Data Dive: Crime Is Down In Honolulu But Cops Still Struggle To Solve Cases
Just over half of homicides in 2024 were solved, and the police department’s record for addressing vehicle thefts is far below the national average.
The number of crimes reported in Honolulu dropped by a whopping 28% between 2021 and 2024. But despite having fewer cases to investigate, the percentage of crimes solved by police didn’t improve at nearly the same pace.
That’s according to the Honolulu Police Department’s public dashboard, which logs the department’s clearance rate — the proportion of offenses that resulted in an arrest or another resolution, such as the death of an offender or a lack of cooperation by the victim.
Last year, police cleared roughly 21% of the more than 37,000 offenses reported across Oʻahu. In 2020, only about 17% of the island’s 52,045 reported offenses were cleared.
Clearance rates on Oʻahu vary wildly by the case type, so while the department has seen significant improvements in solving crimes such as robberies, its rate for other crimes — including homicide — has gone in the opposite direction.
The department did not respond to requests for comment.
HPD Struggling With Murders, Thefts
The overall downward crime trend in the last three years has a notable exception: police recorded 37 homicides in 2024, the most of any year since 2020. Last year its clearance rate for homicides was at its lowest in three years — just 57%.
So far this year, HPD has recorded — and cleared — two homicides. But 16 homicides from 2024 still haven’t been cleared, according to the dashboard.
More than half of crimes reported last year involved some sort of theft, including larceny, motor vehicle theft, burglary, stolen property, robbery and embezzlement. Several of these crimes consistently have some of the lowest clearance rates in the department.
Larceny alone made up more than a third of cases last year, about 90% of which went unsolved. While the resolution rate for robbery cases has gone up to about 27%, police closed just 127 of the 1,647 burglaries recorded in 2024 — less than 8%.
The department also consistently solves less than 3% of motor vehicle thefts, significantly lower than the national average of 9.3% in 2022.
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