 Welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii Studios for another episode of Security Matters. Today, we're talking about Corona crime. We're interested to see if things have changed a little bit with this lockdown, and I've got a couple of guys with me here that know this industry, they know this community very well. Michael Kitchens is with us today, thanks for visiting, Michael. He's got stolen stuff Hawaii. I think, Mike tells me you have some 100 plus 150,000 followers over there. So this is something that's of interest to everyone. Thank you for serving the community that way. And I have Mike Gonzalez here. He's the Director of Technology for Integrated Security Technologies, and he's going to go over the CAP index and some of the crime reports. And we're kind of interested to see if some of the stuff that's coming out of the CAP is maybe similar to some of the stuff you're seeing with your traffic over there, Mike. So I'll let Mike Kitchens go first, please. I'll introduce yourself to our audience, and you know, as much of your background and history as you care to share that leads up to the, to run in the site that you run today. Of course, my name is Michael Kitchens. I run Stolen Stuff Hawaii. It's something I started in 2014. And it came from a very small group into the Hawaii's largest anti-crime group. We have over 133,000 people and growing. It's been an extremely effective tool in helping to not only deter crime, but actually help find those responsible for it, along with a whole number of other things, such as lost and found, you know, missing persons. There are things like that. So we had a good time on it and we've been able to do a lot of good and we actually can see trends and what's going on. So obviously the current situation is, is rather interesting. That's awesome. Thank you. And Mike Gonzalez, give us a little bit of your history there, sir. And then how you arrived here today and this, tell us about this CAP index stuff too. Sure. My name is Mike Gonzalez. I'm the director of technology for integrated security technologies. I've been in the security field for roughly around 20 years. Prior to previous to that, I was in the military as an infantryman in the army. After that, I went into infrastructure security for a major electrical utility in the islands. I did that for about 10 years and learned a lot about the security industry and the threats that that face various different sectors. One of the things that during this coronavirus shutdown is how that affects the crime statistics that we can usually see. And what I usually use as part of security, threatened vulnerability assessments for client sites, we do mostly commercial and critical infrastructure and military is I use the crime cast model. It's a it's a website cap index dot com. What it does is it consumes all the uniform crime reports coming in from the FBI and all of the local police departments all over the country. They report UCR data uniform crime report data to the FBI where it aggregates and then consumed by cap index. And they put it down on a map using using geospatial tools. So what you end up with is the ability to see over the past year or whatever time frame that you're looking for what the crime statistics were in that neighborhood and how that compares to the national average. So we'll show in some graphics here in a little bit about that. I think it's very interesting and it ties into what Mike's doing on the internet pretty well of the people on his site. They report various different crimes. The report suspicious people do these sorts of things. Mike always requires them to have a have a police report number on there just to make sure that it's on the up and up. And we can compare that what I like to do is I like to get those crimes that I see that are of interest to me and to our community. I checked the cap index data and I checked the HPD crime stats website to to see if that's part of a series or if it's part of a one off. Or I'm interested to see if there's any sort of organization in that or if it's just randomized. So it's it's kind of a side thing that I like to do. That's awesome. And Michael Kitchens on your side of the house over there. Do you compose statistical data alongside the sharing of the information that you're putting out with the community? I know it's I know you've got several different platforms and I was kind of wondering if you do you correlate those across or do you just tend to see threads in multiple places? I wouldn't I wouldn't say that we take a statistical database. It's very difficult with the way Facebook works. We had something going and then everything went through the book and that kind of hosed it at all. But really what we do is we try to see trends. You know, it's very easy for us to see trends if there's a specific type of, for example, vehicle that's being stolen. You know, if there's a specific area that's being hit hard, you can see these trends just by, you know, doing quick searches by seeing, you know, the different posts that acquire in the group. And maybe I didn't explain it earlier enough. But essentially what happens is that people who have been victimized, they come to our group and they post about their experiences, whether their vehicle is stolen, their house was burglarized or they were robbed. They post about it, you