(civilbeat.org)
The group that brought public health officials, law enforcement and researchers together to talk about how to prevent gun violence hasn’t met in over a year, and efforts to restart it have failed.
Even as gun deaths in Hawaiʻi have increased at a rate faster than most states over the past decade, the group meant to bring public health officials and law enforcement together to share and discuss trends hasn’t met in over a year.
The Gun Violence and Violent Crimes Commission, created by lawmakers in 2020, has struggled to get off the ground. It’s never really been funded. There have even been several efforts to dissolve it, first by merging it with the also defunct Criminal Justice Data Sharing Working Group, then by moving the commission into a new state office for gun violence prevention. Both efforts failed.
As a result, conversations about tackling gun violence largely happen behind closed doors without community input and with public health voices missing from the conversation. Hit-or-miss data on gun violence — the main issue the commission was expected to address — remains flawed.
That’s concerning to Rep. Darius Kila, who has spearheaded a push this year to create an office focused on preventing gun violence.
“We are trying to all tackle the systemic issues of gun violence every single day,” Kila said. “But if we can start trying to herd everything like cattle into one area, we can maybe even at some point, stop the duplicity that occurs sometimes and really do targeted efforts and outreach.”
The Creation Of The Commission
Data on gun violence in Hawaiʻi is often scattered, incomplete and difficult to analyze. It’s held by a variety of agencies who don’t always count things the same way or share information with each other.
Sometimes, whether certain information goes into reports or not is up to individual police officers. Police rely on people to self-report mental health issues, which means law enforcement may not know if someone applying for a gun permit or in possession of a gun has a history of mental illness that might put themselves or others at risk.
Even identifying the gaps was a challenge for the commission in its early days. Figuring out, for example, how often the person using a gun was not the registered owner, or how many crimes were committed with licensed versus unlicensed firearms, would require police to comb through hundreds of individual records.
Data on the number of gun deaths also lags significantly, making it hard to get an up-to-date sense of the scale of the problem.
Still, statistics from the Department of Health paint a partial picture. While relatively rare, gun deaths in Hawaiʻi increased more than 80% from just 40 people in 2014 to 73 in 2023, the most recent year for which final data was available. That’s a much sharper increase than the rest of the country, which saw a 40% increase overall.
Most of the gun deaths in Hawaiʻi are suicides. An average of 40 people died by suicide involving a gun between 2018 and 2023, more than double the number of gun-related homicides each year.
With better data, members of the gun violence commission discussed in early meetings, they could have new insight into the prevalence of unregistered firearms known as ghost guns, whether concealed carry or registration processes need to change and why youth use guns to commit crimes and where they obtain firearms.
But without it, “research into understanding and reducing violent crime and gun violence is virtually impossible,” the Attorney General’s office wrote in a 2024 letter about what direction the gun violence commission should take.
Housed under the AG, the Gun Violence and Violent Crimes Commission, was charged not just with identifying gaps in available data, but with facilitating better information sharing across agencies. The group included representatives from all four county police departments, the state Department of Law Enforcement, public health experts and members of the community.
An early goal was to gather and analyze data to inform legislation aimed at preventing gun deaths and reducing violent crime.
But the commission’s list of actions has been short. It has met just five times since it was created in 2020. There have been no substantive legislative recommendations. In 2023, members of the commission agreed the best course of action was to merge with the Criminal Justice Data Sharing Working Group, which also hasn’t met in the last year.
“The concern with having multiple groups working simultaneously towards the same goals raises the concern resources are being wasted and that these groups do crossover significantly,” read the 2023 commission meeting minutes.
To criminal justice experts, that misses the point.
“The question is not necessarily about redundancies,” said Nicholas Chagnon, a criminal justice researcher and professor at UH West Oʻahu. “It’s what has changed? Where have there been successes? What are the substantive impacts?”
The Absent Commission
The last time the gun violence commission met was in January 2024, when members discussed whether the group should close up shop. It hasn’t convened since.
