All three finalists vying to be Honolulu’s next police chief say expanding the police department’s use of technology and improving transparency and trust by the community would be top priorities.

But they had somewhat differing views of whether the Honolulu Police Department should hold the line on helping federal immigration authorities arrest and detain undocumented immigrants, an issue that has resonated strongly with the public as the Trump administration has launched nationwide enforcement efforts.

The search to replace former Chief Joe Logan, who retired last summer, is in its final stage. The Honolulu Police Commission last week narrowed the original pool of more than 40 candidates to three finalists.

They are Mike Lambert, currently the director of state Department of Law Enforcement who announced last month he’d be leaving that job because of a retirement system issue; David Lazar, who retired as assistant chief in San Francisco last year; and Scott Ebner, who served most of his career with the New Jersey State Police but served most recently as chief in Glynn County, Georgia.

The candidates will be interviewed on “PBS Insights” Thursday night, then are scheduled to meet with Mayor Rick Blangiardi next week. The Honolulu Police Commission also plans to meet with each candidate individually and then in an open public session Wednesday. The commission intends to pick a new chief at the Wednesday meeting.  

In one-on-one interviews with Civil Beat this week, each finalist outlined his law enforcement background, vision for the department and views on policing issues. Here are each, in alphabetical order:

Scott Ebner

Ebner would bring more than three decades of law enforcement experience across the U.S. to the role. 

While he shared an overall vision for the department and some of his achievements as chief in Glynn County, Georgia, he said he didn’t want to get into too many specifics of his plan. 

Ebner was a finalist during Honolulu’s last chief search in 2022 and said he shared too many details during a PBS “Insights” public session that time, only to have his ideas adopted by other candidates. 

“I certainly understand that the public wants to hear from us and talk to us,” he said, “but I’ll just keep the specifics to when I meet with the comission and the mayor.”

Ebner, 57, worked for the New Jersey State Police for 27 years and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel there. He most recently served as police chief and public safety director in Glynn County, Georgia, where he was hired in 2023. 

He noted he’s the only one of the finalists who’s already worked as a chief. 

Ebner stepped down from his position in December after two years on the job and moved into a role doing public safety consulting for the county and, he said, helping with the transition to the next chief. 

He touted some of his success as chief including increasing recruitment by 25% and improving public perception of the department. 

When he started in the role, Glynn County was still reckoning with the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old unarmed Black man who was fatally shot by by two white men while jogging through a Brunswick neighborhood. The shooting, which occurred in February 2020, happened just before the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis sparked the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests against police.

“Morale was really bad, trust in the community with the media was really low,” Ebner said. “We implemented a public information campaign, met with the media monthly, told them I was going to share what I had, the good, the bad, with them.” 

Ebner said throughout his career he’s also been a major proponent of technology, including drones. As chief, he said he would use additional revenue the department has because of its vacancies to invest in technology upgrades, new equipment and infrastructure improvements. 

“I’m excited to do all of them,” he said. “I have done all of them, and I want to do it here.” 

On collaboration with ICE, Ebner said he didn’t think it was a policy he should create as chief. In New Jersey, he said, it was the state attorney general who put out a directive to local law enforcement not to assist with ICE operations. In Georgia, he said local law enforcement didn’t work with federal immigration agents either. 

“To me, it’s a non-issue,” he said. “I’ve never done it. We won’t do it. The only way we would do it is if they change the law here and they made us do it.” 

When asked why he stepped down so soon after getting the Glynn County job, he said he was ready for a change and had been eyeing the chief job in Honolulu when he saw it was coming open again. 

“I had good people in place, I had an outstanding crew there, and I wanted to move on,” he said. “I was waiting for this to open because I saw Joe Logan had resigned in June.”

He also applied for the chief job in Snoqualmie, Washington, where he was named a finalist earlier this month. 

But he said his heart is set on the job in Honolulu, where he said he’s traveled multiple times with his family since his honeymoon here in 1998. He also feels he can make a difference in the department and fix some of the systemic issues, which he pointed out have only worsened since he applied for the job four years ago. In 2022, the department had about 300 vacancies for sworn officers; that number has grown to about 460 now.

