2022-12-12 Police Commission Regular Minutes

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Hawaii Police Commission Special Meeting Minutes December 12, 2022 Page 17 ➢ Benjamin Moszkowicz stated he spent the majority of his career in the traffic division at HPD. As a result, he has amazing, wonderful, collaborative partnerships with people in the motor vehicle safety office and with the newly appointed director of transportation. These are all folks who they've worked collaboratively with for the past two decades. Hawaii County has the unfortunate designation of having the highest fatality rate per person and the highest number of both speed and impaired driving fatalities statewide. It's really important to focus on traffic laws and back to the original question about being familiar with the Broken Window Theory. The Broken Window Theory is essentially to paraphrase if there's a building that has a broken window, the community repairs the window then it doesn't attract more nuisance-type crimes, but if the window remains broken then people who are otherwise motivated to do things that the rest of the community wouldn't stand for or wouldn't like tend to be attracted to that area because they see it as "oh this is a place that the community is not focused on." One of the huge challenges, but at the same time opportunities that he's had in the traffic division in HPD was to be part of this collaborative partnership that developed the red light running program. He's not 100% convinced that it's a great thing, but seeing some of the violations, these violations that are captured by this red light running program are captured on video, it's not just a snapshot. We've seen collisions, people 5-7 seconds after running a red light. The power of that video is if you then share that video with the community it helps to gain support to understand why the state is undertaking such an effort. There's also going to be a bill introduced at the upcoming legislature to develop a statewide speed device plan that will attach a device to a stationary object such as an overpass or a pole that will measure vehicles' speeds and issue citations that way. Whether that happens or not, those are the kinds of relationships that he has with DOT and partnerships. The other thing is that all three other candidates focused on was the importance of getting priority one case taken care of by uniform officers. this takes priority over traffic enforcement. The motor vehicle safety office has a funding mechanism where they provide Honolulu with $3-4 million a year just to reach out to the community to do proactive sign-waving. They recently contracted with Island Life to do a two- minute PSA segment that people can watch in movie theaters and also a big chunk of that money goes out to enforcement. It's not that Officer Ben is out giving speeding tickets for the day because he's not responding to calls for service, it's also Officer Ben's day off and he's chosen to come in and specifically focus on this grant-funded activity that is at no net cost to the county because it's all passed through DOT funds through the state. Recess was called at 12:49 p.m. The meeting reconvened at 1:31 p.m.