Posted on: Sunday, August 12, 2001

Editorial
Police shooting: Public needs to know more

In January 1999, the public learned that the shooting of a Hale'iwa man by a Honolulu police officer was not a crime.

That fact notwithstanding, the public now learns that the shooting, though legal, is likely to prove costly to taxpayers.

The family of Fortunato Barques III, who was shot near a heiau at Pupukea on in 1998, sued Officer Mark Boyce and the city in federal court in February 2000.

If the City Council fails to approve the settlement, the case will go back to trial next year. The court, as it often does, has ordered that the amount of the settlement remain secret — even from the taxpayers who must fund it.

Does the fact that the city has agreed to settle indicate there was something wrong with the procedures Boyce employed in deciding to shoot Barque? Not at all. Even when absolutely proper police procedure is followed, there can be any number of practical legal reasons that make settlement preferable to trial.

Nevertheless, it is clear that any time a police officer fires his weapon, the taxpayers can be liable for the consequences.

This is one reason we've insisted, time after time, that it is not enough to know that, in fatally shooting a suspect, the officer did not commit a crime.

In the Barques incident — one of three fatal police shootings in 1998 — prosecutors decided there was "insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the police officer in this case committed a criminal offense."

And that is where, as far as the public is aware, the matter stood until the lawsuit was filed and then, last week, settled. The problem is that there can be an enormous gap between conduct that falls short of criminal behavior and the kind of top-flight law enforcement that clearly is demanded by the Honolulu Police Department.

It is this gap that the Barques lawsuit has exploited — and it is this gap that will continue to provide fertile ground for similar lawsuits.

Having been assured that Boyce committed no crime, did the HPD then move on to an assessment of the incident from the standpoint of police procedure? Was it by-the-book conduct that other officers would be instructed to emulate, or was it a mistake they could learn from? Taxpayers have a right to know that their interests are thus being protected.

In response to similar editorials, HPD Chief Lee Donohue wrote that "like all public agencies, the HPD must adhere to numerous (and sometimes competing) laws that address privacy and openness."

Unfortunately, Donohue refers to an ill-advised law passed in 1996 after intense lobbying by the police union and support by the HPD that exempted police disciplinary information from the open-records law that applies to other public employees like librarians and garbage collectors.

Lawmakers reacted to worries that individual officers would sometimes face embarrassment and ridicule. But lawmakers missed the big picture — that public confidence in law enforcement can only come through openness.

Instances like the Barques case, in which taxpayers must sign a blank check for performance the HPD does not publicly explain, can only result in an erosion of public trust.

Transparency is the kind of higher standard to which a police force will submit — voluntarily — if it hopes to be considered elite.