It’ll take time for our community to process Prosecutor Steven Alm’s failed attempt to convict three police officers of murder and attempted murder for shooting a 16-year-old crime spree suspect who led them on a high-speed chase from East Oahu to Waikiki in a stolen car.
The case inspired passionate demonstrations from police supporters, reformers and Micronesians concerned about bias.
We’ve had endless speculation about Alm’s motive in pursuing the polarizing case, and the only one that makes sense is that he truly believed the evidence pointed to a bad shooting.
There was no political upside win or lose; after being endorsed by the police union last election, he’ll almost surely face a SHOPO-backed challenger if he runs for reelection.
Alm directly filed murder charges against the officers after failing to win a grand jury indictment. His prosecutors asked District Judge William Domingo to find probable cause to take the case to trial.
Like the grand jury, Domingo gave the officers the benefit of the doubt on their decision-making in a tense and fluid situation, rejecting prosecutors’ arguments based on frame-by-frame police body camera footage that suspect Iremamber Sykap was cornered and neutralized near a Kalakaua Avenue canal and there was no justification for officers to open fire into the car.
Domingo agreed with police judgment that “it was a very dangerous situation.”
“It was not static,” he said. “We cannot chop it up.”
Signs indicate most of the public was equally comfortable extending police the benefit of the doubt in an unpredictable situation.
But it doesn’t mean the case didn’t warrant scrutiny. The death of a 16-year-old must be answered for, no matter how much trouble he may have been.
It was actually refreshing to see all of the evidence presented in a public courtroom so everybody could see what happened and make up their own minds whether it was right.
Police by nature don’t like scrutiny, and in Hawaii they mostly avoid it.
Until Alm set a policy of the prosecutor’s office conducting its own investigations of shootings involving police, they were done by the police themselves in almost complete secrecy.
Honolulu has a weak Police Commission that historically shuns looking into these cases.
For three years Gov. David Ige refused to fund the Law Enforcement Standards Board created by the Legislature to assure police are trained in best practices when they face difficult situations like the Sykap standoff.
It’s not healthy when the only options for looking into these life-and-death cases is either to shroud them in secrecy or have a criminal prosecution, with no avenue for transparent review in between.
Alm will have a chance to begin closure in the case when he holds a news conference tomorrow to answer questions about his actions.
Hopefully, he’ll find a way to stand up for police transparency while gracefully letting go of this particular case now that it has been fairly and decisively settled.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
