Hawai‘i Island police chief talks story with residents, introduces department’s strategic plan

About a year ago, Hawai‘i Police Chief Reed Mahuna started “talk story” sessions after being appointed as interim chief to learn more about the needs of the community.

After taking on the role permanently in February, Mahuna has continued to visit communities around the island, give them updates about what’s happening in the department and hear their concerns.

This information and feedback he gathered from the public, as well as from employees across the police department, is part of the recently published 2026-2030 five-year strategic plan.

It outlines six strategic goals and objectives of the department, which currently employs 503 sworn officers and 163 civilian employees, and serves a resident population of approximately 211,000 and nearly 2 million annual visitors.

The goals and objectives are:

• Strengthen community trust and cultural connection
• Optimize staffing and resource deployment
• Develop youth, education and future officers
• Modernize technology and cyber capabilities
• Focus on employee satisfaction, recruitment and union collaboration
• Improved infrastructure, fleet sustainability and capital improvement projects

On Wednesday, Mahuna held another talk story session, this time at the West Hawai‘i Civic Center in Kona, where he discussed this strategic plan, for the first time, that was published on the department’s website about two weeks ago.

“Department-wide, people had an opportunity to buy into this plan and to make suggestions,” the chief said. “I think it was a very worthwhile effort.”

Mahuna said modernizing cyber capabilities has been a goal, and highlighted the department secured funding for this fiscal year for the creation of a cybercrime unit.

He said with artificial intelligence advancing so rapidly, the department needs to be at the forefront of the advances or “we’re just going to be left behind. That will make our community vulnerable to different types of cyber threats.

“Criminals are taking old scams and they’re using AI technology to make them more convincing and more sophisticated.”

He said with the new AI tools, criminals who do email phishing are able to make it difficult for people to determine whether the emails are coming from a credible source.

“They’re using artificial intelligence to spoof phone numbers, so now they can spoof a phone number that looks like it’s coming from the police department,” he said.

Josephine Keli‘ipio asked whether the department was utilizing Palantir, a software company that specializes in big data integration, analytics and artificial intelligence platforms.

Mahuna said he doesn’t have plans to deploy any type of AI software at this time, but they are still learning about them and they “will definitely be part of what we do in the future because there’s no way around it.”

Mahuna also talked about new programs coming to the department, including a community academy, which will provide participants with an overview of department operations, investigative tools, use-of-force and de-escalation methods.

“It will be one day a week for a couple months, and you get to learn about what we do and get a chance to interact with people in our community,” Mahuna said.

The chief also said Hawai‘i Police Maj. Roylen Valera is currently working on the department’s first summer camp for high school juniors and seniors that will start in 2027.

The one-week camp will give teens the opportunity to interact with officers and learn about policing as well as its culture and ethics.

Resident Bob O’Meara expressed concern about license plate readers, citing news that the surveillance technology is being used on Oʻahu.

While recognizing how it can be a useful tool in aiding police in solving crimes, O’Meara was concerned about privacy violations.

Mahuna assured O’Meara that police don’t have license plate readers in operation.

“To be honest, we’ve had some for a long time, but they’ve never been deployed, and the reason they haven’t been deployed is because I think we have to be extremely careful,” Mahuna said.

If the department does decide to use the license plate readers, Mahuna said he would hold community meetings to first get feedback.

Mahuna also talked about recruitment and how the department needs to be laser-focused on getting fully staffed. To do that, he is planning to create a recruitment unit with a focus on department-wide efforts.

Mahuna also plans to hire a consulting firm to objectively evaluate their recruitment efforts and provide data on how they can optimize their efforts in hiring.

When Mahuna was interim chief, he said he knew the department needed to improve community engagement. During those initial meetings, he learned how passionate the community felt about immigration enforcement.

While only seven people showed up on Wednesday, Mahuna said it doesn’t matter if only one person or 100 attend, because the purpose of the meetings are to make himself available to the public. He also usually brings along top command staff from the area with him. That was the case on Wednesday.

Mahuna told the group: “This is my responsibility, to be available to all of you.”