 I'm Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys' varsity tennis team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is a former judge and current prosecuting attorney of Honolulu. He is Steve Aum, and today we are going beyond justice. Hey, prosecutor Steve, welcome back to Beyond the Lines. Hey, Rusty, good to be back. It's nice to see you again. Oh, same here. I know that you've been really busy doing everything that you're doing, but I wanted to first ask if you can share a bit about your background. Sure. I was born and raised here. My parents were both professors at the University of Hawaii, where the East-West Center is now is faculty housing, so I literally grew up on the UH campus. My brother, older brother, Robbie, and I both went to university lab school starting at age three, and I played all the sports that were there after I worked at Doe Cannery for four summers. After I graduated, I needed a sport, so I went down to Kalakaua Rack to learn how to fight. I guess that's fitting that my first trip to Oahu Prison was for a fight, but I did two years at the University of Hawaii, and then I went to the University of Oregon, which was a good move because I met my wife Haunani there. She's a Kamehameha Schools grad, and we just celebrated our 42nd wedding anniversary. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. And I went to law school. I taught for a couple of years. I was the basketball coach, but I really wanted, I thought, how could I contribute most? And Robbie was already a lawyer in law school and then a lawyer, and I thought, I'd really like to do that. So I went to law school with the idea of being a prosecutor because I knew that's where the decisions were made, that's where the table is set, that's where the charging criteria are made. And if you want to change the system, it's at the prosecutors. It's not at the public defenders. I mean, they play an important role defending an individual client, but the real change comes at the prosecutor. So I was hired by Charles Marslin in 1985, and I was there for nine years. We set up a lot of training, including for police officers on being honest, on being good witnesses. We set up a lot of training for the deputy prosecutors. And then I was, and even back then, I focused on the idea of being fair. You know, the words progressive weren't in the vocabulary, but it was being a fair, honest prosecutor. And I discovered that that is really what they're talking about nowadays about reforming the system. There's a great Supreme Court gave Berger versus United States about the role of a prosecutor that we're there to do justice, not just win cases. Of course, if you work hard, prepared cases charged, you should win most of the cases, but the focus is on being fair. Then I was tapped to be the United States Attorney, the Chief Federal Prosecutor under President Clinton. And I was, I really enjoyed that. We were very active, very aggressive. We did, you know, I was really proud of the efforts to stop this violent personaging gang in Waikiki that had committed hundreds of violent personages and we stopped at cold. I was also really proud of the weed and seed effort, which involves identifying an area, talking to the residents and businesses in the area to find out what the real issues are, both for crime and social service needs. And then you weed out the crime and then when it's safer, you can seed it with positive pro-social activities. And I'll talk about that a little later as I'm doing it. And then I was appointed to be a judge and I was a judge for 15 years, which I really enjoyed. I had done a lot of trial work. So I knew the rules of evidence well. I could keep things moving. The attorneys liked me in court. I was the toughest senator on the court, partly maybe because I was the first career prosecutor to be appointed to circuit court in Honolulu ever. The path to the bench is through the defense bar before me. But after me, Mark Bennett as AG worked with Linda Lingle and a number of former prosecutors were appointed. So now it's a nice balance on the court. But I did a number of things there. I was the toughest senator, but I also believed in rehabilitation. And the violent, the dangerous, the ones who won't stop stealing should be sent to prison at sentencing. When they're in prison, they should be given rehabilitative programs and other kinds of things. But some people have to be moved from society for a while. But others can and should be placed on probation and we all win when they success there. So working with Sherri Lee-Noy, a really sharp probation supervisor, we started Hope Probation, which has been tremendously successful over the years at Reducing Recidivism. And then I retired, rented the house, moved to the D.C. area with my wife for a few years to try to help other states learn how to do Hope Probation. And then I ended up running for the prosecutor's office and got elected about a year and a half ago. Well, prosecutor Steve, you have done so many things in your life already. And wherever you have been, you've always been successful. And I wanna go back to you while you were being a judge. Why were you so highly respected and so successful as a judge? Okay, well, part of it is leadership and that's whether it's with your law clerks, whether the attorney's in front of you, I would always take a lot of volunteers from Shamanide University, from UH, law