know, they give us as much information as we can as they can get. And that helps us to kind of track and help them, you know, either find the person responsible or, you know, maybe find their stolen vehicle, their stolen property, things of that nature. So by watching the trends, you can see, for example, when, you know, about a couple of years ago, Toyota Tacomas were getting hit non-stop because they were getting their wheels, their rims stolen. That was something that we could see quite easily because it was just multiple posts after another. And of course, Facebook and social media in general is very powerful. So you can actually go and grab from Facebook and grab from Instagram. And you start seeing these trends and that helps us to warn the public and say, listen, you have one of these vehicles, you know, it's being targeted right now, for example. So. Wow. Were the in the Toyota Tacoma instance, were the was this a small group? Did they ultimately get caught? Or was it just something like Varad or a whole bunch of different people wanted to have those types of wheels? Well, there's a lot of discussion on that. I mean, from the information that I do have, there are specific, like, you know, somebody will put a request out for a certain type of, you know, wheel, that sort of thing. And then, you know, somebody goes, you know, they're out there. Of course, that it's their job to steal, you know, and they're in that. They wake up in the morning and that's their job. They're going to go out and steal specific things. And that's kind of some of the things that we actually see. So, but I do know that, you know, a lot of the crime is when it comes to vehicle theft is responsible just for a very small number of people on the island. So. Hmm, interesting. Are our stolen vehicles here just being stripped for parts? Are they being shipped like, like to the mainland and sold? Or do you have any intel on that or are either one of you guys? I hear all kinds of things. Obviously, I get a lot of intel from other people. I mean, I get lots of sources that message me or contact me and, you know, tell me about stuff. But really, I think a lot of the times it's a good mix. I mean, there is definitely vehicles that disappear. And you never see them again. But obviously, there's also places like, you know, the chop shops, you know, that are out in the boonies, you know, and cars disappear over there because they're just taken and then parted out. And of course, the lucrative, there is a lucrative march to the parks. Ah, I see. Yeah, I saw in the news recently, you know, up in Oahu by Whitmore Village going over to that Whitmore Naval Air Station, they cleared out that brush and there were a hundred something cars there. What? God knows how many cases that they just closed from that. You know what I mean? I mean, these cars have been missing for years and they were sitting right there in plain sight from the free or from from Cam Highway. But because that grass was so tall, you had no idea that right on the other side of that tall grass, there's a hundred something cars sitting in the field. So the state is working within itself to figure that kind of stuff out because that's like agricultural development land. And the oversight on that was poor. I see. It was extremely. It was actually, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was just going to say it's something that actually came up in our group two years ago and with the focus on it, it hit the news and then it hit the news again and then it hit the news again. And it was just one of these things for the past couple of years. That's been a known problem area and they wouldn't take any action on it. And then there was a female that got shot in the head and unfortunately passed and that drew a huge limelight to that area. And that's when everything hit. That's when they went after him. That pretty much was the breaking point for them. So. Wow. For the state. Yeah, you make a point that I've often felt and I don't know. I'd like to get you guys opinion on it, but it seems to me that property crime theft in particular is not, not a high priority. Let's put it that way. And then violent crime, of course, you do something violent. They will find a bed for you some in one of these jails, right? What's your feeling of, you know, the experience that you've seen over the years as that is that a valid kind of sentiment? Or do you think there's equal levels of activity for, you know, for investigating property theft as well as violent crime? I think the issue with property crime is that it's often viewed as a, you know, non-traumatic, non-violent experience. But from my experience running the group, it's our bread and butter. Violent crime, thankfully, is not a very high, it's not something that's extreme here compared to the mainland. But property crime is through the roof. Fortunately, it is quite traumatic. You're talking about affecting about people's jobs, people lose their, get their car stolen, you know, have their houses burglarized. That creates this trauma. They're afraid to sleep in their house at night. You know, there's a massive amount of property crime that affects people on a very high level, but for some reason it's kind of relegated to the, you know, the lower end of the spectrum. When, like, for example, our elected officials talked about