Serious crime on O'ahu shows increase of 9%
By Curtis Lum and Brandon Masuoka
Advertiser Staff Writers
Serious crimes in Honolulu increased 9 percent from 1999 to 2000, while there was scant change in that category nationwide, according to statistics released yesterday by the FBI.
Honolulu recorded 46,659 serious crimes last year, compared with 42,678 in 1999, the FBI said.
The category comprises murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny/theft and motor vehicle theft.
Last year in Honolulu, every type of serious crime showed some increase from 1999 except for murder, which dropped from 37 to 20. The most significant increases in 2000 were in burglaries and vehicle thefts.
Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Peter Carlisle said the increases weren't unexpected and they do follow four years of record-low crime rates. Carlisle couldn't explain why property crimes increased, but he said courts need to get tougher with people convicted of these offenses.
"When you see property crimes starting to rise across the board, then you see concomitantly a rise in violent crimes because there's more opportunities for the crime to occur," Carlisle said. "I'm hearing a lot of alarming rhetoric about how prisons don't work and only treatment does and I think that's very short-sighted and not true. Prisons definitely work at incapacitating criminal activity."
Carlisle said Honolulu's murder rates are very low when compared to cities similar in size, such as Las Vegas and San Francisco. He credited Hawaii's strict gun laws as primary reasons.
"We don't have as much of a gun culture as they have in some Mainland cities.As long as that remains true ,our murder rates will be lower," he said.
The FBI yesterday also reported that arson cases, which are not listed as serious crime, increased in Honolulu from 263 to 324 in 2000, a 23 percent increase. But Capt. Richard Soo, spokesman for the fire department, questions that aspect of the report.
"Our preliminary recollection of the statistics from 2000 and 1999 reveals just a slight increase," Soo said yesterday. "We're not sure what reporting system the FBI relied on. They might involve accessing police files on car fires that we don't really track."