That’s not necessarily a problem, according to state Department of Law Enforcement Director Mike Lambert
“I don’t feel like it hinders our ability to do our job,” he said.
Lambert officially sits on the gun violence commission but there hasn’t been a meeting since he took over the newly formed department, which is charged with policing at a state level, including at airports, ports and prisons. He speculates that overlapping responsibilities with other groups and a lack of resources hindered the commission’s success.
“We’re kind of talking about what we already agree on, and it kind of just loses steam,” he said.
Law enforcement officials say conversations about gun violence prevention are happening across the state, just not through the commission. Lambert points to task forces such as the Hawaiʻi High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program, which brings together federal, state and county law enforcement. Lambert said that program recently added guns to its focus.
The Department of the Attorney General did not make anyone available for an interview, but AG spokesperson Toni Schwartz emphasized that a separate committee that includes law enforcement, prosecutors and the courts has been meeting to identify and share data.
Kila doesn’t doubt that agencies are talking to each other about trends in gun violence and violent crime. It’s just that it’s happening without public input.
“It’s like ok, if it’s happening, then show us,” Kila said. “That’s all we’re asking.”
The original gun violence commission includes non-law enforcement voices, including an epidemiologist from the Department of Health and experts from the University of Hawaiʻi and the John Burns Medical School. It’s also supposed to have community representatives, although those positions are vacant.
Kila questions whether crucial information and perspectives are missing in the conversation about gun violence prevention without the commission.
“That’s where the frustration is,” he said. “All of our agencies and departments need to start being on the same page and the same silo to address these different problems.”
Lambert acknowledges there are benefits to having the commission. He’s confident that law enforcement has decent data on gun injuries, as long as hospitals are abiding by mandatory reporting requirements. But he also sees the value in including more perspectives.
For Kila, the situation is a reminder that just because lawmakers establish a commission doesn’t mean it will do meaningful work. This commission didn’t come with any of the funding necessary to conduct research and it can be tough to get everyone in the same room.
“When we’re really trying to answer calls from the community,” Kila said, “are we really setting up these commissions and boards to succeed?”
Systemic Change In Gun Violence
This past legislative session, which wrapped up in May, it looked as though Hawaiʻi might be moving on from the stalled gun violence commission to something more substantial.
Lawmakers, led by Kila, introduced a proposal to create a Gun Violence Prevention Office under the Department of Law Enforcement to not just share data but to seek proactive solutions to prevent the violence in the first place.
To avoid duplicating efforts, the Attorney General’s office pushed for the gun violence commission’s responsibilities to be moved into this new office and for the commission itself to be dissolved.
The Department of Law Enforcement and the commission supported the idea.
“I always feel like we’re not doing enough in prevention. Law enforcement is always trying to come in at the end,” Lambert said. “We want to try to pivot our traditional role, but we need a mechanism to do that.”
Lambert hoped the new office would allow law enforcement to move from “discussion into action” and increase community engagement. It would have come with money and staff that Lambert wanted to put toward things like mentorship programs targeting youth.
More resources, Lambert said, also would mean his team could do more with the tools it already has. His department recently got a machine that uses shell casings recovered from a crime scene to create a unique fingerprint of the gun, for instance. That fingerprint can be used to confirm if the same gun was used in another crime or found on a suspect.
Lambert thinks the new office would have supercharged this tool by allowing for better coordination with all the counties to understand trends in how guns are moving throughout the state.
But the bill to create the Gun Violence Prevention Office failed to cross the finish line earlier this year. Some lawmakers balked at any proposal that would cost the state money.
Kila still wants to see the office happen and plans to resurrect the idea this coming legislative session, which starts in January.
“I’m not dumb to think we’re going to solve it overnight by the creation of this office,” he said. “But I would rather do something different, because obviously what we’re trying to do now is not necessarily moving the needle that we need to be.”