it. You'll notice that in the elected officials' campaigns of that, they rarely talk about crime, but yet crime is horrible here. I think one of those things also has to do with the fact that property crime is hard to solve. Without any distinct and obvious amount of evidence. In other words, you need to have something like, you know, career video of the person doing it, you know, you need to have, you know, just enough evidence to put him away. Otherwise, it won't be prosecuted. If it's not 100% open and shut case, the prosecutor's office usually doesn't take it just because, you know, they have so many cases on their hands, it's impossible to go after every single one. Mike, I know when you were at the utility, you built some casework around some of this kind of stuff and provided evidence, was that your experience as well, that you really had to have really good detailed, you know, technology, you might be a camera evidence or access control, whatever you may have had in order to get some action taken against a potential, I don't want to convict everybody, but a potential, what are they, a potential criminal? I'll just leave it at that. Well, you know, we did feel that exactly what Mike was saying. And one of the things we had to do is take the steps to work within the legislature to make trespassing and tampering with the electrical utility a felony. And that's what got its attention. That just went into, it passed through the legislature just a couple of weeks ago and it takes effect, I think in like 2024, something like that. And that's really what we had to do to get any kind of traction. We had to increase the severity of the crime, even though it's the same crime as it was yesterday, by making it a felony now, then it'll be actually investigated. Previous to that, we could have video, we could have analytics, we could have all kinds of data and even with a face shot, and it didn't always go anywhere. Wow. You know, I took a little bit of criminology back when I was in undergrad studies and I recall that they, back then, I mean, this is going way back now, late 80s, early 90s, they said that 7% of the criminals did 70% of the crime. Is that, would that resonate with you guys in your experience in the community here? I would have to say so. That is, like I was saying about the vehicle crime, there's a certain segment of the population that really are responsible for it. And actually, they just actually had a pretty successful case against one of them who was kind of the leader and they took him out and that's actually some of the vehicle crime, actually, as of late. And there was the news in the, I mean, article in the news, you can go and look it up, but it did have an effect and that's because of what you said. There's certain key people that have just basically, they have learned the system, they know how far they can push things and the likelihood of them getting caught. A lot of the random crime that we see, they are just single persons, but they're the ones that are really big, like where you can see vehicles getting stolen without much proof and evidence, that's usually behind somebody who does it for a living. Wow. And Mike, you got to know, because copper theft was a big thing for a long time for utilities, is that, did we have that happening over here as well? Oh yeah, absolutely. It was a weekly occurrence almost, people risking their lives to steal $100 worth of copper. And when I was with the utility, what they would do was steal any kind of copper grounding or anything that you could reach from the outside of the perimeter fence, all the systems would detect them and we'd roll the police and they'd get there and either arrest them or chase them off, but that $50 to $100 worth of copper that they just stole, it cost that company upwards of $50,000 to replace because of all the things that they have to do, shut up the station, roll crews, roll trucks, do all these things, just to replace that 50 to 100 bucks worth of material that was taken. Man, that is something else. We're gonna look at some of this data when we come back, we gotta pay some bills, so we'll take a break for one minute and we'll be right back with Michael Kitchens and Michael Gonzalez. Thanks guys, hang around. Aloha, my name is Duretian. I'm the host of Finding Our Future here on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm here every other Tuesday from one to 1.30 p.m. Here on this show, I cover issues around sustainability, global issues that matter for young people for future generations and other social justice issues. So please join us. It's live streamed on Think Tech, Hawaii and also up later on YouTube. Hey, aloha everybody and welcome back to Corona Crimes. This is a special edition today. We're chopping up this issue of crime in Hawaii and trying to see if it had at the Corona quarantine, not really quarantine here, but the shelter in place orders have had an effect on crime. We've been talking a little bit about what crime's been going on and it seems like property crimes, kind of rampant in Hawaii. And if you're really bad and do some violent things, then probably they'll put you away, but the crime scene is big. Michael Kitchens is with us today. He has stolen stuff away. I've got a great community of folks out there. So if you have some problems, make sure you go find him and post out