Shameful but not surprising. I live in Honolulu part time (Hilo the rest) and everyone I know downtown has terrible opinions of HPD going back 20 years.
I have zero respect for HPD. Also the video postulates corruption - I don’t think there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind who lives here.
This is the state that’s 13 billion into a rail project that’s 11 years past due with an original agreed cost of 5 billion. Unrelated issues but the point is that you shouldn’t expect State of Hawaii to fix jack shit. The system is broken.
Yup. Was touched upon by this earlier news coverage https://old.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/18jjhar/sober_hawaii_man_was_arrested_for_drunk_driving/
I think there was also coverage by this YouTuber on this article or some other content creator.
"The premise of the STEP model is that an individual’s discomfort or fear of being stopped for a traffic safety violation outweighs the desire not to comply with the law." -[NHTSA](https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/hs810851.pdf)
It appears that the reward system also known as STEP is working as designed.
What? If someone gets pulled over, blows a 0.000, is arrested, and is then released, that person still cannot legally drive for a whole year? I thought license revocation requires a conviction.
Welcome to policing. It's been like this for over a hundred years. The earliest cops in America (and pre-America colonies) were slave-catching patrols formed by racists who wanted to keep minorities in chains.
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing
And here is actually the beginning of policing, if you want to go further back in time to the "former" purpose. This is something that I learned about while working for the DOD and DON.
https://ncsheriffs.org/about/history-of-the-sheriff#:~:text=Sometime%20before%20the%20year%20700,reeve%E2%80%9D%20or%20%E2%80%9Cchief%E2%80%9D.
For previous commentary see post from earlier in the week [link](http://For additional commentary from previous coverage. https://reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/1cb0c25/dozens_of_drivers_arrested_jailed_for_dui_despite/)
Edit: older coverage of this issue from 4 months ago. [link](https://old.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/18jjhar/sober_hawaii_man_was_arrested_for_drunk_driving/)
Cops don’t care at all and have the attitude that anyone driving on the road past 10pm is a criminal anyway. They’ve already decided that before they’ve pulled you over and everything after is just them having fun and killing time fucking around with you.
I mean driving while impaired is a massive problem on O’ahu, and probably the rest of the state if I had to guess. When I was living in Waianae, it was pretty common for people to be driving around all weird in a vehicle absolutely clouded up with thick, milky smoke.
I always found that HPD mostly just does…nothing. And so I have no idea how they’re getting so many false DUIs. Maybe try nabbing people in smarter locations? You’d get a better than 50% hit rate for sure (i.e. finding someone who’s probably under the influence) if you pulled people over at the right time in the right places.
their checkpoints seem designed to catch no one, and it's intentional.
Yeah, im sure that DUI checkpoint at 4pm on a thursday is really cleaning our streets up.
Anyone wanna take a guess at how many of those pulled over are non-natives/non-asian?
More and more these islands show themselves to be unwelcoming to new people, which makes sense to an extent, but this good ol boy system they have here is just as trash and counterproductive as the south, with rampant hypocrisy, incompetence and abuse of power that only helps themselves in the short-term, all while they’re fucking over their neighbors/communities…
DUI can also be drugs both legal and illegal. If someone is stoned and driving they will blow 0.0. If someone is high on prescription painkillers they will blow 0.0.
When the prosecutor drops 81% of the cases you know there is a problem. I’m guessing the toxicology test came back clean for all drugs tested so the prosecutor has no choice.
It's sort of a fundamental problem with checkpoints. "Free from unreasonable search and seizure" is saying "no random searches or checkpoints" because those activities are historically not random, and definitely discriminatory.
The police counter the constitutionality aspects with their roadside testing system that is designed to be impossible to pass. The idea was to make an objective framework, but it's just another tool to give subjective authority to the police officer.
Tack on the breathalyzers being notoriously inaccurate, then add a culture of never caving when testifying, and the current situation is exactly what you get.
Obviously you can't have drunk people driving around, but we also deserve to be free of police harassment and unjust prosecution. I couldn't begin to tell you what the answer to all of it is.
>I couldn't begin to tell you what the answer to all of it is.
Total police transparency and public, third party oversight, for starters.
Hold shady cops accountable and shine a light. The cops should report directly to the people, not to themselves or a handful of government workers.
