The Honolulu Police Commission is finally moving forward in its search to replace former chief Joe Logan, who announced his retirement in June after about three years in the job.

The city’s procurement office inked a deal on Dec. 31 with the California consulting firm Public Sector Search & Consulting Inc. for $121,900. The company, which specializes in law enforcement executive hiring, has agreed to come up with three to five candidates for the seven-member commission to choose from.

And it looks like it will still be May or June before a new permanent chief is on board, based on a timeline included in the search firm’s proposal and contract, despite public promises by the city and the commission that this time it wouldn’t take so long to find a new chief. It was nearly a year between when former chief Susan Ballard quit and Logan was in place, mainly because the city’s procurement process takes that long if it needs to bring on an outside search firm to do the heavy lifting.

So here we ago again. But this time the Police Commission envisions more public forums held in local communities before a final selection is made, as well as making more of the search process public as it unfolds.

“I want us to over-communicate,” Commission Chair Ken Silva says.

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The new chief will be Honolulu’s fourth since Louis Kealoha, a cop with a Ph.D. in education, was promoted to chief in 2009. Five years later, the FBI began an extensive public corruption investigation into Kealoha and his wife, Katherine, a deputy county prosecutor, after the couple tried to frame her uncle on federal charges of stealing their mailbox to get a leg up in a civil case he had brought against them. In 2019, the Kealohas were convicted and imprisoned on federal conspiracy and corruption charges in a case that took down several other Honolulu police officers and other city officials.

Kealoha retired from the department during the investigation but not before the Police Commission agreed to give him an extra $250,000 on top of his retirement so he wouldn’t raise a stink. He was eventually replaced by Ballard.

She quit abruptly in 2021 after the Police Commission questioned some of her management practices in an annual job review. Logan, a former adjutant general with the Hawaiʻi National Guard, took over in 2022.

The Police Commission used a search firm that time too, a company that had worked on the search for Ballard, and picked him from a group of four finalists. The process was widely criticized for lack of transparency and lack of broad community engagement, a knock on the commission that puzzles current and recent members of the panel who think they talked to lots of people in the community and even had the candidates go on public TV to talk about themselves.

A couple of things appear to be different this time, based on a review of Public Sector Search & Consulting’s proposal as well as the contract it signed.

First, the contract doesn’t allow the consultant to withhold information about the candidates it collects as part of its search process. The last consultant claimed it was proprietary work product, not public record.

That material is expected to include candidate dossiers, the results of surveys of stakeholders (such as agencies and organizations that deal with the police department), police department employees and the community. We should get to see how the consultants rate the candidates this time.

More importantly, the proposal and the contract envision much more community involvement in the selection of the new chief. The consultants, who are expected to be in Honolulu for a few days later this month, plan to reach out to numerous people and conduct surveys to help them shape a a job posting and brochure that will lay out in detail just what qualities they are looking for in a chief.

The contract requires the firm to involve the State of Hawaiʻi Organization of Police Officers, the statewide police union, early in the process. The Police Commission wants the search firm to take SHOPO’s views seriously and to interview as many rank-and-file members as it can, perhaps even holding listening sessions at district police stations during shift changes, says Silva, the Police Commission chair.

“The SHOPO executive board I think is just critical,” Silva said. He’s also of the mind that the consultant needs to speak face to face with as many officers, dispatchers and staff as possible.

That’s a different approach than the last couple searches and SHOPO President Don Faumuina is glad to hear that his organization has finally got the commission’s attention.

“Honestly,” he said in an interview last week, “we haven’t always felt heard in decisions that directly affect the day to day policing and the direction of the department.”

In recent months, SHOPO leaders have been attending Honolulu City Council and Police Commission meetings to present the findings of a survey of about 600 officers and civilian staff that discussed issues within the department.

At the public meetings and in interviews with Civil Beat and other media, “we talked about the qualities and the experiences of what the next chief should have,” Faumuina said. “And our members were united in what they wanted to see in their next chief. … Our members are on the line every day and they know better than anyone what HPD needs and the type of leader that we need to achieve real, actual progress.”

That boils down to someone who will “publicly stand up for our officers, defend them when they get it right, and stand up for HPD and ensure officers have the resources that we need to protect our community,” he said.

Patrol staffing and finding ways to retain good officers should be priorities.

They also want a chief who knows what it’s like to be on the street and doing the job they’re asked to do every day. Not someone “who’s been in the office most of their careers.”

Once the search firm recruits, screens and recommends three to five finalists, the Police Commission takes over. Last time the consultant kept close control throughout the hiring process.

It will be up to the commission to reach out to the community, likely through a series of public forums, and get feedback on what the citizens want in their next police chief. That part of the process is expected to start in mid-April, according to the timeline presented in the proposal.

It remains to be seen what those sessions might look like. Silva said in an interview last week that beyond preliminary surveys and gathering information to draft a job description, the commission hopes to partner with the neighborhood boards to get a better feel for where to hold public forums and how those audiences might come together.

The good news is that he does want to hold meetings in the community, finally bringing the commission out from the small conference room behind the locked doors of the downtown police headquarters where it always meets. That in itself would be a giant step toward actually engaging the public.

Read the search firm’s contract and proposal: