Police presence is only a small part of addressing our island's problems. We need to think about how all of us fit in to making a more connected, safer Oahu.
A few days ago, a few friends of mine told me they were worried about coming to my side of Oahu because of the crime and violence here. I had to immediately remind them that while there have been several highly publicized violent incidents here, there was no reason to fear having to spend time here or worry about being personally targeted.
It dawned on me in that moment however that communities can get neglected and bad situations can entrench because we sometimes have an expectation that only bad things will happen in certain places, and we should just stay away from there.
Over time, others around us start to think and feel the same way, and a pattern develops where reform cannot occur because people either avoid the place that needs it or assume it's a lost cause altogether. We stop taking pride in a community, we start dehumanizing people as statistics, and then this leads to situations getting worse and things getting uglier and uglier.
Think of it this way: Say that you're chewing gum, and decide to spit it into a foil wrapper, and now you need to throw it away. If you're in the middle of a clean, beautiful place outdoors with no garbage can, would you throw the trash on the ground? Most people would probably say no. "I can't throw this on the ground," you might think to yourself, "it wouldn't be right."
But say you're standing instead in a landfill, where all around you there is trash, grime, unmentionables and swarms of flies orbiting around you. Does throwing something on the ground seem so unreasonable when there is already so much on the ground already? Who would notice, if you did?
Our communities can slowly over time accumulate crime, violence, poverty and social disparities in the same way. Once we start to avoid dealing with some problems, we get more problems and more problems until we find ourselves surrounded by them. So with this allegory in mind, as Oahu ponders how to address things like crime and violence, we need to start looking holistically about how we can get from where we are to where we want to be.
Typically, the most common response to an outbreak in crime is to call for heightened police presence and to look at how many officers we have on the force as a deterrent. This "boots on the ground" approach is a reasonable short-term reaction, but it doesn't remedy the reasons that crime may be occurring.
Worse yet, over a protracted period of time, having large concentrations of police in a given area can have unintended consequences where residents feel they are being over-surveilled and intimidated by authoritarian power dynamics, similar to what Philip Zimbardo observed in his famous Stanford University prison experiment in 1971.
What is needed more than boots on the ground is for everyone to have a stake in the outcome of a community and its residents. But there's a couple of things that make it difficult to get people to engage.
Forbes recently reported about the rise in America of something called "no-contact families" - that is, an increase in personal estrangement - where people out of resentment, shame, or persecution can't (or won't) communicate with each other. This is a serious problem. If you have a disordered relationship with your family, you're more likely to respond in a disordered way to everyone else.
We have known for hundreds of years that every successful community begins with strong families. If the family structure is being eroded by resentment, poor problem-solving skills, fear of abandonment, abuse, and so on, the community structure will likewise erode.
This is an area where charitable nonprofits and religious organizations need to step up for all of Oahu. We need to teach people how to be good to themselves and others, because if you are not at peace with yourself, you can't be at peace with others. In my observation, Oahu has become extremely toxic in recent years where many people are angry, anxious, frustrated and not everyone has a healthy remedy for expressing or resolving these feelings.
We also need to take into consideration how surroundings affect people's emotions and behavior. The first thing I would do if I were the chief of police would be to go to places with high levels of crime and look at the built environment to take notes. In several cities around the United States, researchers found that adding green spaces - parks, trees, beautified areas - resulted in less crime and better self-reported mental health.
If I'm living in a place where there's trash everywhere, the sidewalks are shattered and unwalkable, abandoned cars are everywhere and wild grass is growing out of control in state- or city-owned areas, that's going to have an impact on how I feel all day long. One of the reasons we need to pay attention-to-detail to community appearances is they have a nexus to mental health. If people feel like they're living in a run-down, beat-up, forgotten place, that will impact how they behave in that environment.
Most important of all, we have to resist the temptation to think in silos and have the approach of "you stay in your area, I'll stay in mine, what happens there is of no concern to me." Oahu is a small place and we can't afford to think in terms of factional geography. The reality is that quitting is exactly what bad people want us to do, and abandonment is all that underserved people have ever experienced others doing to them. Dilemmas are designed to make you quit, but enlightenment says "I'm going to stay because this is important."
The health, wellness, and success of everyone, everywhere on the island impacts us all, as we learned from the experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of my good Native Hawaiian friends reminded me the other day that the word "pono" is best translated not so much as "righteousness" but rather things being set in the correct state or place as they should be. The correct place for all of us here in Oahu is where we are needed most.
There are far too many people who read news, react to news, and just say "tsk, tsk, tsk" with a smug attitude that it's too bad others don't have their act together. No, we all need to ask ourselves what can we offer to the parts of Oahu that are underserved or unstable right now?
Maybe that means we volunteer to do a community safety walk in an area we don't live in to help others keep watch. Maybe that means we assist in graffiti or trash cleanup. Or maybe it means we make sure that invisible people become visible again by restlessly advocating for their help.
No matter what, however, we need to understand that crime and violence are fruits of a tree of disparity and injustice that needs to be uprooted with the collective efforts of all of us. I hope and pray that in the days and weeks to come, we can all humble ourselves to be problem-solving volunteers, and not just observers of crime and violence.