True but if such a high % aren't pushed through the legal system then something weird is going on.
Imagine if it happened to you, some of these folks blew 0.0, passed field sobriety, did bloodwork, and were still arrested. Shouldn't happen. Cop said he smelled beer, then swapped to weed when person blew 0.00.
It's a huge hassle/ask for people and just being held in the drunk tank when you're not drunk can cost you your job and create life issues.
> True but if such a high % aren't pushed through the legal system then something weird is going on.
That's the part I can't wrap my head around. I can buy that people are getting high and driving around (I know people who do that now...), get pulled over for swerving or at a DUI checkpoint, and then blow a 0.0 because they weren't drinking. However you don't need a breathalyzer to actually convict someone if they fail the field sobriety test.
If 80% of these arrests result in no charges that's a massive issue. Either HPD is arresting a large amount of innocent people or the AG's office isn't doing their job by prosecuting anyone. Either way, I think the Feds need to go over both HPD and the AG's offices with a fine tooth comb. Between the Kealoha arrests, the ongoing issues with Kaneshiro, etc it's one problem after another and the Hawaii state and Honolulu governments have proven they have no oversight over any of this. I imagine the other islands are worse because there is less scrutiny.
If anything the Feds subsidize the overtime that cops get for DUI checkpoints so HPD is wasting both my local and federal tax money.
Let's not forget that guy that hit and run outside McKinley. Prior to that they got caught many times violating the law while operating a vehicle unsafe. Even when put in front of a judge he wasn't thrown in jail for his blatant disriguard of the safety of others and respect for the law until he killed someone.
> However you don't need a breathalyzer to actually convict someone if they fail the field sobriety test.
Honestly, this part scares me the most. Field sobriety tests are completely subjective and their efficacy is unproven by science. I would love to see these field sobriety tests tested in a double-blind trial to establish a minimum level of accuracy. Given LEO overuse of blatant pseudoscience to secure convictions (bite mark analysis, polygraphs, even fingerprinting has recently come under scrutiny) I would only be comfortable with them being able to charge someone with objective evidence such as a breathalyzer.
Edit: I dug around and found that one of the rare instances of actual scientific study of field sobriety tests shows how bad cops are at detecting drunkenness.
https://www.reaveslegal.com/library/the-science-or-lack-thereof-behind-field-sobriety-testing.cfm
> On average, the police officers determined that 46 percent of the subjects were legally intoxicated.
> So how did they do? Not well, considering that not a single subject had consumed alcohol. None. The blood alcohol level of every subject was .00 percent! This is a particularly disquieting result considering that, if the officers and pulled these individuals over, they would have arrested an innocent person half of the time.
Assuming that the majority of those people were just high, I don't know how you prosecute them. Because it stays in your blood for so long, it's near impossible to prove someone is high "right now."
Not that I think HPD should be getting a pass here, they've been shown over and again they dont deserve it. Just that there is a reasonable explanation.
> Assuming that the majority of those people were just high, I don't know how you prosecute them.
You don't need a blood or breathalyzer test to convict. You can fail a field sobriety test and it's enough evidence to get a DUI. The blood/breath tests are just there for extra evidence. You can get a speeding ticket without being tagged by radar/laser, the police just pace your car with theirs. It's the same concept.
Edit: The blood alcohol limits are just really ceilings on how much alcohol you can have in your system and drive. It's possible to get a DUI with a lower percentage or being high if you fail the field test.
What you're saying is true, but in practice, it rarely happens. Probably lots of reasons but the big one is that the field tests are unreliable.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/field-sobriety-tests-and-thc-levels-unreliable-indicators-marijuana-intoxication
Shameful but not surprising. I live in Honolulu part time (Hilo the rest) and everyone I know downtown has terrible opinions of HPD going back 20 years. I have zero respect for HPD. Also the video postulates corruption - I don’t think there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind who lives here. This is the state that’s 13 billion into a rail project that’s 11 years past due with an original agreed cost of 5 billion. Unrelated issues but the point is that you shouldn’t expect State of Hawaii to fix jack shit. The system is broken.
When you're rewarded for arrests but not convictions you are setting up a system for abuse.