school and undergraduate because I thought that was part of my job. But first, you just have to be a good judge. You have to guide the jurors. And I did hundreds of jury trials through the process because they know the attorneys on either side kind of have an agenda, but the judge doesn't. The judge is there to explain the process to them, explain how it all works, talk to them after the verdict, whatever it is about it. And I think both doing that, that made me a very popular judge as far as doing trials because I'd done a lot of trial work. So I knew the rules of evidence well, I was decisive. I would control the courtrooms. We never had a case of prosecutor misconduct in my courtroom because if I thought the prosecutor was starting to ask a question or say something in closing argument, I wouldn't wait for the question or statement to come out and then have the defense object. I would stop it, you know, like something like, as a prosecutor, you can never say, send a message to a certain community because that's not the job of a jury. A jury's job is to decide, has the prosecution proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt, just based on the evidence in front of them. So if I ever heard an attorney start to say, and we need you to send, I would instantly interrupt them, have them approach the bench, find out what was going on and tell them to stop. But I'm also proud of a couple of other things. One is the whole hope probation strategy because on regular probation, defendants are given all sorts of chances. And part of that is because before hope there was no mechanism to bring them back to court quickly. So the probation officer would let them violate probation, test positive for drugs. They'd let them leave the PO's office, misappointments, they'd try to chase them down until they finally racked up 20, 30 or more violations. They were a danger to the public. And then the PO would spend a couple of hours writing up the violation, get them arrested and months later have a hearing and recommend they get sent to prison for several years. I thought that was crazy. So I thought, how did our, you know, how are we raised? How do you raise our kids? You tell them you care about them but if they misbehave, you do something immediately so they can tie together a bad choice to the consequence and learn from it. And that simple idea grew into hope probation. Shirley and I started this, we implemented it, she was head of the high risk section and we ended up with results of 55% fewer arrests for new crimes if they were in hope rather than regular probation. And they failed and got sent to prison 50% less often. A 10% reduction of recidivism is caused for celebration. A 50% reduction is unheard of. That's why 30 some states are doing versions of it on the mainland, most in probation but some in pretrial or parole or in prisons to reduce inmate violence. So the other thing was every 10 years the legislature asked the judiciary to chair a review of the whole penal code, all the crime statutes. 29 members on it, defense attorneys, prosecutors, police, victims, OHA and the like. I was asked by Chief Justice Moon in 2005 and again by Chief Justice Wreckingwald in 2015. And we made 84 recommendations this last time the legislature passed all of them. But one of them that made a lot of sense was before possession of a small amount of drugs would require people on the second time to get sent to prison. And clearly people learn more and they're more successful by treatment out in the community. Because getting the stress of, will you see an old friend and succumb to using that kind of stuff is part of it. Now we give the choice to the judges. So if the person's violent or dangerous the judge should send that person to prison. If the only thing we can catch them for is a small drug possession crime. But otherwise, if they don't have a violent history we're better off with them getting treatment in the community. And so I'm a combination of very tough on the violent and dangerous sex offenders and the like and more rehabilitative oriented for the folks that can and should be successful on probation. And so my job as a prosecutor now is public safety is number one. We've got to keep people safe. And so I've kind of come full circle but I think I'd be a much better as head of this office now than in the past because of my experiences. Well, Steve, I love hearing your insights and before you became our prosecuting attorney we all knew that there was a lot of corruption in the prosecutor's office. Now since becoming prosecutor what have you done to clean up the prosecutor's office to try to restore the public trust? Okay, well, restoring trust you're right is job one and many different things went into this. First, it's making sure you put good people with moral compasses in supervisory positions. And that involved talking to the people within the office the current leadership to see who is good who might be better. I require all team captains and division chiefs to have extensive trial experience because then they're able to in the middle of a trial when something comes up the deputy prosecutor needs to be able to go to them they need to be able to ask that question. So something like Catherine Kahlo and never would have been a supervisor under me because as charming a person as she sounds like she can be she didn't have the kind of trial experience that would