The gap in pay between state sheriffs and county police officers has widened in recent years, making it difficult for the Department of Law Enforcement to recruit and retain sheriffs for its short-staffed agency, department director Mike Lambert told the Legislature’s Finance Committee on Tuesday. 

During the hearing, Lambert outlined the progress his department has made over the past year, especially in the realm of fireworks enforcement, and described some of the new initiatives he plans to implement this year, such as the installation of gunshot-sensing devices called ShotSpotters in areas of Oʻahu with higher rates of gun violence. 

The Department of Law Enforcement is responsible for safeguarding state facilities, including courts, harbors and airports, and conducting statewide criminal investigations into such areas as narcotics trafficking, agriculture crime, illicit fireworks and crimes that occur within the state’s jails. 

The vacancy rate, though, creates a persistent challenge, Lambert said, especially as recent pay raises for county police officers widened the salary gap, making it more difficult for the state agency to attract and retain candidates. 

“We really are hurting,” he told the committee. “It’s important that I have parity so that I can recruit, so that our courts, our airports and harbors can be well staffed.” 

Pay Gap

County police department officers across the state received their largest raise in 17 years last year. Most members of the state police union will get a salary increase of 27% over four years. That means Honolulu police officers with seven years on the job will see their salaries rise from $89,736 last July to $108,036 by July 2028. 

An experienced deputy sheriff, by contrast, makes between $60,000 and $89,000, according to Civil Beat’s salary database. Sheriffs are represented by the Hawaiʻi Government Employee Association while county police officers across the state are all represented by the State of Hawaiʻi Organization of Police Officers.

The Honolulu Police Department has long struggled with staffing shortages, too. Its vacancy rate last year hovered around 20%, from about 15% in 2021.

Lambert told committee members his agency has a 27% vacancy rate.

“I would rather be at 20% than 27%,” he said. “So in other words, having a fair wage and at least being comparable would help me to fill those vacancies.”

Lambert didn’t go into detail with the Finance Committee about what kind of raises he would like to see for his sheriffs. 

In a letter submitted to the committee before the hearing, he said the salary disparity between county police and state sheriffs has contributed to “increased vacancies, elevated overtime usage, delayed hiring timelines, and the loss of experienced personnel to higher-paying county and mainland positions.” 

The shortages also cause Department of Law Enforcement employees to take on higher workloads and limit the department’s ability to do proactive enforcement, the letter says. 

Lambert told committee members his officers deserve to be paid what county police make. He highlighted an October barricade incident in Kapahulu during which a Department of Law Enforcement officer who was part of a task force was shot while trying to execute a federal narcotics search warrant.

“There was an HPD officer, to no fault of his own, 10 feet away that didn’t get shot but makes $20,000 more a year,” he said. “So when I hear that we’re not doing what they do, I’d like to highlight that as an example of not being true.”

Cracking Down On Fireworks

Despite the staffing shortages, Lambert said he was happy with the progress his officers made on reducing illegal fireworks activity over the New Year’s Eve holiday. 

He said the department seized more than 121,000 pounds of fireworks in 2025. The average consumer buys 50 to 100 pounds, so he said that equates to 1,200 to 2,400 families that didn’t have illegal fireworks this year. 

But he expressed disappointment in the low number of fireworks citations given out by Honolulu police. Police gave 29 citations and responded to 592 fireworks violation calls between 6 p.m. on Dec. 31 and 6 a.m. on Jan. 1. 

“That was a number that I was not happy with,” he told the committee. “I’m just going to have to figure out what hindered them from giving more tickets that night.” 

Honolulu police Interim Chief Rade Vanic said in a statement that officers need probable cause and sufficient evidence to issue fireworks citations and not every fireworks call meets that standard. 

“In addition to handling 592 fireworks calls, our officers responded to 881 general calls and made 119 arrests for public safety offenses,” the statement said. “True success is measured by the safety of our families, and I’m deeply grateful to our officers, dispatchers, and first responders who worked tirelessly to serve and protect our island.”

A civil citation, which carries a $300 fine, requires a lower standard of proof than what would be necessary for a criminal case. To issue a citation, an officer must be able to reasonably determine that a particular person “was more likely than not in control of an illegal aerial firework,” Brian Lynch, assistant chief of the regional patrol bureau said in a statement.

That may include directly observing someone light the firework, he said, or seeing someone in the immediate area where the firework was lit if they are the sole person there.

New Tech

To help further crack down on fireworks and gun violence, the department is planning to deploy an explosion-sensing technology called ShotSpotter that can detect the sound of a gunshot or firework. The technology consists of an array of acoustic sensors that triangulate from where a sound originated.

Lambert said he plans to install the devices in Kalihi, Waiʻanae and downtown Honolulu. 

He told lawmakers that in addition to monitoring gun violence, the ShotSpotters will help law enforcement measure fireworks activity and tell whether it’s gone up or down each year. 

“It’s going to give us a temperature check year over year based on sound if we’re making improvement,” he said. 

He also hopes it will help with shooting investigations. The ShotSpotter system can be combined with existing license plate readers to show law enforcement officials the plate numbers of every car that fled from a shooting scene. 

Lambert said this can give investigators leads on shootings where no witnesses are cooperating.

The AI public safety company that makes ShotSpotter claims on its website that the technology has a 97% accuracy rate for detecting gunfire. 

SoundThinking says the technology provides important public safety benefits, including helping police respond to gunshot victims when there is no associated 911 call, improving investigators’ ability to recover evidence like shell casings from shooting scenes and collecting comprehensive data on gunshots in cities. 

But the technology has been controversial in some of the 180 cities where it’s being used.  

A 2021 study in the Journal of Urban Health that examined 68 counties using ShotSpotter between 1999 and 2016 found it had no significant impact on homicides or arrest outcomes in those areas.

Three years later, an audit of ShotSpotter in New York City found that the vast majority of calls police responded to as a result of ShotSpotter alerts were never confirmed to be shootings. Of the 940 ShotSpotter alerts had police responded to in July 2023, 82% could not be confirmed as shootings when officers arrived on scene, according to the audit. New York City police officers spent nearly 430 hours investigating dead-end alerts that month alone. 

“Given this low performance rate — as well as the $54 million contract value — NYPD should re-evaluate use of the tool to determine whether it is in the best interests of the City,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander wrote in the report. 

The technology costs between $65,000 and $90,000 for each square mile where sensors are installed, according to The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom focused on gun violence.

In 2024, the mayor of Chicago decided not to renew the city’s ShotSpotter contract. An analysis of city data by the newspaper South Side Weekly and the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations found ShotSpotter missed more than 20% of the shootings and firearms discharges that happened within its coverage area between January 2023 and August 2024.

A study of the use of ShotSpotter in St. Louis County, Missouri, by the New York University Policing Project found the technology alerted police to four times as many gunshot incidents as in comparable areas of the county without the technology. In areas with ShotSpotter technology, assaults, including gun-related assaults, fell by 30%.

Lambert was not available for follow-up questions about how much the technology will cost or when law enforcement officials will start using it.