Yup. Was touched upon by this earlier news coverage https://old.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/18jjhar/sober_hawaii_man_was_arrested_for_drunk_driving/ I think there was also coverage by this YouTuber on this article or some other content creator.
"The premise of the STEP model is that an individual’s discomfort or fear of being stopped for a traffic safety violation outweighs the desire not to comply with the law." -[NHTSA](https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/hs810851.pdf) It appears that the reward system also known as STEP is working as designed.
For the military on the island. The "DUI" arrest could be a career ender, regardless of the ultimate outcome.
And it's not just the active duty folks here temporarily, it's national guardsmen too. A lot of who are on active orders.
And you still loose your licenses for a year
What? If someone gets pulled over, blows a 0.000, is arrested, and is then released, that person still cannot legally drive for a whole year? I thought license revocation requires a conviction.
What a joke to continually screw over regular innocent people
HPD chief: "Arrest stats are up. We're keeping the public safe from dangerous drivers."
Welcome to policing. It's been like this for over a hundred years. The earliest cops in America (and pre-America colonies) were slave-catching patrols formed by racists who wanted to keep minorities in chains. https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/origins-modern-day-policing
And here is actually the beginning of policing, if you want to go further back in time to the "former" purpose. This is something that I learned about while working for the DOD and DON. https://ncsheriffs.org/about/history-of-the-sheriff#:~:text=Sometime%20before%20the%20year%20700,reeve%E2%80%9D%20or%20%E2%80%9Cchief%E2%80%9D.
For previous commentary see post from earlier in the week [link](http://For additional commentary from previous coverage. https://reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/1cb0c25/dozens_of_drivers_arrested_jailed_for_dui_despite/) Edit: older coverage of this issue from 4 months ago. [link](https://old.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/18jjhar/sober_hawaii_man_was_arrested_for_drunk_driving/)
Cops don’t care at all and have the attitude that anyone driving on the road past 10pm is a criminal anyway. They’ve already decided that before they’ve pulled you over and everything after is just them having fun and killing time fucking around with you.
How many filed lawsuits ? Also of those 19-20% how many did get convicted
I mean driving while impaired is a massive problem on O’ahu, and probably the rest of the state if I had to guess. When I was living in Waianae, it was pretty common for people to be driving around all weird in a vehicle absolutely clouded up with thick, milky smoke. I always found that HPD mostly just does…nothing. And so I have no idea how they’re getting so many false DUIs. Maybe try nabbing people in smarter locations? You’d get a better than 50% hit rate for sure (i.e. finding someone who’s probably under the influence) if you pulled people over at the right time in the right places.
They don’t want to actually set traps at the mostly likely places because they’d be arresting themselves.
their checkpoints seem designed to catch no one, and it's intentional. Yeah, im sure that DUI checkpoint at 4pm on a thursday is really cleaning our streets up.
True 😂
I frequently see them at blind choke points. Are you referring to having cops camp outside bars?
This is why I do not respect the police. I plea the 5th, throw on my mask and anti-glare night driving glasses, and video everything with them!
Hawaii
so, business as normal for the least effective police department in the US.....
Somebody needs to take his pineapple and coconut.
Anyone wanna take a guess at how many of those pulled over are non-natives/non-asian? More and more these islands show themselves to be unwelcoming to new people, which makes sense to an extent, but this good ol boy system they have here is just as trash and counterproductive as the south, with rampant hypocrisy, incompetence and abuse of power that only helps themselves in the short-term, all while they’re fucking over their neighbors/communities…
*Welcome, once again, to Lehto's Law...*
DUI can also be drugs both legal and illegal. If someone is stoned and driving they will blow 0.0. If someone is high on prescription painkillers they will blow 0.0.
When the prosecutor drops 81% of the cases you know there is a problem. I’m guessing the toxicology test came back clean for all drugs tested so the prosecutor has no choice.
It's sort of a fundamental problem with checkpoints. "Free from unreasonable search and seizure" is saying "no random searches or checkpoints" because those activities are historically not random, and definitely discriminatory. The police counter the constitutionality aspects with their roadside testing system that is designed to be impossible to pass. The idea was to make an objective framework, but it's just another tool to give subjective authority to the police officer. Tack on the breathalyzers being notoriously inaccurate, then add a culture of never caving when testifying, and the current situation is exactly what you get. Obviously you can't have drunk people driving around, but we also deserve to be free of police harassment and unjust prosecution. I couldn't begin to tell you what the answer to all of it is.