have justified putting her in that kind of position. And the advantage to a lot of trial experiences it really tests you as a person trial work is really hard. It's exhausting, it's exhilarating, it's exciting but you're tested by getting, you know there for a long time you're out in the public you're being stressed. So that's a good way to get an idea of somebody's metal is to have them doing it. But I've also tried to set it up so that anybody who applies to the office now and I have a real preference for hiring people at the front end right out of law school because they don't have baggage with them we can teach them the ethics of the job what it means to be a good prosecutor like Berger versus United States and give them the right training in order to be successful. So we have hiring committees of three people that including the new division head they're going to go into which in most cases Florence Nakakuni who was the US Attorney to after me she's head of our misdemeanor division. So she's always part of those hiring committees. And so we're telling people this is not a 745 to 430 job. This is a great opportunity to help people keep people safe give victims closure maybe some restitution how many jobs can you talk about that you can really help people that way. We're also doing a lot of training for the deputies every year the public defenders would ask the judiciary for a week out of court so they could do training well we decided we'll ask for the same week too. So starting last May we had a full week of training and we're going to do it at the end of May every year. It was the first office wide training here since 1987. Part of setting the tone though too was I did ask a number of deputies to leave when I first came in deputies are at will hires. So that meant a few quit knowing I'd probably get rid of them. A couple retired and I got rid of several people including some involved in sex harassment and lost a work environment and not being so, you know, there's no place for that here. I met with everybody in the office to say I have zero tolerance for any sort of bullying, harassment, that kind of thing. This job is too hard to have to deal with that kind of stuff. And we set up a salary structure here before this there had been no salary structure at all the prosecutor could pay the deputies between $59,000 and $160,000, totally at will. So now we've set up a structure so the deputies can see this is where I am now, this is where I'm likely to be next year. I guess ever since Civil Beat would publish all the salaries of city and state workers every year a couple of people would quit because they say, you know, that person makes more than me, what's up with that? So it's a sense of fairness, it's transparency. You know, and I think for the press and the public we're trying to be much more transparent, explain our reasons for things, having press conferences, you know, to explain some things. We're now meeting with the deputies and small groups to get feedback from them, hear their concerns, see what we can implement. So it's a daily thing about doing the right thing. Don't wait for the dragon to slay because, you know, you may not run into a dragon or if you do, your sword is stuck in the scabbard from non-use. You've got to just get into the habit of doing the right thing every day and then everything else will come easily and you'll follow your training. I totally agree about that. I mean, there's never a wrong time to do the right thing and prosecutor Steve, you know, you mentioned that you're hiring, you know, these coworkers for, you know, those reasons you mentioned. What are some of the top character traits that you're looking for as you're hiring these people? Well, we are trying to, you know, get people to be honest. We're trying to find out what are the biggest challenges you faced in your life and how did you overcome it? And not accepting the first answer if it's something like, oh, I was on law review, so I had to supervise somebody and they made mistakes and stuff. No, we're talking about something in your personal life that may have been a real challenge and how you overcame it. And that, you know, we're looking for people that want to work hard, that do the right thing. And I think that really kind of lays it all out. You know, we're really looking for people that are honest, that are willing to do the right thing even if it's cost them in the past because we want this office to be known as a place where we're going to work hard, we're going to take a hard look at charging decisions even if people don't always agree with what the decision was. And you're never going to satisfy everybody in a job like this, but they'll know that we worked hard, we had very experienced people looking at making those decisions. And I think that's really important so people can know that we're experienced, we're working hard at this, we're looking at the facts and circumstances of each case, nobody gets a pass, you know, it doesn't matter, you know, politics or anything else, we're going to call it as we see it every single time. Steve, I like hearing this and you have both of my books and I want to ask you if you like the books and what stood out to you in it? I really like the books and I like the way, you know, you talked about creating a culture of excellence, but you also as a coach were flexible about the individual characteristics of some