 Hello everybody, I'm Mufi Hamid. Welcome again to Think Tech Hawaii, another edition of Tourism 101, where we talk about issues affecting our number one industry in the state, tourism. Today we're gonna focus on a district, iconic, historic, and everyone has a favorite story about Chinatown. Because through the years, it's been a gathering place for many reasons, cultural reasons, religious reasons, commerce, all kinds of activities that take place in Chinatown. But with this progress and development, there's also come a series of challenges. I wanna have two individuals speak specifically to what they're doing to make Chinatown a better place to live, work, and play. One of them is Sean Hamamoto, who is the Executive Director of the Neighborhood Board Commission. He's done a bang up job there in reaching all the different neighborhood boards, soliciting their participation and involvement. And the mayor has recently appointed him to be the liaison for the Chinatown community with the administration. Sean is a graduate of Punahou School and also has a college degree. He went to school on the mainland, came back home and finished up here. And he's had years of experience working in government. He was a former senior aide to a council member, Rod Tam, and in the president administration, he heads the Neighborhood Board Commission. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Not to be all done, he's a Kamehameha School Kapalama High School graduate, Captain Mike Lambert. Captain Lambert got his degree in Business Administration, UH West O'ahu, and he's had a meteoric rise in the department from officer, sergeant, major, and now captain. And he's really recently been appointed to head up a new unit within HPD called the Community Outreach Unit. And a lot of it has to do in Chinatown. Thank you for being on the show, Captain. My pleasure. Yeah. Let's start with you, Captain. Let's talk about some of the law enforcement challenges that have been part of the challenge of ensuring that Chinatown is a safe place for all of us. Yeah, so it's always been a challenge. It's particularly in Chinatown where it's always, where do we find the balance between enforcement and outreach? So prior to Chief Ballard coming aboard, there was only a very small pilot to kind of improve the way that we deal with social service-related issues regarding the homeless, the mentally ill. Those are sometimes abused. And in a lot of cases, they have all three type of issues and really trying to explore different avenues besides incarceration, which is expensive and doesn't always have the type of results that we're looking for when we're dealing with our homeless. So it's really trying to explore and find other ways to perhaps better use taxpayer dollars and be a little more responsible in seeing the big picture and not just being so quick to put everybody in jail. What about the crime rate in Chinatown? What is it, you know, oftentimes there's this competition between Waikiki and Chinatown. Folks in Waikiki say, hey, we need more HPD officers in Waikiki and Chinatown folks who say, no, no, no, we need them more in Chinatown. Can you address some of those challenges there? Yeah, so definitely, you know, Waikiki always tends to be given the mindset that it's always given more resources. And actually there's equal amount of resources in both areas. It's just that Chinatown, unfortunately to the prevalence of the homeless crisis that we're experiencing and the focus of it, it appears to be less safe than Waikiki. We do have a lot more, I guess, incidences that are highlighted within the Chinatown area which can create fear within the community and create, you know, perhaps a feeling that the police aren't doing enough. But between Waikiki and Chinatown, very similar incidences occur and it just comes down to, again, you know, again how the news plays it and how people with the community takes it. So, Sean, you know, as someone who oversees the neighborhood board there, what are some of the issues that have come up in the Chinatown neighborhood board? So, you know, definitely congruent to what Officer Lambert has said, homelessness over the years has become more prevalent. You know, I guess on a few decades ago, it was more of the open drug dealing. You know, that was a big thing. But, and as Officer Lambert had said, before homeless wasn't such a big issue, but now it is. So, yes, it is important because it not only affects the residents of the area, but the many small businesses and our tourism industry as well. Yeah. So, I know when I was mayor, you know, and every mayor had a pet event or a favorite event, I should say, in Chinatown. And certainly it was always impressed upon me and I recognized it quickly that, you know, you can't keep your eye off the ball that you can't take Chinatown for district, Chinatown District for granted. Talk about some of the challenges, the ongoing challenges that the city has in terms of doing the maintenance work in Chinatown or the cleanup that people, whether it's the neighborhood boards or the legislative talk about, you know, why isn't this being done? Why isn't that being done? Yeah, thank you, Mayor. So, yeah, sanitation has been an ongoing issue and of course this is in conjunction with the homeless. You know, way back when, the city used to have better resources. I believe Mayor Harris back then had a clean team where they could regularly power wash streets and so forth. What had happened over the years is the areas of responsibility grew. So, more people wanted more and more service, but what happened is the