Newly selected Kaua‘i Police Chief Rudy Tai will not take office for at least two months but he’s already offered island residents a sense of what kind of leader he’ll be: Visible, approachable and upbeat, with plans to build the next generation of police supervisors and strengthen the department’s community relationship.

The Kaua‘i Police Commission chose Tai to run the department from a pool of four finalists at its Nov. 21 meeting despite concerns from the state’s influential police union. The job opening, which carries a $181,800 salary, attracted 42 applicants.

It is a conditional job offer, pending ongoing background checks, with an undetermined start date that Tai said he expects will fall sometime in February or March.

Tai, 60, is the San Diego Police Department’s second-highest-ranking member. He runs the agency’s daily operations and serves as a volunteer community liaison between the department and the city’s Asian and Pacific Islander community. He was born in Hawai‘i, raised in Pearl City and has been a San Diego cop since 1990.

The Oʻahu native said he won’t assume the role of the island’s ninth police chief until after he retires from the San Diego Police Department in February, closing a 35-year career where he has served stints as captain, assistant chief, deputy chief and acting police chief. 

“My goal was always to try somehow to return to the islands and serve others and provide some guidance and leadership from all of the experience and knowledge I gathered over the years,” Tai told Civil Beat last week. “When I saw the Kaua‘i chief opening, it almost sounded like a dream job.” 

Former Chief Todd Raybuck retired in June after a six-year tenure clouded by controversy. The department has since been run by Elliott Kalani Ke, who moved up from assistant chief to serve as interim chief. Ke did not apply for the chief position.

Tai faces a challenging time at KPD. He must manage an approximately 135-member force struggling with low morale and low staffing and navigate the dynamics of being a so-called outsider in a culture where deep, genealogical connections to the island shape social and political frameworks.

Nicholas Schlapak, president of the State of Hawai‘i Organization of Police Officers, has said that Kaua‘i’s next chief will need to focus on rebuilding the department, a message that reveals the union’s dissatisfaction with department leadership under Raybuck.

“They really need to start with trust and individual buy-in and … they need to find a way to take employee feedback, listen to it and then engage those employees and actually create solutions,” Schlapak said.

When he is sworn in next year, Tai said he will seek to develop a leadership training program, boost recruitment efforts and build stronger relationships between police officers and the community — business owners, religious leaders, politicians and residents.

“As chief, I want to be approachable and I want our officers to be visible,” he said. “Just because a police officer is there doesn’t mean something’s wrong. I want to flip that script. I want officers walking around because I want people to feel safe.”

Through community engagement, such as public meetings and listening sessions, and crime data analysis, Tai said he wants to develop strategies to prevent crime before it happens. 

When it comes to housing instability, mental health and other quality-of-life issues that don’t necessarily fall under the purview of law enforcement, Tai said he wants to partner with health and social services agencies and volunteers to help people find resources.

“Sometimes we’re missing it — we don’t see what residents see in their own neighborhoods,” Tai said. “It’s really built on relationships. Without community support, there’s no way any police department can be successful.”

He pointed to the Kaua‘i Police Activities League, or K-PAL, which offers boxing, wrestling, jiu jitsu, flag football and pickleball leagues, as well as a junior police academy, as an already successful vehicle for youth development and relationship-building between kids and cops.

Local Roots, Outsider Perspective

A number of outsiders have been appointed to police chief positions across Hawai‘i’s county police departments in recent years, sometimes driven by public demand for greater transparency and accountability. It hasn’t always panned out.

Performance evaluations for Raybuck, who was plucked from the Las Vegas Police Department to take the reins at KPD, show that soon after he was hired in 2019 he was considered “well on his way to stardom.” 

In early job reviews, police commissioners commended Raybuck for generating a “newfound sense of respect for KPD” among Kaua‘i residents, noting that complaints from the public and from within the police department noticeably declined under his leadership.

But Raybuck found his shining public image tarnished when a 2021 county investigation found he had created a hostile work environment and violated county discrimination policies when he mocked Asian Americans by bowing his head, squinting his eyes and fabricating a Japanese accent in conversation with officers. He was suspended without pay for five days and later apologized for the comments in a statement posted on YouTube.

He announced his retirement about a week before he was suspended without pay for three days in November 2024 for leaving his loaded, department-issued Glock unsecured in a police station bathroom stall for the second time in two years.

