The Honolulu Police Department doesn’t track how many of its officers have been charged with or convicted of crimes. As it turns out, it’s a statistic that very few cities keep, national experts say.

“I’m not aware of any [police] department keeping a separate compilation” of officers who’ve faced criminal investigations, said Karen Kruger, a Baltimore-based attorney who serves on the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Legal Officers’ Section.

Civil Beat reported last week that HPD does monitor the cases of individual officers who have been charged or convicted for crimes. But it does not compile that data, and neither does the city Police Commission, arguably making it difficult for the department to put together a complete picture of what’s happening within their own walls.

According to Kruger, while “keeping tabs on officer misconduct” — from accusations of on-duty “discourtesy” to off-duty criminal activity — is standard for police departments, calculating aggregate statistics on the officers who’ve been charged or convicted is rare.

“Generally speaking, I know of no agency that documents the convictions of its sworn personnel,” says Thomas Martinelli, a police misconduct expert and former Detroit police officer and attorney who trains agencies across the country in police ethics and liability issues.

Furthermore, Martinelli says legal advisors for police departments across the country likely “do not encourage the keeping of such statistics, on a list or database, as they would then be discoverable in any civil lawsuits filed against the department.”

Efforts to Generate Statistics on Officers’ Misconduct

That void is what moved David Packman to set up The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, an independent, one-man campaign that gathers and distributes data on police misconduct.

And “it’s fairly rare that those law enforcement agencies track [police misconduct] at all or, if they do track it, that they release that info to the public,” says Packman. He calls it a “fundamental lack of information about police misconduct” on his web site.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are well over 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the U.S.

Packman, who works full-time as an engineer, creates his statistical and trending reports from news sources that he analyzes several times per day. He locates reports on alleged or confirmed cases of police misconduct from “all available media sources in the U.S.” and then incorporates those reports into databases.

While he acknowledges the shortfalls to relying on the news media for his data reports, Packman says that the media serves as the best possible data source “since a vast majority of police departments do not release misconduct data and state laws in many locations even prohibit the sharing of such data.”

Some Say Statistics Aren’t Necessary

But Kruger, who provides legal counsel for Maryland police departments and has participated in numerous officer misconduct cases, suggests that such statistics wouldn’t necessarily reveal whether or not any given department has “a problem that’s disproportionate to the rest of society.”

Based on her own experience, a very small percentage of police officers are convicted for crimes, indicating that such statistics would be insubstantial.

“There is no logic to maintaining a separate database or list of only those officers who have been charged with or convicted of crimes,” she said, noting that her law enforcement agency clients keep general databases on “complaints made against officers, the outcome of any investigation into such complaints and whether any personnel action was taken against the officer.”

Moreover, Martinelli, notes that police departments already receive considerable scrutiny from the public. “The [law enforcement] profession is policing itself,” he said.

“This is the mindset of police administrators and legal advisors, alike, that agencies can police themselves and mete out the appropriate discipline to right any wrongs, without civilian oversight boards or the public’s involvement,” Martinelli wrote in an email.

Yet, there’s still no way of knowing whether Kruger’s speculation — that the number of officer committing crimes is small — rings true.

The Honolulu Police Commission “does not routinely investigate criminal matters regarding members of the Honolulu Police Department,” according to James Hughes, the commission’s executive officer.

And the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center, the state agency that manages information on residents’ criminal history, does not distinguish and keep separate data on HPD officers who’ve been convicted for crimes.

The data center keeps data on all Hawaii arrests and convictions but does not “flag any records belonging to officers as such,” said Liane Moriyama, the center’s administrator.

Surfacing Officers’ Crimes via Internal Investigations

Following internal investigations is another method of tracking the number of officers who commit crimes. But that too, is difficult, says Packman. Public records laws often protect personnel information.

Laws addressing records on officer misconduct, says Packman, “vary greatly from state to state.” Some states maintain explicit stipulations that keep confidential records detailing disciplinary and internal investigations. Others have laws permitting departments to keep such records private if they choose, often at the discretion of “whoever’s in charge,” he says.

As Kruger notes, criminal records — those registering actual convictions — are considered public information. But laws designed to protect officers’ privacy mean that disciplinary records are often closed.

Given the gray area of officers’ privacy rights, it would be difficult to implement a system that tracks officers who’ve faced criminal investigations but haven’t necessarily been convicted, Martinelli indicates.

In at least 16 states, disciplinary records on officers are completely exempt from open records laws. In California and New Hampshire, for example, state laws explicitly require that those records remain classified in most cases.

Hawaii law states that misconduct-related items on an officer’s personnel file are confidential unless that misconduct resulted in the “discharge of the officer,” according to Honolulu’s Corporation Counsel Department. The department serves as the chief legal advisor to all city agencies.