“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find, you get what you need.” I’m fairly certain that this pearl of wisdom from the Rolling Stones was not aimed at the Honolulu Police Commission. That being stated, it’s advice that could radically improve the results of the commission’s main mission: hiring the Honolulu Police Department’s chief of police.

What’s ironic is that the commission constantly lets the world know its principal reason for existing is to hire the chief. A responsibility they jealously guard. Yet, commissioners face two fundamentally basic problems: they’ve convinced themselves they know what they want, yet they haven’t the foggiest idea of what HPD needs.

They don’t know HPD’s core strengths, weaknesses, where investment is needed, or how HPD stacks up against other departments in areas like training, policy, or community policing strategies. Anyone who followed the cute, jovial gabfests between Arthur (Joe) Logan and the commission can tell you these topics were never examined.

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat is focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

They definitely don’t know what their sworn and civilian staff need to be successful, nor what we think the department needs to provide the best services possible. How do we know? Because they’ve never asked.

Those of you playing along from home might wonder, “if they don’t know what the department needs or what the employees need, how can they select the next chief?” It’s an excellent question, one that we should all be asking. But we’re not. In fact, we never do.

It’s not a surprise, and it’s not unique to Honolulu. Police chief selection processes are often carried out in isolation from department employees. The process functions more like a high-stakes beauty pageant than a professional, serious and strategic effort to hire an executive leader charged with safeguarding an entire citizenry. Hiring panels want to be smitten with their choice, not challenged by them.

As we just saw in Kauaʻi, commissioners place enormous value on how a candidate responds to an essay question versus confirming and evaluating an actual, credible authentic body of work in policing.

In policing, experience matters. It matters a lot. But that’s lost on the commissions. Ask yourself, of the three chiefs who left their posts this past summer, how many of them had experience as a chief, deputy chief or assistant chief? Which one had experience in working with unions or administering the employer discipline system?  Which one spent just as much time being a cop as they did being an administrator? 

The answer is none of them. The reason is that the selection process is completely disconnected from the reality of police department operations.

Last year, as we watched in shock as Logan got top marks by the Honolulu commission on his performance review despite a stack of over 1,600 negative comments from the department’s own brief employee survey, SHOPO knew no one would come calling on our members to get their insight on hiring the next chief. So, we did it for them.

We fielded a survey of our Honolulu members about what attributes, skills and experience they’d like to see in a chief. What we got was an honest, insightful and astonishingly cohesive response.

In short, our members stated that their leaders — police, administrative, political and otherwise — are failing them. What police officers want from their leader is no different from what workers in other fields want. They want a leader who will be their champion: for resources, for their reputations, and for the HPD. They want a leader with tangible accomplishments in their career, not someone who boasts about having worked everywhere but has nothing to show for it. 

They want input into the job they do, feedback on how they’re doing and for the top cop to explain their vision for the department’s direction and how officers fit into it. They want to lose the “I have been here the longest, so I deserve the position” entitlement. To officers, rank and resume do not equal success.

A police department’s biggest financial investment, its biggest asset, its only hope for success, is its employees. Yet, they’re ignored in this process. That is ludicrous.

The national chief-picking playbook states that the hiring “consultant” writes a description of the ideal candidate. We encourage you to read one. What you’ll find are paragraphs stuffed full of self-help/management guru platitude-heavy adjectives. I counted 49 separate highly desired personality/experience attributes in a recent posting. Forty-nine.

The kicker is the typical chief selection process does not provide an opportunity for the commission or the community to assess a candidate by those 49 attributes. Instead, it’s a process shrouded in secrecy to hide the candidates and rush a decision. It all boils down to essay responses and interview performances. No public discussion on a portfolio of work. As we recently learned in Kauaʻi, we cannot even be sure a candidate’s name is Googled before getting the gig.

Expectations and responsibilities are continually placed on the shoulders of the not-yet-hired chief. Yet the process takes no time to measure the width of a candidate’s shoulders before making such a critical decision.

The Honolulu Police Department hiring process is seriously delayed. These months-in-waiting should be used to partner with all HPD employees to assess our strengths, weaknesses and needs. We should be taking this time to improve this process and treat it as seriously as we pretend it is.

Because we know for sure, you can’t always get what you want. However, if we work together, we just might get what HPD needs.