Accountability must accompany police power

Police are to government as the edge is to a knife. Unlike other occupations, police have the general right to use coercive force within a state’s territory. They are given this authority because all societies — even the most free and democratic — confront problems that cannot be solved without coercive force. And sometimes the force is lethal.

Many people feel ambivalent about the police use of force because they know that sometimes it is necessary, but also realize that it can be misused. And this is the critical issue. The power given to police creates risks that require real accountability.

In Hawaii, police accountability is all but absent because the Legislature has caved in to pressure from the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers (SHOPO), the union that represents the state’s four city and county forces. Public reporting requirements for police in Hawaii are far more limited than those in most states. Under an exemption SHOPO received in 1995, police are merely required to send the Legislature an annual summary of cases in which an officer has been suspended or discharged for misconduct. Each summary is only a few words long, and there are no names, places or dates.

There is also a failure of accountability with respect to lethal force. Police in Honolulu have shot and killed eight people in the past five years. This is, per capita, about double the national average of "justifiable killings" by police. As this newspaper has reported, police protocol in lethal force cases is "wholly internal" ("HPD transparency, oversight lacking," Our View, Aug. 13). The names of officers who use lethal force are not released to the public, and neither are the results of the police department’s own internal investigations — unless someone is fired.

The secrecy that surrounds killings by police can be compared with capital punishment, for both are forms of state killing.

The federal capital trial of Naeem Williams in Honolulu generated a large volume of publicly available documents and extensive media coverage, much of it speaking to the question of whether Williams should be condemned to death (he was not). In contrast, the information available to citizens interested in how and why people in Hawaii have been killed by police amounts to a drop in the bucket.

In the past, at least two Hawaii police chiefs called for increased accountability after some of their officers were arrested, but their efforts were blocked by SHOPO. When it comes to the critical question of accountability, the preferred policy of the union appears to be: Let us act, and don’t ask us questions later.

Police have a hard job. From drugs and domestic violence to homicides and hit-and-run, they experience humanity at a level of skinned-alive intensity and have to make many split-second decisions.

There is danger too. From 2009 to 2013, 727 police officers died in the line of duty in the United States (the three who died in Hawaii were killed in traffic accidents). These former officers deserve our respect and thanks, as do those who continue to serve.

But police in Hawaii must be held more accountable to the public precisely because they matter so much. In the end, questions about police behavior are too important to leave to the police.