resources either stayed the same or shrank because I know like some of their equipment got stolen. So, bottom line is the resources were unfortunately spread in. I think this is when the community steps up. You know, there's a lot of neighborhood security watches. There are volunteers in the community that have been willing to step up to take part in either doing citizen watches with HVD or even volunteering to help with the cleanups. So, it is a true community effort. Captain, can you talk about the community outreach unit? They say it's newly created. You talk about why it was put together and I know why they put you there because you're a creative guy and you love going out in the community, but how about what that entails? So, what the community outreach unit is, it's a group of officers that really have a big heart. Sometimes we've been referred to as outreach workers with firearms and kind of funny, you know, we're still police officers. I want everybody to remember that. Well, definitely we have brought in the way that we look at problems and the way that we attack issues that affect the community. So, one of the biggest things we want to do is support diversion programs. Diversion programs meaning that instead of being so quick to put somebody in jail, we try to put them into mental health services. We try to put them into substance abuse treatment programs because the data shows that there's a lot better results for individuals that are put into services rather than jail. A lot of times they come out worse than they were when they went in and it's kind of a revolving door. So, we really want to try to leverage our community partners, which we have a lot of great, great community partners that support our initiative. They take our phone calls and we encounter individuals that could use mental health services or substance abuse or the simplest of housing services. And they go ahead and they take those phone calls for us and again, instead of having to leverage jail, we go ahead and divert them to services. We're going to drill down a little more on that because of some new initiatives as a result of some funding that the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association got together with the state to provide. Before we do that, Sean, I want to come back to you and I want to talk about, Chinatown is often seen from some folks who come here. Well, that's just Chinatown and that's just for the Chinese community. There are other ethnic groups that gravitate to Chinatown. Talk about that. Absolutely, in your correct, Mayor. If you look back historically at Chinatown, it was the entry point where all nationalities came through. For example, my great grandfather, when he first came to Oahu, the first place he lived, was on River Street in Chinatown. So yes, although called Chinatown, it is a place for all nationalities. And you know, I remember when I was on the council, I got to work with, to help bring about the arts at Mark's Garage. And I'm happy to see that it's continuing to function and flourish. But the arts has always been a big part of Chinatown that brings people from all ethnic groups and all ages. Yes, the arts has been a growing part and actually they have been one of the key groups that have, I guess, tried to get this re-imaging to Chinatown. Over a decade ago, I think you remember First Fridays, started as an initiative. This was a community project that was meant to, I guess give Chinatown a different image. The idea was to bring people down. And the idea was when you bring positive elements into a community, you automatically displace the more, I guess, criminal activities. And to a large extent, they were successful First Fridays of every month. You would have professionals, families come down to actually enjoy and walk around. And I can say Chinatown has definitely improved. We still have a ways to go, but working that arts community was a big catalyst in improving the community. I love the fact that Hawaii Theater continues to have a rebirth where I was growing up as we went to the movies. Costs 35 cents back then. And now with the concerts that they're having, the events that they're having there, it's starting to draw people back to Chinatown. Absolutely. Hawaii Theater is for sure one of the anchors in the community. They've been not only providing great entertainment and venues for people to enjoy, but I can also say about Hawaii Theater that they are active in participating with the community. They engage. In fact, I wanna commend them for a while they were holding their business public safety meetings and Hawaii Theater would offer up their space to have meetings. So they've been great partners in the community. So we have, when we talk about some of the not so nice things that happened in Chinatown before it, it used to be concerned about drugs and gambling and gangs. But I haven't seen as much, at least in the public media about that. So obviously something has changed in that regard. Or am I having a wrong impression? No, you're absolutely correct. Again, when I started off my career, I actually started in Chinatown and the issues act then were prostitution and gambling. And that's, all day, all night, people would come into the sub and go ahead and report that type of illegal activity. And now it's just, it's almost pure homeless complaints. Somebody blocking the sidewalk, urination, defecation. And I can definitely see where as a community member, if I lived or worked in that area, I'd be very frustrated with the current state of affairs there. But again, like everyone is