When was the last time the Honolulu Police Department said, “Yeah, we messed up on that one. Sorry.”

The answer isn’t “never,” but it is a rare occurrence.

The usual response is a justification for what the cops did or didn’t do. First, the chief or an assistant chief says the situation “has to be evaluated,” which buys enough time for some of the heat to die down so that everyone has forgotten what happened when the lawsuit is settled out of court or somebody actually gets fired.

In the last week, the Honolulu Police Department defended handcuffing a little girl at her elementary school and arresting her for something she drew on paper, saying the police action was “reasonable.”

In the last week, video surfaced that showed three police cars appearing to leave the scene of a vehicle crash that happened during a high-speed police chase. In the last week, a cache of surfboards stored a short way down the street from the Waikiki police station was set ablaze — the third such incident in less than two years, as though surfboard-rack fires next to police stations are now a trendy prank to see if the officers sitting at desks ever notice anything going on on their block.

All this new stuff is on top of all the old stuff – police shootings, crime-solving problems, understaffing issues and a recruit class that largely washed out, Former Chief Susan Ballard’s abrupt departure after refusing to step up to Police Commission performance goals, and all the Chief Louis Kealoha mess that still hangs over the department like a bad smell.

There is so much to fix at HPD; but while many problems linger, new stuff keeps piling up.

One of the biggest flaws of HPD, and of state and local government in Hawaii as a whole, is that nobody ever says they’re sorry. It is rare for anyone in a government job to take responsibility or admit that things did not go as they should have.

It always has to wind up in lawsuits and settlements. It almost always must involve the media to invoke a measure of public shame to the department, but even then, the reflexive reaction is always to defend, deny and clam up.

HPD does not understand or employ the disarming power of an apology.

Here’s an example of how that can work:

In December 2004, a large boulder came tumbling down onto the highway in Nanakuli. Two women who were driving on the highway could not avoid the boulder and plowed into it. Both women were seriously injured. A construction company had been doing work on the hillside in the area and immediately took responsibility for dislodging the boulder. The company literally said they were sorry, even using those words on note cards attached to flowers sent to the two women in the hospital.

A simple, earnest apology can be disarming in the sense that it can allay hostility in a situation and keep it from escalating.

“I believe things will die down fast if you just tell people what happened and answer their questions up front,” the company leader said. “You can’t demand integrity from your employees if you don’t practice it from the top … Our situation wouldn’t be any worse if we took responsibility right away. It’s better than having lawyers argue over responsibility for months in court and then come to the same conclusion. If we’re going to give out money, I’d rather give it to the victims than attorneys.”

That should not have been remarkable, but it was.

In March of this year, Ballard did publicly apologize, but not to the public. Ballard apologized to HPD officers and their union about an unauthorized memo that detailed a weekly quota of five moving citations, five parking citations and two DUI stops per traffic officer. That wasn’t so much an “I’m sorry” as an “I don’t need more hassling with the police union right now.”

A simple, earnest apology can be disarming in the sense that it can allay hostility in a situation and keep it from escalating. An apology could potentially be disarming in terms of removing the fuse from a public relations bomb. Of course, an apology means nothing if not backed up by an offer to make things right and a serious effort to never repeat the offense, but an apology at least signals an attempt to be reasonable and self-reflective.

It’s hard to trust anyone who never apologizes. Everyone messes up. When your job requires split-second decision-making, dealing with dangerous criminals, carrying a gun and the impunity to turn on lights and sirens and drive at high speeds, the consequences of messing up are that much greater.

Yes, we live in a litigious society, and yeah, HPD has to do more than say “sorry” when they mess up, but that the department so rarely acknowledges that they do mess up makes it that much harder for the public to trust their explanations and justifications.