Honolulu Mayor Ducks Undercover
Despite his prosecutorial history, Mayor Peter Carlisle has never enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Honolulu Police Department. The police union has never endorsed him.
Still, there’s one issue he refuses to get involved in: Compelling the department to follow the law and release the names, job titles and compensation of its officers.
Civil Beat has asked the Honolulu Police Department for the names, salaries and job titles of all officers, just the way it’s asked all other public agencies for that information about their employees. We have been in discussions with the department for more than a year.
Carlisle says the public can figure out who’s on the police force by looking at police reports and at the badges of individual officers.
“I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who’s in the police force,” Carlisle told the Civil Beat editorial board last week. “There’s a thousand different ways. You can find out who responds, you could go out and ask people. It would be a pain in the neck, it would be a nuisance to do, but you could find out some other way.”
His comments came during a meeting at Civil Beat headquarters. He brushed off concerns that without the names of officers, Honolulu essentially has a secret police force — one arm of government that doesn’t follow the same rules as the others.
“It’s not like it’s not public. You could go up to 90 percent of police officers and say officer what is your name, or you see the name on the badge,” he added.
In Hawaii, the names and salaries of public employees are public records — except for undercover officers.
But the term is interpreted so broadly in Honolulu that virtually every officer would be covered by the exemption.
In Honolulu, plainclothes equals undercover. In other words, a single day of plainclothes duty on Waikiki beach would qualify an officer for the exemption. That definition is identical to the one the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers has told the police chief and Civil Beat it believes should apply.
When asked for his definition of undercover, Carlisle quickly replied: “I don’t have one.”
“I don’t know if it’s fair to put it all on our backs because this is an effort essentially by the union, and they have the courts on their side,” he said.
Honolulu’s definition of undercover is out of step with those followed by other metropolitan police departments.
The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, regularly publishes a roster of its officers — including names of detectives who do occasional undercover work. Only those officers whose undercover work is so sensitive that they do not go into a police station qualify for California’s undercover exemption.
Read our related stories:
- Honolulu Police Out of Step With Other Departments on Undercover Officers
- Honolulu Police Declines to Name Promoted Officers — Then Names Them
- Honolulu Police Union Wants Entire Force to Be Secret