there. You never know what kind of help you might get. Michael Gonzalez is here with us. He spent a lot of time helping one of our large utilities manage crime and serve facilities and keep them secure. So Mike, I know you got some of the CAP index data from Honolulu. Why don't you explain what the CAP is and then maybe we'll take a look at some of that six mile data that we have today. Okay. So what the CAP index data does, as I mentioned before, is it consumes all that uniform crime reporting data from the FBI and puts it in a geospatial tool, which will lay that out on where the crime occurred and we can run statistics on when it happened and how that compares to the national average. And it takes things into account like population density and things like that. So it takes away some of those gaps that you might see between the comparison of a city like Honolulu and a city like Chicago or LA or New York. It'll adjust to those numbers for things like that. And as you can see here, I believe that's 275 or 245. What that means, that score, that means that in this six mile methodology where I ran the report and I just centered it under on Sand Island for the purposes of this presentation, just so it would catch most of downtown Honolulu and Kalihi and all that. What that's showing is that the crime in Honolulu in this area is 2.45 times the national average for cities of our population density and size. So that's interesting. That supports exactly what Mike was saying where property crime is kind of a big deal here and it's not seen as being as big of a deal as we see it because it's not understood to be as traumatic as an experience of like getting assaulted or something of that effect. But when you come into somebody's house and you violate their space, I mean, that has a severe traumatic impact on everybody I've spoken to and the same thing applies in their car, right? I mean, we have an expectation of privacy and when somebody invades that regardless of what location they're doing it in, whether it's your home, your business, your car, whatever, you feel that and it matters to you. And you know, there's a lot of things that could be affecting that. Like for one example, I know I just saw the chief on the news several months ago talking about their staffing issues with the police department and that they were going to forego investigations on various different low level crimes and focus on some of the more important stuff in their view. And that could have a negative impact on, you know, on how much crime is going on because people see that as like, hey, that risk reward calculation that they're doing in their head with the scale, right? So one of the things that I was thinking about when it comes to coronavirus and how it affects all of this is that as you mentioned before somewhere between two and a half and 10% of the population commit 100% of the crimes. And in Hawaii, we have a very high cost of living and we have a high homeless population and that fringe, you know, the 10 to 20% fringe right there, they might be tempted to turn to crime in these sorts of times because they may not be an essential worker. They may not be able to work from home. They might not be able to work at all. They're looking to not become homeless. If they're not homeless right now they gotta pay their rent. Any money they have is going towards that. So the temptation is there to break the law. Now, usually we have an insane amount of tourists here. And I don't know if you all have seen the pictures of the Aloha Stadium where the entire stadium parking lot is full of rental cars that are no longer on the road. That blew my mind because it puts a, I understood the numbers but I didn't understand the severity until I saw that. And so what's interesting to me is that before when it came to property crime people would go after tourists and do UEMVs, you know, car break-ins for rental cars because they understood that if I break into this car even if I get caught, the chances of this person coming all the way back to Hawaii to testify against me is slim to none. So that nothing's gonna happen to me. Now, this last week, only 800 something tourists came into Hawaii because of the governors, you know, basically stay home. So these people still gotta do what they gotta do as Mike mentioned, stealing is their job. So the people who are gonna go after is us now. You know what I mean? So it's not, I'm not trying to like create fear or anything like that. You know, it's, I'm just saying awareness, right? Everybody's thinking about how do I take care of my home? How do I take care of my family? How do I protect myself from this unseen threat? We need to start thinking about seen threats too. This is the time where it's important, you know, make sure that you understand what's going on in your neighborhood and you understand who's snooping around. Yeah, Mike Kitchens has ever resonated. Are you seeing more crime? You're seeing less crime. How's it looking? I did notice that the piggyback on what Mike said is that we actually just had a couple of days ago we had an actual burglary, a robbery pretty much at one o'clock in the afternoon in someone's house. You know, they left their door open. They came in, you know, robbed them, you know, at gunpoint and then left, you know? And they just go to see, wait, that is something that I don't