Tuesday, October 07, 2014
Civil Beat must read essay: We Need Police Accountability in Honolulu
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In a hearing at the state capitol on Sept. 30, representatives of the local Domestic Violence Action Center revealed that 38.7 percent of murders in Hawaii between 2008 and 2012 were related to domestic violence. This is more than double the national percentage of 16.3. And in 2010, domestic violence accounted for half of all murders in Hawaii.
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We analyzed media reports of shootings by HPD from June 2010 through August 2014, and we found 22 incidents in which police shot their weapons during this 50-month period. Eleven of those shootings were fatal. This is a per capita fatality rate of 2.7 persons killed per million population per year, which is almost four times higher than the national average of 0.7 “justifiable killings” by American police in 2012.
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Of 512 HPD disciplinary cases between 2000 and 2012, only 33 resulted in criminal conviction (6.4 percent), and only five of those led to the dismissal of officers. Many of these cases involved serious felonies such as sexual assault and domestic violence. Would you be able to keep your job if you were convicted of a serious crime?
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This Civil Beat article is a must read (thanks for pointer by Kat Brady!):
We Need Police Accountability in Honolulu (Civil Beat, 10/6/2014) by David T. Johnson Meda Chesney-Lind and Nicholas Chagnon.
It’s an article that should appear in a newspaper, but won’t, because of its length, at least. A website doesn’t have that limitation.
You need to read it.
And you know what I’m going to say next: we, the people, have to get up off our okoles and do something about the city’s failure to control the HPD..
I of course agree. But while were at it, lets all come together and clean up the whole sordid mess of government and insist that publicaly funded elections be passed in 2015, "the reform that makes all other reforms possible." This would require that all advocates working on every issue from environmental to health care to domestic violence begin to collaborate now. Otherwise nothing will change.
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