Two Honolulu paramedics didn’t think much of taking their official city vehicles home with them in the spring and summer of 2023. There was no rule against it. If a call came in, they figured, they had their phones and radios on them and could quickly respond.

What they didn’t know is an investigator hired by their bosses was outside taking pictures of their department SUVs and building a case that they were sleeping on the job. 

The investigation into the two paramedics would get them sidelined on paid leave and eventually fired in February 2024 before they were reinstated two years later. An arbitrator ordered the city to give them backpay, but as of this month, the city acknowledged, they still haven’t gotten it. 

The probe cast aside two supervisors in a department that was already suffering from chronic understaffing and burnout. And with each employee making in excess of $97,000, taxpayers were left to pay for more than $300,000 in work not performed. 

The circumstances that triggered the investigation — and the manner in which it was conducted — also raised concerns about the department’s motivations, according to investigation and arbitration documents obtained by Civil Beat through a public records request. The identities of the employees and their supervisors were redacted from the documents, but one of them, Jonathan Lee, confirmed his identify to Civil Beat and agreed to an interview.

“I really believe this was a targeted investigation and termination,” Lee said.

The Honolulu Emergency Services Department launched the probe in reaction to an anonymous complaint in May 2023. An EMS official then hired a friend’s security company to conduct the investigation and guided the inquiry, telling the investigator which witnesses to talk to and what questions to ask, the city records show. The official also disclosed the employees’ home addresses without their consent, which the company used for surveillance. 

The official, who is unnamed in the documents,  “wrongly controlled and directed the secret investigation,” the arbitrator wrote in a June 2025 order reinstating the employees. 

In the end, an arbitrator concluded the city erred in its investigation of the employees and improperly fired them for breaking a rule that didn’t exist. The employees got their jobs back.

According to the arbitrator’s decision, the city treated its process “as mere legal camouflage” to make it look like they followed the correct procedure before firing the paramedics. 

The paramedics’ union United Public Workers did not respond to a request for comment. Shayne Enright, spokesperson for the city’s EMS department, declined requests to interview director Jim Ireland and deputy director Ian Santee.

Former Honolulu EMS chief Patty Dukes said the EMS workers should have been more embedded in their districts rather than working from home. But she also said the city’s investigation and eventual firing of the employees was mishandled.

“I find it unacceptable to take a car home and stay there for three or four hours,” she said, referencing the paramedics’ actions. But she said EMS can’t cite it as a reason to fire them if there’s no policy prohibiting it, and she criticized EMS’s decision to initially not inform them they were being investigated.

“I just don’t think that’s the right way to do an investigation,” she said.

Paramedics Surveilled By Bosses

Each paramedic challenged their firing and the amount of money the city paid to them while on leave. The department deprived them of regular overtime pay as well as holiday pay, night shift differentials and meal allowances, Lee said. He declined to say how much money the paramedics are requesting since that amount is still under discussion.

“It’s not a big number,” he said, “but it’s a significant enough amount of money that we’re asking for.”

The firing was also improperly handled, the paramedics said, and the arbitrator agreed. 

The anonymous tip that sparked the investigation said the employees had been unplugging their EMS vehicles’ tracking devices and taking the vehicles home at night to sleep while on duty.

EMS then hired Allied Universal to surveil the employees’ homes, finding a handful of occasions that each went home with their work vehicles during the months of June and July 2023 for two or three hours at a time while on duty. 

The department informed the employees they were being placed on paid investigative leave in late July and early August, and the employees’ union United Public Workers filed grievances on their behalf three weeks later. The city denied the grievances, and in December, UPW informed the city that they would pursue arbitration. 

There is no policy prohibiting EMS employees from bringing their city-issued vehicles home during their shifts, the arbitrator’s order says. While employees who do take their vehicles home often do so briefly in order to change clothes or pick up food, it says, there is no written rule against going home for hours at a time. 

With that in mind, the order says, it is unfair to punish the paramedics for not following a policy that does not exist.

