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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the recent brouhaha over a Honolulu cop in trouble for punching his girlfriend in a Waipahu restaurant is how close we came to never knowing about it.

If the Kuni Restaurant’s surveillance video hadn’t been leaked to several media outlets, the public very likely would never have known that an 18-year police veteran, Sgt. Darren Cachola, had punched and pushed the woman for long seconds through two rooms of the closed restaurant.

It’s also very likely the current investigation would never have been launched because officers who responded to the fight never even wrote up a report. They’re now under investigation, too, and the officer in charge has, like Cachola, been put on desk duty until things are sorted out.

Now, even Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha is lamenting the department’s infamous lack of transparency when it comes to matters involving its own officers and actions.

Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha defends his department’s domestic violence policy during a news conference.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

“The reason we have all this second guessing and confusion is because sometimes the police department isn’t as transparent as we should be,”  the chief told reporters last week at a news conference. It was called to talk about the department’s domestic violence policy but evolved into Kealoha vigorously defending HPD’s handling of the investigation so far.

The chief insisted he would not hang Cachola out to dry before good police procedure was followed and the incident thoroughly investigated.

“If you expect a chief to crumble under political and public pressure, and arrest someone based on partial evidence and without doing a full investigation, I’m not going to do that,” he said.

“Who wants to live in a city, or in a society, where you can be threatened with arrest and charged for an offense, when there’s only a sliver of evidence and we haven’t completed the full investigation?

“If you’re expecting the police department and the police chief to do that, that is a crime. You can expect no less from me as your chief.”

A laudable speech from Kealoha. And of course that should be the norm for anyone accused of a crime — cop or civilian.

But Kealoha’s passionate plea for patience on the part of the public and policymakers rings more than a little hollow given HPD’s deplorable track record on disclosure of police misconduct and disciplinary action, including during his tenure as police chief.

It’s a very big stretch to ask the public to trust him now when his department balks at revealing even the most basic information about officer misconduct and other public safety matters. Recently, HPD has come under scrutiny for a series of officer-involved shootings. But Kealoha and his top deputies have refused to even discuss public concerns over the killings of civilians let alone let the public know what their internal investigations have found.

Like most other police departments, HPD has a detailed policy concerning officers who commit domestic violence. It purports to have very little tolerance for people who carry guns and badges abusing that power when it comes to family members. Last week, Kealoha called domestic violence by officers “unacceptable.”

But a review of what little is known about how HPD handles domestic violence within its ranks suggests the department doesn’t take it very seriously at all. Not a single HPD officer in nearly 15 years has been successfully fired for domestic violence.

Since 2000, at least 26 Honolulu officers have been disciplined for domestic violence-related incidents, according to the only information HPD releases about misconduct — brief annual summaries to the Legislature that give no names, dates, places or other details about the incidents. The summaries note that some of those officers have been convicted of crimes — but not fired. And yet the department refuses to reveal any information about them.

The public has a right to be worried about domestic issues in law enforcement work. that police officer families may experience domestic violence at two to four times the rate of the general population. And although federal law prohibits anyone convicted of even misdemeanor DV charges from carrying a gun, let alone convicted of domestic violence offenses. Police officials are against their own officers who undoubtedly would lose their jobs.

In Hawaii and especially Honolulu, the politically influential statewide police union works hard to keep a lid on negative information coming out about its members, and in that regard, Kealoha has an uphill battle on a number of fronts when it comes to investigating officers and making disciplinary action stick. For instance, Civil Beat recently won a lawsuit forcing HPD to turn over disciplinary records of officers and it’s the union, not the department, that has filed an appeal.

But now it is Kealoha who is asking the public to trust him on this one.

He needs to earn that trust.

He could start by meeting with the two dozen women lawmakers and council members who had wanted to hear from him about what was going on. His excuse for canceling on them — that he didn’t have a room big enough to accommodate them, as he told reporters last week — was laughable. He should hear them out; he doesn’t need to reveal details of an ongoing investigation to do that.

Kealoha also needs to be more forthcoming about domestic violence cases involving his officers in the past. He should explain what happened in each of those 26 cases, why most of those officers were not charged, prosecuted or fired, and what HPD is actually doing that shows he takes domestic violence seriously — even when it’s not caught on tape.