As a security attendant at Nānākuli High and Intermediate School, Kaui Asinsin often felt overwhelmed by the frequent fights on campus, including a week in 2022 with more than two dozen fights and a mob that ended with a student in the hospital.
Asinsin left the job after less than a year and started petitioning the neighborhood board to better protect students by putting police officers on campus.
“I was just on a mission, like, let’s go find some help and see what we can get for our students and our community,” she said. As a parent with kids at the school, she felt that trained law enforcement officers called school resource officers would help calm the violence.
After several years of petitioning, that’s becoming a reality. Honolulu, the only county in Hawaiʻi that does not have school resource officers, will have police officers stationed at several Oʻahu schools starting next school year, according to Honolulu police and elected officials.
Westside residents and elected officials are hopeful that the move will address concerns about community safety and prevent the kinds of violence involving young people that have rattled people in the last several years.
But national studies and data from neighboring islands show that having officers on campus can also increase the number of kids who are arrested at school — potentially undermining longstanding efforts in Hawaiʻi to reduce juvenile incarceration rates.
Disciplinary statistics from the Hawaiʻi Department of Education show that three-quarters of school-related arrests last year took place at a school with an officer on campus.
Carrie Ann Shirota, the policy director at the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, acknowledged that adding police is a natural reaction to concerns about campus safety. “But the data is not there to support that by investing in more resource officers and policing communities that it makes those communities safer,” she said.
Bringing Back Retired Officers
School resource officers have become commonplace in American schools. Nationwide, there were 23,400 sworn school resource officers at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
In Hawaiʻi, 19 public middle, intermediate and high schools on neighboring islands have an officer on campus. This includes eight schools on the Big Island and five schools on Maui, as well as schools on Kauaʻi, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi.
The officers are stationed at a school, but they don’t work for the Department of Education and they aren’t there to discipline students who cut class or violate school rules. Those duties are the responsibility of the safety and security staff employed by the school.
Instead, these armed officers are tasked with enforcing laws and addressing criminal behavior on campus, said Sgt. Jonathan Honda, who oversees school resource officers on Maui.
“We don’t handle any type of suspensions or anything like that,” he said. Drugs, assaults, threats and sexual misconduct by a student are the types of incidents that would fall under his officers’ purview.
Data on campus crime in Hawaiʻi is limited to school-related arrests and referrals to law enforcement. It’s unclear what types of crimes are involved or how off-campus incidents are reflected in the data. The DOE did not respond to Civil Beat’s request for an interview.
Community members, especially on Oʻahu’s Westside, point to frequent fights and several high-profile violent crimes in the community involving students.
Police were called to Waiʻanae High School more than 300 times and Nānākuli High and Intermediate School 138 times last school year, according to lawmakers.
In the past, the Honolulu Police Department has said it didn’t have enough staff to put officers on campuses. As a result, most public intermediate and high schools on Oʻahu rely on unarmed security staff on campus during the day. After a 15-year-old was beaten, robbed and threatened with a gun at Nānākuli in 2023, the DOE responded by hiring private security to patrol the campus outside of school hours. But it didn’t quiet the calls for a police presence.
The police department changed its stance in late February after the City Council applied pressure, and the department announced a pilot program to put officers in two schools on Oʻahu, one on the Westside and another in Honolulu.
HPD plans to bring recently retired officers back on a contract basis, said Chief Joe Logan in a recent Honolulu Police Commission meeting.
The department has a list of eight to 10 former officers who previously worked with schools or on community policing teams. Those selected will undergo a weeklong training on the mainland through the National Association of School Resource Officers, a nationwide group focused on training for school-based law enforcement. The eventual goal is to have three officers per school, Logan said.
Funding for the next school year will come from the police department. If the pilot program is successful, police will work with the state education department to figure out funding in the future.
Honolulu City Council member Andria Tupola, who pushed for the plan, said this will be more effective than private security.
“I think that the school resource officer is much more proactive. It’s about building relationships with the students, with the families, with being a colleague to the staff members at the school,” she said.
It’s unclear which two schools will end up having officers next year, but Waiʻanae, Nānākuli and Kapolei High School on the Westside and Kaimukī and McKinley high schools in Honolulu have been floated as options.
Tupola is pushing for Nānākuli to be selected. “The whole thing started about Nānākuli,” she said.
Ultimately, Logan said the school superintendent will make the selection.
What It Takes To Be An SRO
Paul Aio was a school resource officer, or SRO, in Washington state for more than four years before he returned to Oʻahu to retire. The former Honolulu cop is now on the Nānākuli-Māʻili neighborhood board, where he has become a vocal advocate for putting officers in local schools.
Being an officer in a school requires specific skills, he said. “Total honesty. You got to be trusting too,” Aio said. “Be able to sit there and listen.”
Although officers are tasked with investigating crimes and enforcing laws, he said a big part of the job is building relationships with students, staff and parents. It required him to get to know students, their backgrounds and the challenges they faced at home.
“Understanding what they’re going through,” he said. “That’s the major factor of why they’re becoming at-risk kids in the school now.”
Marissa Purcell, vice principal at Kauaʻi High School, said her school has had an officer for more than a decade, which makes the campus feel safer.
“He’s very visible on campus in the morning. He’s out by the drop off, saying hi to people, building that relationship already,” she said.
She said the relationships that school resource officers build with students allow them “not just to hold them accountable, but also educate them before they enter the real world.”
Arrests On Campus
Although a majority of on-campus arrests in Hawaiʻi took place at neighbor-island schools with a school resource officer, putting police on campus doesn’t always lead to more arrests. Several schools with an officer didn’t report any arrests last year.
But the majority of students who were arrested went to a school with an officer on campus, which Shirota at the ACLU calls “completely alarming.”
National research shows that having officers on school campuses increases the likelihood of arrests at school and fuels what is known as a school-to-prison pipeline.
“Officers are trained to look at the world in such a way as whether people are violating the law,” she said. “Versus counselors, teachers are looking at it like these are our keiki. They may be having a difficult day. Maybe something’s happening at home. What can we do to help them in this time of need.”
Shirota would rather see increased investment in mental health resources and after-school activities.
“What they need is more care, more counselors, more behavioral health specialists, not more armed officers,” she said. “Those are the types of staff that are needed to provide the care, the support for children.”
Full article can be found at: https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/03/amid-concerns-about-campus-violence-po...ʻahu-schools/