“More importantly, I was asked to put in for it the last time around by people here,” he said, “ and they said, ‘We really need you now. It’s not gotten better.’”

Mike Lambert

Lambert has spent the majority of his career at the Honolulu Police Department, and as the only insider candidate among the finalists, he says he’s the only one who can “hit the ground running.” 

“I know what needs to be fixed,” said Lambert, who left HPD last year to run the state law enforcement agency. “I know which people in my command have the right skill set for certain projects. I know which commanders need development in certain areas, and you can’t replicate that in a short amount of time.”

The 46-year-old Kāneʻohe native, who also was a finalist for the HPD chief job in 2022, hopes the fact that he rose through the ranks of HPD won’t hurt his chances at becoming chief. 

Some people may judge insiders as not being able to bring the cultural shifts necessary to truly reform HPD, which has been rocked by scandal in past years. One longtime HPD officer who rose to chief, Louis Kealoha, was caught up in a federal corruption probe stemming from his actions as chief and ultimately convicted and sent to federal prison.

He was followed in the chief’s role by another longtime insider, Susan Ballard, who stepped down after three years when she received a somewhat negative job review by the Police Commission. Logan, who had been a Honolulu cop earlier in his career, was a career military officer and had been running the state emergency management agency when he was tapped as chief. He also left the job after three years.

“I feel like I’m having to live with the sins of the father,” Lambert said about Kealoha. “That I wouldn’t do a good job because the last guy with a similar resume betrayed all of us.”

But Lambert said his track record shows that he’s committed to transparency and following the rules. 

“I think what officers love about me is that I’m not a hypocrite,” he said. “I will expect them to do what I do. Which means, be polite to people, do your job. The rules matter.” 

He noted that he was the one who conducted an internal audit of drunken-driving arrests of drivers who were released and never charged shortly after Hawaiʻi News Now broke a story about a sober driver being falsely arrested at a checkpoint. Lambert said he found “red flags” in the data and wrote a memo to the then-assistant chief warning him sober drivers were being arrested and asking for an investigation. 

That investigation never happened, and the American Civil Liberties Union later sued the department on behalf of hundreds of drivers. 

“I was pissed because we’re already dealing with public trust — you know what I mean? — investigate these guys,” he said. “It has to be looked at seriously.”

Lambert said as chief he will be committed to transparency and holding everyone to the same standard. He would create a discipline matrix to match misconduct violations with specific punishments. It would be made public so community members could understand why certain discipline is doled out to officers. The department would also be able to point to a consistent disciplinary standard during the arbitration process with the union. He is in the final stages of creating such a matrix for the DLE. 

“It’s preset outcomes based on officer behavior, so in other words, there is no ambiguity,” he said. “We set standards that people can see ahead of time.” 

He also said he would loop the community in on any plans to expand the department’s use of technology, which he favors. As DLE director, he established the Real-Time Operations Center, similar to the real-time hub in San Francisco, which brings together various technologies including drones and license plate readers to respond to crimes. He is working on setting up drone docking stations throughout Waikīkī and wants to install ShotSpotters, which are gunshot-detecting machines, in various locations around Oʻahu. 

One thing Lambert would not commit to, however, was establishing a policy to prevent police officers from collaborating with federal immigration enforcement. He said he agrees that police should not be involved in enforcing administrative immigration violations, which could include an overstayed visa or a missed court hearing. But he stressed that federal partners can be helpful in investigations into sex trafficking or drug smuggling.

Overall, he said he understands community concerns but also puts a priority on patrol officers want and need. Things like buying new patrol vehicles, which the public might balk at paying for, can make all the difference to an officer on the road. He recalled being a patrol officer himself and getting assigned to the dreaded “HPD 666,” a dilapidated patrol car that reeked of old fish and had exposed metal in the steering wheel. 

“I was pissed off the whole shift, and it probably transferred to the people I talked to that night,” he said. “But I can tell you right now, when I got a new car and I sat in there, I felt like… man, my boss cares about me.” 

David Lazar

Lazar wants to run a police department focused on transparency. 

