Gun violence data in Hawaii is incomplete – and unreliable

Three years before Hiram Silva opened fire on his Waianae neighbors in one of the worst shootings in Hawaii history, a newly formed gun violence commission met for the first time to discuss critical gaps in information about how to prevent such tragedies in the islands.

Legislators created the commissio n after a man with an unlicensed firearm shot and killed two Honolulu police officers. Their goal was better data to frame laws that could save lives.

The only legislation to come out of the commission was a proposal this year to sunset the group and merge it with another.

Hawaii proclaims that its strong gun laws have resulted in low gun violence, but there is sparse evidence to back that up. And cops also don’t have the data they need to craft strategies for dealing with rising violence in places like the Westside.

The Gun Violence and Violent Crimes Commission identified nearly half a dozen issues in need of urgent research — from untraceable ghost guns to a rise in juvenile crime — while also noting that statewide information is so unreliable that even the basic premise that shootings are not a big Hawaii problem is questionable.

“We just don’t have the data on it,” Commissioner Denise Konan, dean of the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii Manoa, said at a 2022 meeting.

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County police departments all collect and report data differently, agencies struggle with how to clearly define violent crime, and even finding out how many crimes were committed with an unlicensed versus licensed firearm would require police departments to read through hundreds of records individually.

Without better data, “research into understanding and reducing violent crime and gun violence is virtually impossible,” the Attorney General’s Office wrote this year in a letter supporting a proposal to end the group and merge it with another commission.

Commissioners from the University of Hawaii and the Department of Health declined to comment, referring questions to the AG’s office, which houses the commission. A spokesperson for the AG would not provide anyone for an interview and instead referred Civil Beat to the commission’s annual reports.

Little Research Nationally

At the commission’s inaugural meeting in 2021, one of the first questions posed by the group of high-level law enforcement officers and representatives from state and county agencies, was whether more research was actually needed.

Hawaii consistently reports one of the nation’s lowest gun violence rates, and places like the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence give the islands a top score for the strength of its gun laws. Perhaps one thing that the commission could accomplish, members of the group mused, was identifying ways Hawaii could serve as a model for other states.

But there were warning signs warnings signs in 2021 that Hawaii’s status as a relative haven from shootings could be threatened. Ghost guns were on the rise and firearm registration had increased dramatically, Konan pointed out at the commission’s first meeting. A recent study found the state also had one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, which Konan said could be an issue for the commission to look into.

Beyond that, it was important to know what was working and what wasn’t, commissioners said, rather than just assume that Hawaii’s laws were the reason for violence being below the national average.

The lack of reliable and evidence-based research on gun violence and prevention is a national issue – one that affects not only groups advocating for more gun control measures but also pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association.

Hawaii lawmakers had made various efforts to address the information gap during her time in office, then-Attorney General Clare Connors told the commission at its first meeting, including proposals to create a center at the University of Hawaii to study guns and violent crime. More than a dozen university professors and researchers expressed interest in studying issues that fell under the commission’s scope.

“Hawaii has some special aspects that need to be considered, and it is important for us to take those approaches and do our own research,” Konan said in a 2022 commission meeting.

Despite being given broad leeway in how to approach its mandate, the commission struggled from the beginning to gain traction. The Legislature that created it failed to fund it for two years, and although the commission initially decided to meet monthly, it ended up only convening as a full group six times over the next three years.

Why Is The Data So Unclear?

One early challenge was simply defining what qualified as gun violence for the commission’s purpose. Should suicides be included? Were the federal categories of violent crime the same ones the commission should use? If they were tasked with looking at violent crime, how much of the focus should be on guns versus other types of weapons?

Figuring out the scope of what to examine proved to be the least of the obstacles to getting a better grip on the state of guns and violent crime in Hawaii.

Although crimes are defined by state law, each county police department has its own policies for reporting crime, along with how they collect and store that data. As of last year, Hawaii, Honolulu and Maui collected data on intimate partner violence but Kauai did not. Hawaii and Kauai tracked gang-related crimes, but Honolulu did not.

The commission also found that definitions of violent crime categories vary at a local level and “people have different interpretations of what constitutes violent crimes.” Data definitions or “data dictionaries” are nonexistent for most of Hawaii’s crime databases, according to commission reports. Information about the use of firearms is also “not readily available across all crimes.”

A federally led effort to standardize crime data only applies to certain categories of crime and even that doesn’t appear to always result in consistent figures. For example, the number of annual weapons violations reported by the Honolulu Police Department on the agency’s data dashboard is significantly different than the number reported in the federal database — even though they refer to the same definition and category of crime.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System shows 499 weapons violations for 2022, while the police department’s database shows 769 for the same period. Honolulu police spokeswoman Michelle Yu said in an email that delays in sending data can lead to discrepancies, adding that HPD and the FBI may count the number of incidents differently.

“For example, if multiple parked cars are broken into on the same street on the same night, the FBI may count the multiple break-ins as one incident,” Yu wrote. “In contrast, HPD would create a separate report for each break-in.”

The amount of information available on gun crime also varies by agency. The commission asked all four of Hawaii’s county police departments what data was available in their record management system about the use of guns in crimes. Specifically, was a firearm recovered during the commission of a crime, was the firearm registered, was it registered to the suspect and were they in legal possession of the weapon? None of Hawaii’s police departments tracked all of that data, and would have to update their systems to do so.

Between April 2021 and April 2022, the Honolulu Police Department flagged 1,052 cases as involving firearms, including 759 cases where firearms were recovered, then-Acting Deputy Chief Darren Chun told the commission. The number of recovered firearms included instances where police confiscated a firearm while serving a restraining order. Obtaining any of the other information requested by the commission would involve going through each police report.

Sharing information on a state level was also an issue, because each agency has its own rules around who can access information, Commissioner Erin Harbinson pointed out during a 2022 meeting. Information wasn’t just a barrier to academic research: Police told the commission that better data could help them better respond to crimes, in particular access to more real-time data on violent crime, consistent data broken down into more categories and automated crime “hot spot” data.

In Limbo

While the commission slowly moved forward on efforts to figure out what data even existed, gun homicides continued to rise.

In the meantime, other mandates and demands on the commissioners’ time kept piling up. In 2022, the state got an influx of federal funding as part of a national push to improve firearm crisis intervention. The next year, Hawaii passed a law creating a Criminal Justice Data Sharing Working Group, which is supposed to provide recommendations to the Legislature by 2026. The AG’s office strongly opposed the bill, calling it duplicative of existing efforts.

In what could also be duplicative, the AG’s office published a report earlier this year on gun violence in Hawaii to help support firearm crisis intervention – an effort not linked in any way to the commission’s work. Without a statewide source of data, the AG’s report relied on a national database that uses a proprietary system to collect data on gun homicides and injuries.

By the time the criminal justice data group was created, the commission had met only four times. At its fifth meeting, commissioners voted to see if they could disband and merge their work with other initiatives.

Sen. Chris Lee, who pushed for the commission’s creation, introduced a bill this year to fund a gun violence office under the AG to take up the kinds of research that the commission never pulled off. But the AG’s office opposed the bill, voicing support instead for a proposal to merge the commission with another group focused on improving criminal justice data sharing. Neither bill passed and Lee did not respond to requests for comment.

The commission now appears to be in limbo. It has not met since January and no meetings are scheduled.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.