“It was an established practice within EMS that EMS employees could take their EMS vehicle home so long as they were within their district and available to respond to calls,” it says. It says nothing indicated that the paramedics missed work calls or were sleeping on the job. 

One fired paramedic said they worked from home on training slides and that the city’s firewall blocked them from downloading videos at work, which was one reason they worked from home. The other said they went home to take care of a loved one, and admitted they did not request Family and Medical Leave for that despite having done so in the past. 

In addition, the decision says, the city should have informed the paramedics they were under investigation and should have precisely explained what the charges were per their contracts. Instead, it says, officials went against the established chain of command by purposefully not informing the paramedics’ direct supervisor of the charges against them so they would not find out they were being surveilled. 

The employees were surveilled for roughly two months before being informed they were under investigation, an approach the city defended by saying the paramedics were not technically under investigation at the time. Manta K. Dircks, an attorney who represented the paramedics for UPW, challenged that argument. 

“So you wouldn’t consider surveillance an investigation?” Dircks asked an EMS official whose name is redacted during a January 2025 hearing for the arbitration. 

“No, because as I stated earlier, that we have a process,” the official said. “The information [the anonymous complaint] was provided as an allegation and we provided the surveillance to determine if we could move forward with an investigation or not.”

The arbitrator sided with the paramedics on that front and said the city committed other errors in its investigation process too, citing the official’s friendship with the investigator they used from Allied Universal. 

Furthermore, UPW submitted a memo in support of each employee before a January 2024 meeting arguing why they should not be terminated. When the department terminated them weeks later, their discharge notices made no mention of the arguments in UPW’s two memos. 

The arbitrator asked a department official whether they reviewed one of the memos before deciding to terminate the employees. The official said no. When the arbitrator started to ask whether they read the other memo, the official jumped in early with an answer.  

“I’ll help you,” the city official said. “No, I did not review that document.” 

All evidence offered by UPW – including those memos – must be reviewed by the employer before coming to a final decision, according to the paramedics’ employment contract. 

And when it came to the charge that the paramedics had been disconnecting their vehicles’ tracking systems, the arbitrator concluded the systems are too technologically unreliable to use as evidence.

One of the paramedics alleged that the investigation was retaliation for speaking out against proposed shift changes during a union members-only Zoom call on May 11, 2023. 

“I don’t have evidence,” the paramedic said. “It’s a feeling. I feel this was a personal attack on me for what I’ve spoken up for my field personnel.”

The arbitrator rejected that argument, citing the lack of evidence. 

Slow To Rehire

Even after the arbitrator’s June 2025 order, the union said city officials dragged their feet fulfilling its terms. 

Both paramedics were supposed to be rehired with their records expunged and given backpay after the arbitrator’s decision. 

Rehiring typically takes between one to four weeks, a UPW employee with over 40 years of experience testified during another arbitration hearing. But eight weeks after the June order, the paramedics still had not been rehired.

In explaining the holdup, the city cited paperwork issues and unresolved questions about the employee’s retirement pay. The union called the city’s ostensible confusion “a delay tactic.” 

The paramedics were reinstated Aug. 28, 2025, according Enright, the EMS spokesperson.

Camron Hurt, executive director of the good government group Common Cause Hawaiʻi, said the saga highlights the importance of unions to protect people’s employment rights and ensure their contract is followed correctly.

“If it was not followed that way,” he said, “they have every right to be challenging this.”

When it comes to surveilling the employees without them being told they’re under investigation, Dukes, the former EMS chief, she said she can see both sides. 

“If they know they’re being watched they’re going to behave,” she said. But she also said employees need to be told they’re under investigation. 

Her experience as EMS chief made her familiar with the need to investigate employees, she said, “but we did it while they were on leave, and they were notified that this was going on. I think the method in which they tried to do it, to catch them, backfired, honestly.” 

The city seems to have learned from the saga. A policy now exists that covers when employees can go home while on shift.

“It says you’re absolutely not allowed to go home on duty under any circumstances,” Lee said. “It came out the day before we were reinstated.”