ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

President Barack Obama is making an offer that Hawaii should not refuse — help with the purchase of body-worn video cameras for police officers.

This week, asking Congress to authorize $75 million to help local police departments throughout the country pay for about 50,000 small lapel-mounted cameras that would record their interactions with citizens and suspects. The money would be in the form of matching grants, with local agencies pitching in about half the cost and the feds the other half.

That’s not going to go very far, considering there are about 700,000 sworn officers in the U.S. and only about 70,000 cameras currently in use. But Hawaii’s police departments would be smart to join the growing number of law enforcement agencies already moving to implement body and dashboard cams.

Screenshot: Taser.com

The shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer earlier this year and a grand jury’s recent decision not to indict the officer who shot him has focused national attention on the need to have a reliable record of what actually happens in officer-involved shootings. Eye witness testimony in the Ferguson case proved to be debatable and physical evidence from the scene was not much help either.

In Honolulu, police have shot and killed 13 people in the last 12 years, according to University of Hawaii criminology experts David Johnson, Meda Chesney-Lind and Nicholas Chagnon. With eight fatal shootings in just the past five years, that’s about double the national average of “justifiable killings” by police, they concluded.

Honolulu citizens have good reason to wonder what happened in those cases, including a couple of highly publicized incidents in which police shot at a fleeing vehicle.

And it’s not just shootings — in 2012 Aaron Torres died when Honolulu police sat on him as they were trying to subdue him. The taxpayers just settled that case for $1.4 million.

In recent weeks, a lot of air time has been devoted to the in the Chinatown gaming joint as he beat up a man who was simply sitting on a chair. And then the officer threw a chair at him. Body cams would likely have made that officer think twice about his bad behavior.

Many other jurisdictions have independent oversight boards that include citizens on the panel. But not in Hawaii, where citizens are forced to rely on a blue brotherhood of sorts to oversee police. It’s left to the county prosecutor’s office to review police shootings or in-custody deaths. County police commissions — which have the authority to hire and fire the police chiefs — are protective of the departments and only address citizen complaints, not officer-involved shootings or use of excessive force.

We’ve received internal investigative reports from the Honolulu Police Department, but they are heavily redacted. So no help there. And because disciplinary action in police misconduct cases is still a closely guarded secret, the public is generally at a loss to figure out if police officers are acting professionally or wildly out of control as they go about their duties.

Nationally, the public embraces the idea of body cams. A found 72 percent of respondents supported legislation requiring body cams. Unsurprisingly, they think that police brutality, intimidation and use of excessive force is common in America these days.

There are questions to be addressed, of course, and rules put in place to prevent misuse. Civil liberties advocates will become just another “broad surveillance tool” that would encourage the recording of private conversations and monitoring of actions that are outside the purview of law enforcement.

In reality, the use of body-worn cameras or other video devices help the police department and ultimately save the taxpayers a lot of money in lawsuits and claims. Studies have shown that agencies that use recording devices see significant drops in the number of complaints filed against their officers.

The Kauai Police Department has been testing body cams for the past month with five uniformed patrol officers who work different shifts. And Chief Darryl Perry says the pilot program is showing promising results.

“As you know, when the camera is rolling people are often on their best behavior, under normal circumstances,” he says.

The use of the cameras has even exonerated an officer who was accused of wrongdoing by a citizen who had filed a notarized complaint. “The video recording contradicted what the citizen alleged,” Perry says.

As part of the pilot program, Perry and his staff are addressing privacy concerns raised by the police union as well as working with the ACLU, the prosecutor’s office, the state attorney general and others. Perry says he has also implemented a departmental policy with strict guidelines on how cameras are used.

Honolulu police already use Tasers that have cameras mounted on them. That’s been in place since 2008 as a way to ensure accountability and enhance both officer safety and public safety, then-Chief Boisse Correa said at the time. “The camera brings credibility to the whole system,” he pointed out in a .

Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha tells us (through a spokeswoman) that HPD is interested in acquiring body cameras. The department is looking at how other police departments are using, storing and retaining the video data, the department says.

That’s a good sign. Now, Kealoha and Maui and Hawaii County police officials need to move with the same urgency that Kauai and the rest of the country is feeling to equip their officers with these devices.

To quote Kauai’s Chief Perry: “With President Obama’s move toward funding the purchase of body cameras for police departments, I believe this is the wave of the future, and long overdue.”