by police in “situations in which subjects put up no resistance.” Subjects who resisted police were five times more likely to be injured than subjects who did not resist, researchers found.

HPD’s use-of-force policy requires officers to fill out and file a use-of-force report whenever an officer “uses force beyond routine handcuffing.”

When more than one officer responded to an incident, multiple reports were created for many use-of-force incidents. The spreadsheet received by UH researchers came from officer self-reporting that should be reviewed “cautiously” and “6,308 use of force reports that were filed by HPD police in 2021.”

The UH researchers also noted that in November 2016, HPD “changed its method of reporting uses of force, from a system that relied mainly on paper forms to a computerized Case Report System.”

Under the CRS, each time an officer gets called to a situation that requires a record, an incident report is completed.

The CRS reporting system that started in 2016 has resulted in “more comprehensive reporting” of use-of-force incidents, “which would help explain why the aggregate count of HPD use of force rose from 706 in 2010 to 2,646 in 2021 — an increase of 275 percent,” according to the study.

The HPD data set for 2021 contains information on the characteristics of each use-of-force incident, including incident type (the reason for the encounter), time of incident, district and civilian demographics such as sex, height, weight and race or ethnicity, according to the study.

Use-of-force reports for a single case were “condensed into one report that includes all information on police force used in that incident.”

HPD’s policy outlines a use-of-force continuum and describes levels of resistance corresponding with the recommended level of force and specific force options within each level.

According to HPD, from lowest to highest, the seven levels of force in HPD’s policy are verbal command; physical contact; chemical agent; physical confrontation; intermediate weapon — conducted electric weapon — specialty weapon; less lethal ammunition; and deadly force.