It’s unclear how Tai’s outsider’s perspective might serve him as chief. Although new to Kaua‘i, he spent the first 18 years of his life on O‘ahu before moving to California to pursue higher education and a law enforcement career. Tai said he grew up in a family steeped in Hawaiian culture and local values, tenets he has continued to cultivate.

“Even though I left the islands,” he said, “the aloha spirit always stayed with me.”

Tai is a Pearl City High School graduate of Hawaiian and Chinese descent. He grew up in a Mormon family, involving himself in sports and the Boys Scouts. He looked up to law enforcement officers, including several family members.

After high school he attended San Diego State University, pursuing studies in law and sociology. He joined the San Diego Police Department shortly after graduation. It’s always been his dream, he wrote in his job application for the Kaua‘i position, to return to Hawaiʻi.

Tai said he has childhood friends on Kaua‘i, as well as distant relatives from Hanalei he hopes to meet when he moves to the island early next year.

Last month Schlapak, the police union president, raised concerns about Tai’s judgment as a supervisor, pointing to his failure to hold accountable a subordinate officer who in the 1990s was allegedly involved in a sexual misconduct incident involving a mentally disabled woman, according to a 2014 news story in the nonprofit news outlet Voice of San Diego. Tai gave the officer a verbal warning, according to the story, and did not document the incident.

Schlapak told Civil Beat that Tai’s lighthandedness in dealing with the incident could have allowed the officer’s misconduct to continue. The cop, former San Diego Officer Anthony Arevalos, was convicted of sexual assault in 2011. A 2015 investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found the department had systematically failed to discipline and hold its officers accountable.

“It was 30 years ago but what I would tell people is I took immediate action,” Tai told Civil Beat. “I counseled the officer and I told my supervisor and I did not see any type of activity like that moving forward with that officer.”

Crime Is Flat But New Chief Faces Challenges

The island’s crime rate decreased by almost 1% in 2024 to 3,613 incidents, or 31 fewer crimes than the previous year, according to a crime statistics dashboard published by the Hawaiʻi Attorney General’s Office. The slight reduction stands in contrast to other neighbor islands. On the Big Island and Maui, which hired its current chief from Las Vegas as well, the number of criminal offenses last year climbed by 5.9% and 4.2%, respectively.

But while crime was falling, other challenges mounted. A 2024 workplace Gallup survey found that 49% of KPD employees aren’t just unhappy at the department — they’re resentful that their needs aren’t being met.

KPD employees who participated in the survey noted a lack of daily appreciation and said the department’s values seem superficial.

“I am counting the days until I can leave,” reads one survey response. “I feel we are at a standstill since this administration. There is no direction. There is no training or guidance. I feel like a ship that is floating in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight and no direction of where we are going.”

Tai will oversee the agency at a time of high public concern over historic staffing lows. The Kauaʻi Police Department, with a $41.5 million annual budget and 236 full-time staff members, has 135 sworn officers. Another 30 officer positions are unfilled, creating an 18% officer vacancy rate.

Last year the department reorganized its command staff and merged several bureaus to improve efficiency and streamline communication amid staffing troubles. The structural changes remain under review but are expected to become permanent, according to KPD’s 2024 annual report.

The agency’s command staff now includes two assistant chiefs and five captains, rather than three assistant chiefs and four captains. A captain position was added to the support services bureau that oversees evidence, training, records and community engagement to alleviate the assistant chief’s workload and improve workload distribution among captains. 

The former investigations and patrol services bureaus merged to form the new police operations bureau, which also includes divisions focused on criminal investigations, patrol administration and field operations. The latter, considered the backbone of the police department, is responsible for responding to 911 calls.

The department receives roughly 50,000 emergency calls for service a year. 

In some areas, such as training, the agency is making strides. This year KPD established a weapons training option at KPD headquarters in Līhuʻe with a goal to quadruple officers’ annual training time. Most officers currently participate in just a few hours of hands-on firearms drills annually. 

The new virtual reality and live-fire training complex has two components: a $2 million modular live-fire shooting range unveiled earlier this month and a compact, portable Taser and handgun training container powered by virtual reality that the department acquired in April. 

Combined, these technologies introduce realistic, immersive exercises that go beyond traditional shooting practice. Built into a series of shipping containers, the training complex makes weapons drills more accessible, unlocking the potential for micro-learning sessions that last only 20 minutes.

Kauaʻi police officers rarely fire their guns in the line of duty during their careers. None of the department’s 135 officers pulled the trigger in 2024.

Civil Beat’s reporting on Kauaʻi is supported in part by a grant from the G. N. Wilcox Trust.