see very often in the group, you know? But to have somebody actually be so brazen enough that they go into somebody's home during the middle of the day and rob them, that's a huge change, you know? That's a turning issue that we have to look for. And one of the other things that happen as well is that they're now releasing inmates. They're releasing inmates from the gels, you know, misdemeanor crimes, but also felons who have committed, you know, a probation violation. So you can have somebody that, you know, went on a rampage, stole a bunch of vehicles, you know, and then, you know, did a lot of property crime and now they just got released because they violated the probation as opposed to the fact that, you know, they're not, that's not a misdemeanor, they're a felon. And now because they're releasing inmates because of the COVID virus, those guys are now on the streets, you know, able. And, you know, yeah, they say that they're either, they have to have a place to go before they get released. They either have to be in rehab home or something like that, but you know what I mean? That doesn't mean that they're staying in those places. So, yeah, it's different. I think this is something we might need to keep up, kind of keep maybe a two week check-in on this kind of an episode to kind of keep up and keep the public abreast of what's kind of going on. I know you brought some February and March data as well. Let's take a look at that, because I thought it was interesting that the days of the week that crime was happening changed. I think that's February and looks like Thursday was the biggest crime day of the week. And then I don't know, Eric, if you can flip that to March. Now look at March, Sunday and Monday. So I, anybody got an idea why that might be happening? So this data that we're showing right there is from the Honolulu Police Department Crime Mapping website. So you can get up to the minute from, the first one was CAP index, this last one was crimemapping.com or something. It's a link from the HPD website. If you look at crime stats or crime mapping the tab on there and you can do filtering and zone in on your particular neighborhood, right? So that representation, that's just showing basically the same representation as the CAP index data, like central, like downtown and like three miles around downtown. And you'll notice that those days did flip, you know, the Thursday, I mean, I think it stands to reason that before the coronavirus thing was a problem, on Thursdays and Fridays, they might be taking things to gear up for the, you know, party favors for the weekend or whatever their habit is, you know, feeding their habit or whatever they're doing. And then when it flips to Monday, it looks like more, it looks to me like, it's more of necessity, right? It's like getting money to make sure you can eat and do those sorts of things. I mean, that's just speculation, but it stands to reason. And why I say that is that in addition to the crime that Mike was reporting in the middle of the afternoon at one o'clock, when everybody knows that most people are home and there's a good chance of encountering somebody, on top of that, the Hawaii food bank just had a break in where people stole a bunch of stuff from the Hawaii food bank in the past week. So that is a sign that there is serious desperation there. And one of the points that I wanted to make, and you know, I'll say it again in closing at the end of this is that, you know, we need to be aware of what's going on in our neighborhood and we need to be able to protect each other. But equally important, I think, is that we need to have compassion for the people that are committing these crimes. I'm not saying open your door and let them steal, but it's on all of us to help each other, right? And if we can help solve a problem and have people not turn to these sorts of violations, you know, of people's personal space and income and everything like that, we might be able to help ourselves. Nice. We can definitely use more compassion right now. Mike Kitchens, your final thoughts? Well, I believe that, you know, the fact that everybody's at home right now, there's a large majority of people that are at home. And because of the uncertainty of the virus, I'm hoping that crime will maybe improve. However, the fact that, you know, there are people are losing their jobs, you know, they're losing their employment, you know, unemployment is record highs. I don't foresee that happening. I see it possibly getting maybe a little bit worth, not to be fear-mongering, but I just think that we really need to be aware, we need to be vigilant and we need to make sure that, you know, we're watching out for each other and we're taking care of each other. And most importantly, you know, as soon as something happens, you've got to pick up the phone and you've got to call 911. It's not calling social media, it's not going social media, it's not, you know, tell your friends, it's, you know, call 911. And of course, protect yourself as well. Yeah, thank you. Guys, thank you so much. We may gear up another one of these in a few weeks to see how we're doing. I think this is good information for the community and I really appreciate you taking the time to share today. Out there, everybody, you guys be safe, stay indoors, be healthy. Aloha everyone, take care. Thanks now.