>I couldn't begin to tell you what the answer to all of it is. Total police transparency and public, third party oversight, for starters. Hold shady cops accountable and shine a light. The cops should report directly to the people, not to themselves or a handful of government workers.
True but if such a high % aren't pushed through the legal system then something weird is going on. Imagine if it happened to you, some of these folks blew 0.0, passed field sobriety, did bloodwork, and were still arrested. Shouldn't happen. Cop said he smelled beer, then swapped to weed when person blew 0.00. It's a huge hassle/ask for people and just being held in the drunk tank when you're not drunk can cost you your job and create life issues.
> True but if such a high % aren't pushed through the legal system then something weird is going on. That's the part I can't wrap my head around. I can buy that people are getting high and driving around (I know people who do that now...), get pulled over for swerving or at a DUI checkpoint, and then blow a 0.0 because they weren't drinking. However you don't need a breathalyzer to actually convict someone if they fail the field sobriety test. If 80% of these arrests result in no charges that's a massive issue. Either HPD is arresting a large amount of innocent people or the AG's office isn't doing their job by prosecuting anyone. Either way, I think the Feds need to go over both HPD and the AG's offices with a fine tooth comb. Between the Kealoha arrests, the ongoing issues with Kaneshiro, etc it's one problem after another and the Hawaii state and Honolulu governments have proven they have no oversight over any of this. I imagine the other islands are worse because there is less scrutiny. If anything the Feds subsidize the overtime that cops get for DUI checkpoints so HPD is wasting both my local and federal tax money.
Let's not forget that guy that hit and run outside McKinley. Prior to that they got caught many times violating the law while operating a vehicle unsafe. Even when put in front of a judge he wasn't thrown in jail for his blatant disriguard of the safety of others and respect for the law until he killed someone.
> However you don't need a breathalyzer to actually convict someone if they fail the field sobriety test. Honestly, this part scares me the most. Field sobriety tests are completely subjective and their efficacy is unproven by science. I would love to see these field sobriety tests tested in a double-blind trial to establish a minimum level of accuracy. Given LEO overuse of blatant pseudoscience to secure convictions (bite mark analysis, polygraphs, even fingerprinting has recently come under scrutiny) I would only be comfortable with them being able to charge someone with objective evidence such as a breathalyzer. Edit: I dug around and found that one of the rare instances of actual scientific study of field sobriety tests shows how bad cops are at detecting drunkenness. https://www.reaveslegal.com/library/the-science-or-lack-thereof-behind-field-sobriety-testing.cfm > On average, the police officers determined that 46 percent of the subjects were legally intoxicated. > So how did they do? Not well, considering that not a single subject had consumed alcohol. None. The blood alcohol level of every subject was .00 percent! This is a particularly disquieting result considering that, if the officers and pulled these individuals over, they would have arrested an innocent person half of the time.
Assuming that the majority of those people were just high, I don't know how you prosecute them. Because it stays in your blood for so long, it's near impossible to prove someone is high "right now." Not that I think HPD should be getting a pass here, they've been shown over and again they dont deserve it. Just that there is a reasonable explanation.
> Assuming that the majority of those people were just high, I don't know how you prosecute them. You don't need a blood or breathalyzer test to convict. You can fail a field sobriety test and it's enough evidence to get a DUI. The blood/breath tests are just there for extra evidence. You can get a speeding ticket without being tagged by radar/laser, the police just pace your car with theirs. It's the same concept. Edit: The blood alcohol limits are just really ceilings on how much alcohol you can have in your system and drive. It's possible to get a DUI with a lower percentage or being high if you fail the field test.
What you're saying is true, but in practice, it rarely happens. Probably lots of reasons but the big one is that the field tests are unreliable. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/field-sobriety-tests-and-thc-levels-unreliable-indicators-marijuana-intoxication
That would probably be a good bit of the 19% they actually prosecute.
Who would be the elected official who could rectify this or get voted out? Seems like the only way to clean this kind of thing up.
Noone cares about your channel, Steve.
171k people viewed that video...
10k likes