Lee Cataluna: What Happened To HPD Chief? Blame The Pandemic - Honolulu Civil Beat

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On Thursday, the Police Commission told Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard that, among a list of other requirements, she must do more to communicate with the public. On Friday, she did. She released a minute and 16 seconds long video news release and it was a doozy.

Rather than accept a critical review from the Police Commission, get her mind around what she needed to do, and come back strong to disprove the doubters, Ballard just up and quit. That’s not supposed to be what heroes do, and what is a police officer if not a hero in durable shoes?

But in the work world, it’s hard to come back from a structured performance improvement plan. We expect kids to straighten up after a bad report card and meet school expectations, but professionals forced to go through formal improvement orders often quit or get fired.

There’s always the slim chance that someone will gloriously wrest victory from the jaws of a humbling near-defeat at work. There’s always the possibility of rising to a challenge. Ballard didn’t even sit through the Police Commission meeting where her performance evaluation was publicly presented. She supposedly had another appointment. Before she said it out loud on Friday, she said it in silence in Thursday. She was already out the door.

In some ways, Ballard is like Love’s Bakery or Monterey Bay Canners; a victim of the pandemic. When she started in the job three years ago, she represented a fresh start from the tangled, tawdry years of the Louis Kealoha era. She was plainspoken with the media, a straight shooter with the city council and generally looked like she was handling the job.

It wasn’t easy before COVID-19, to be sure. The department was woefully understaffed. Two officers were killed in January 2020 shootings on Hibiscus Drive in Waikiki. There were a string of police shootings. Ballard was front and center, answering questions like there was nothing to hide.

Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard announced her retirement two days after receiving a negative job performance review from the Police Commission. She will leave her position on June 1.  Cory Lum/Civil Beat

But the pandemic changed Ballard. While people were losing their jobs and standing in food lines, the police department was fat with federal funds, buying motor scooters and ATVs and trucks. While the community was hurting, cops were raking in the overtime pay and harassing lockdown-weary residents for sitting on the sand or walking around the edge of a closed park.

The police department never found a way to be heroic during the pandemic. Only months after the horror of Hibiscus Drive, cops had become mask-monitors, overtime abusers and car collectors. 

Similarly, Ballard was never able to figure out how to play defense without coming off as defensive.

So until a better answer presents itself, let’s just keep it simple and say that it was the pandemic that killed Ballard’s career. It made her thin-skinned and isolated — just like a lot of the rest of us. If there was truly an organized effort to remove her from office, which she is hinting at, she didn’t fight back. By bailing and blaming her bosses, she gave her would-be enemies more rope with which to hang her.

The most significant failure of Ballard’s tenure didn’t even make it to the top of her performance review. In September 2020, the FBI released a report that pegged HPD far below the national average in solving or “clearing” crimes. Ballard said only that the numbers were wrong.

It would have been easier for the Police Commission to overlook Ballard’s poor communication skills and stonewalling if the department was actually getting the job done. You don’t have to be a law enforcement expert to interpret HPD’s online crime map — people in Honolulu are getting robbed in their houses in broad daylight on Saturday mornings. When you see the black burglar mask icons everywhere on the map, you see who is running this town, and it’s not the cops.

Ballard obviously cared. She was at HPD for 36 years. Being a cop was her life. That’s what’s so disappointing. She had a tough job going in, and the pandemic made it infinitely harder. Her tenure should be viewed within that context.

But also, the worst of times can reveal the best in people.

Even if Ballard is correct and the fix was in for her, the end of her HPD career didn’t have to be so sulky and ignoble. There is a way to meet defeat with honor, and it isn’t to cut and run.

What about rising up one more time when you’re knocked down? What about standing up to the challenge and saying, “You want improvement? Just you wait and see.” Ballard somehow lost hold of that fighting spirit. The pandemic and the pressure for the police department to be all things to all people did her in.

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Lee Cataluna: What Happened To HPD Chief? Blame The Pandemic - Honolulu Civil Beat
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