The 55-year-old San Francisco native told Civil Beat that if he’s selected as chief, he will involve the community in policy discussions, release body camera footage quickly after officer-involved shootings and give members of the media better access to police department policies and practices through ridealongs and police scanners. 

Lazar served in the San Francisco Police Department for 33 years, the final three as an assistant chief. He retired last July. 

Lazar’s wife is Native Hawaiian and he has family members across Oʻahu. He said he looks forward to making the island his home and, if selected as chief, he would be in it “for the very long haul.”

Lazar said he’s had his eye on the Honolulu chief job since he learned last year that Logan was retiring. He’s been looking at a number of things that he thinks he could help improve, noting that substantive change in the department could take six to eight years. He’d put a focus on succession planning so that future chiefs will come from inside the department to maintain consistent progress. 

“I want to be the last outside chief,” he said. “I want to get the Honolulu Police Department so prepared, their leadership prepared, the culture changes, the modernization, so that the obvious choice next time is an inside chief that is ready, who has been involved in all the change, and is ready to lead the department from the inside.”

One of those changes would be a shift to transparency, something the department has lacked in recent years. Logan, who retired under pressure last June, was criticized for a lack of communication with the public and the media. City officials, including Blangiardi and City Council Chair Tommy Waters called Logan out for his handling of an incident on Jan. 1, 2024, involving an islandwide pursuit of an armed suspect. Logan failed to keep the public adequately informed during the daylong manhunt and withheld information from Blangiardi about a bystander who was beaten by officers. 

The department has also had a dismal record of releasing body camera footage and does so in only a fraction of deadly police encounters. In addition, Logan and interim Chief Rade Vanic opposed giving members of the media access to police scanners.  

Lazar said that would change under his leadership. 

He promised to be accessible to journalists and grant media outlets access to police dispatch communications. 

He said he would implement a policy to release body camera footage of officer-involved shootings within 10 days of the incident and hold town hall meetings for the public to ask questions. 

“Then we let the investigation and the administrative, criminal investigation and everything that needs to happen take its course,” he said. “But at least we’ve told the story. We’ve got everything out there.” 

He also said he would be transparent about the roll out of police technology, such as surveillance drones and AI-assisted report writing programs — two tools he supports using in Honolulu. 

In San Francisco, he helped establish that department’s Real-Time Investigation Center, which serves as a hub for police technology, including drones, automated license plate readers and surveillance cameras. Police and city officials have touted the tech hub as playing a role in San Francisco’s decreasing crime rate. But the initiative is unpopular with police accountability and privacy advocates who fear the department is collecting too much data that could later be abused. 

Lazar said he’d like to continue Honolulu’s efforts to increase the use of drones and other technology, such as an AI-assisted report writing tool called Draft One, which HPD began testing late last year. San Francisco also was piloting the program when Lazar retired, he said.  

He said these tools can greatly improve officer efficiency and help police solve more crimes. Drones especially help reduce the number of risky pursuits by allowing officers to keep eyes on fleeing suspects from a safe distance while they devise a plan. 

But he also understands concerns some members of the public have about these gadgets and said any technological rollout would have to be done transparently and with thorough oversight. 

“I need to bring the community in to help guide us on these policies,” he said, “and to get input from the community before we implement them.” 

He said he would engage the community, too, on a formal policy to prohibit HPD officers from collaborating with ICE agents under any circumstance. Community members who’ve testified before the Honolulu Police Commission have said they’re concerned about the potential for local officers to get swept up in immigration enforcement activities. Vanic has said HPD does not cooperate with ICE, but the department lacks a formal policy. 

Lazar said he would move quickly to create one.

“I’m going to include the community in the process of building that policy, and then we’re going to train the entire department as to what the rules are around ICE,” he said. 

Lazar also said he has ideas to help with the chronic understaffing that has plagued HPD for years. To improve recruitment, he would offer financial incentives to officers who bring in new recruits, support initiatives to help officers with housing, create an app where prospective recruits can track the status of their application and speed up the hiring process. He would also like to hire a marketing firm and advertise job openings nationally. 

“I’m confident,” he said, “we can really start boosting up the numbers this way.”