of your different athletes. And the same exact same approach is not going to work with everybody. Some people may have skills in a certain way, but their confidence is lacking or they may be overconfident. I think the, you know, God's gift to tennis at Punahou and you're the one who'd have to, you know, address each person differently regardless of their skill level in order to be successful. And, you know, I think you benefited from setting it up, starting to win. And then when you get that culture going, it makes people want to win and do the right thing. And that's what I remember the most. No, I'm glad you brought that up because it's all about creating that culture of excellence and that's exactly what you're doing right now in the prosecutor's office. And earlier prosecutor Steve, you mentioned about crimes and consequences. On the mainland, it seems like, you know, there's some people that are committing some smaller crimes and then they're getting out as soon as they go in to be booked. And then they keep repeating all of these crimes. What are your thoughts on that? Well, one of the things we're trying to do is make sure we charge all of the cases we can that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And the whole weed and seed area is really trying to focus on certain communities, all that have, you know, higher crime rates than average, but you pick the tough communities like Chinatown and Kali Palama. There's been violent crime there forever. And that's why we picked it as a tough case. But the first time around crime was reduced by 70%. And this time around, I always thought if I could ever get back in a position where I could get the leadership started for weed and seed, I'd do it. So that's what we did in Kali Palama in Chinatown. And just preliminarily, it looks like crime is down by about two thirds from pre-pandemic time. But one of the key differences is that the homeless problem is much worse. And I am convinced that, and I'm not, the homeless are very different types. There's no monolithic definition. You've got a husband and a wife who've lost their jobs. They can't stay on the relative sofa anymore. They're living in their car. All they need is a job, get a job, get housing, and they would get off the streets immediately. But when you talk about the chronically homeless sleeping on the sidewalk on Mauna Kea Street, I am convinced virtually every single one has a mental health and or a drug and alcohol problem. So what we're doing is really trying to speed up the process to get them arrested so they're out of a merchant's doorway. And one of the interesting things in Chinatown, because of the huge fires that wiped out Chinatown in 1900, all the Chinatown doorways have to be set back so the doors can open out so people could escape if ever there was a fire. The problem is that creates a setback that's a perfect little hidey hole for somebody to sleep in or become their little house. Well, you've got people defecating on themselves. The poor merchants are trying to hose out the area every single day. So we're working with HPD and now there are more than a hundred homeless folks in Chinatown have been arrested and we've set up a new process where instead of waiting months for them to get put on probation and then try to get them into a program, we're working with all the players in the system, Department of Health, public defenders, intake service center at the jail, the treatment providers, HPD and we're getting them assessed quickly by the Department of Health at the jail and then they line them up for the appropriate program out in the community and then the Department of Health pick them up at OCCC and take them to the relevant treatment program. And by doing this, it helps the merchants and the residents of Chinatown by getting the homeless folks off the street there. But it helps the homeless person by getting them sober, getting them help. So if we can get housing for them down the road, they'll have a chance to be successful. And there are a lot of voluntarily programs for the homeless and the core program with the city, the health and harm reduction folks, but all of that is voluntary. So we encourage all of those efforts. And if any homeless person takes advantage of it, that's great, but a lot of folks who are homeless will say, I don't have a drug problem. I don't want treatment, leave me alone. Well, those are the folks that are getting arrested if they have a drug problem because they are gonna have ice pipes with them. They'll be smoking ice on the sidewalk there. They're getting arrested and we're getting them into treatment a lot faster. And I think that's a huge part of it. But that means in the weed and seed site, certainly any violation of the law, they're getting arrested and we're trying to deal with it. And for the folks that are getting arrested over and over and over for theft, we're using a statute for habitual property offenders to charge them with a felony. So the first one in this more recent effort of ours, Mr. Smalls had 161 prior convictions. And he would typically get one, two, three, four days in jail with credit for time served. When he came to court, the first time he'd get released with credit for time served. Most of the vast majority were for alcohol problems. So now he's been arrested. He's at OCCC. He needs to go to a good drug treatment program, an alcohol program to deal with that or he's never gonna stop stealing. And it's really dangerous when somebody steals that much because the shop folks in these stores like in Waikiki are told, don't fight with them. Don't try to interfere with it because you might get hurt, you could get sued, but that means there's no deterrent. So they would do it over and over. So we have charged several people with these felonies, people that have had extensive histories. And in some cases, it's gonna be appropriate to use the leverage of the criminal justice system to send them to drug treatment or alcohol treatment to try to stop this cycle. Otherwise it will never end. Yeah, you mentioned Waikiki, obviously Waikiki is so highly visible. I mean, it's super extremely popular globally. So and because of tourism, but what do you think needs to happen? I mean, how can you work with HPD or with the weed and seed to really make sure that Waikiki doesn't become a bigger problem than it is now? Right now we're working with HPD to identify these frequent fliers, the ones who keep getting arrested over and over and see if we can charge them with a felony. But we are also looking at weed and seeds. There were three weed and seed sites in the past. The seed part never went away. They've always kept going, but without weed, it's not the same thing. You need both working together. And so very soon we'll be starting to bring the weed part back to Waipahu and Ewa Ewa Beach, because the seed part's been going, we're adding the weed to it. But already starting, and I'll be on a town hall later this month, talking to residents in Waikiki about starting the conversation about bringing weed and seed there. So that will be an important part. It'll allow us to learn from the community there, what are the big crime problems? And let me give you an example. The first time around, we had Stu and Rice at Kailani Elementary School across from Mayor Rice. And I asked the residents and businesses that came to the meeting, what are your big crime problems? They said, and what are your social service gaps? They said, we're the expert. I said, yeah, but I live in Kaimuki. I don't live here. So they talked about the open drug dealing on Pua Lane. We knew that, but they also said people speed up and down Pua Lane getting between King Street and Vineyard. We're not gonna let our kids play outside. They'll chase a ball into the street and get run over. So in what must be a record, within two weeks of us talking to the city council, they put speed humps on Pua Lane, which slowed the traffic down, cheap intervention that we never would have figured out without doing that kind of community outreach and learning from them. They also talked about things for their kids to do and early childhood. So the Sisters at St. Francis gave, opened up a two bedroom unit at the Kukui Gardens for a Head Start program. Lillio Kalani Trust paid for tutoring at Kailani Elementary School. And then Bernard Lewis, the chief custodian, ran an after school sports program for 125 kids five days a week with donations of basketballs and gloves from a sports authority. And so it's whatever the community identifies is the big problem. That's what we're gonna focus on cause they know their community the best. Prosecutor Steve, I have to say that, I mean, you have so many challenges and I mean, so many things on your plate right now. And I really wanna thank you for taking time to join me on the show, to really share with everybody what you're doing and how you're trying to do it. So I really wanna thank you for your time. Well, thank you very much. We are looking at every part of the office to think how can we make it better? Just very quickly, we changed our domestic violence charging policy. It was a rigid no-drop policy regardless of what the victim wanted to do. We discovered almost nobody in the country still sticks to that. So we've replaced that with a much more victim-centered approach and listen, usually her not always but it's usually a girlfriend or wife who's getting beaten up. We listened to her now. Does she wanna proceed with the case and testify? We will give all the resources and support. We're working with the Domestic Violence Action Center to do that. But we're looking at every part of the office to think how can we make it better? How can we be smarter about justice? And working with the deputies on making good individualized sentencing recommendations. So the judges know we're treating it seriously and we're looking at each case because we do want a number of people probably 35, 40% to go to prison at sentencing. We need that for safety in the community. When they're in prison, they should have programs, they should have classes to get rehabilitated. But some people do need to be removed from society for a while just to protect the rest of us. So we're trying to make the office the best place it can be. I can tell you a lot of the graduates from Richardson wanna come work here now, which is music to my ears. Well, it's all about safety and justice and I think you're on the right track and really wanna thank you, prosecutor Steve. Well, thank you, Rusty. Good to talk to you and I look forward to being on your show again as things move ahead. Definitely. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKomori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that prosecutor Steve and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.