saying, is that we got to move in a positive direction and it's not going to be overnight. Everybody has to realize that a direction has to be made by the city, by the police. And then we have to follow through with that, regardless of what people, with the kind of criticism we get for it. So, you know, Mayor Caldwell has been great, Chief Ballard has been great and supported. My, really my ask for a lot of things that, to benefit not only Chinatown, but all of Honolulu. Chinatown has always been the focal point because of saturation. So we do start off a lot of our pilots in Chinatown. And then we try to get, again, best practices which we can utilize throughout the whole island. Having a very visible presence in Chinatown, as I remember when we were debating, you know, having a physical presence there, which is now, you know, you have actually substation there. Correct. The same argument in Waikiki. You know, to me it's always been a major deterrent to crime when folks know that, you know, there's a police presence, but not just officers patrolling, but there's actually a station that you can go to seek help immediately. It has to have helped. Right, so having a substation in the area definitely gives an officer a place to kind of launch from and work from. The issues with the visibility is just that we're dealing with a shortage right now. So for beats that would normally be filled, they go unfilled. And not because the officers don't want to work, we just don't have that type of employment numbers that we've had years prior. Chief Ballard has assigned some pretty smart majors to work on that and we are slowly but surely filling the ranks again so that we can start to see more staff than not only in Chinatown, but in all neighborhoods. But I can tell you right now that Chinatown definitely needs the support. There's a lot of focus there. And initiatives like you guys are supporting definitely helps that process move along. Our guests today are Captain Michael Lambert and Sean Hamamoto, two individuals who are at the forefront in their efforts to make Chinatown a better place to live, work, and raise our families. It goes without saying, I think every mayor has regarded Chinatown as a special district. But the challenges change throughout the years and now the second part of our show, we're gonna focus on homelessness which has really become a major issue in Chinatown as it has throughout the rest of Oahu. There's some creative solutions and there's some individuals and organizations that have come together to make sure that we address this head-on. So we're gonna take a little pause for the cause, a little break here, and then we'll be back with more from Think Tech Hawaii through to 101 where our focus today is on Chinatown. Hi guys, I'm your host Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3 p.m. And this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health, regarding your health, and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So do join me, I look forward to seeing you and aloha. Aloha, I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to join us on Wednesdays at one o'clock for Cannabis Chronicles, the 10,000-year odyssey where we take a look at cannabis as food, cannabis as medicine, cannabis and religion, cannabis and dear old Uncle Sam. So please join us to learn all about cannabis. Again, Wednesdays at one o'clock. Thank you. Welcome again, everyone to Think Tech Hawaii. Today we're talking about Chinatown here on Tourism 101. Our guests are John Hamamoto, the executive director, the Neighborhood Board Commission, and Captain Mike Lambert. John, the Neighborhood Board is one forum for people to come forward, share the manao, hear their concerns, complain. What are some of the other organizations that you work with as a liaison of the mayor in the Chinatown area? Thank you, Mayor. That is the exact reason why the mayor assigned me to this is for the fact that there are so many different groups. So in addition to the Neighborhood Board, you have fantastic organizations like the Chinatown Improvement District, the Chinatown Business and Community Association, CBCA. You have the Arch District experience and you have the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, United Chinese Society. And one good thing is, while they all have their own interests, they do share, I guess, a common thought of doing what's good for the community. But because there are so many and so scattered, it really does take someone to be a liaison to kind of help, I guess, shepherd these discussions to be constructive. You know, I know when I was mayor, there's always those figures that have been involved in the community for a long time that everybody kind of looks to. Nothing can come through Chinatown without their permission. You know, it was, my day was Sunny Wong, Hinchulau. Are there Sunny Wongs at Hinchulau today in Chinatown? Well, I can say Sunny Wong and Hinchulau are still very well-known and remembered in Chinatown. They're legendary. But you know, today we still have a group of leaders, still from the old days. I think you may be familiar with the honorary mayor of Chinatown, Dr. Joe Young. Yes. He's around all the time. Then you have other great leaders, Chu An-Chu-Buk-Hua, president of CBCA, Lee Stack, president of the CID. You have Sandy Paul with her arts group and you have Nicole Reed with her restaurants at Hotel Street. Friends of Chinatown, our friends on K-Kalikei Mall. There's just so many great people in the community. Yeah. You know, the thing though, I always know that whenever I would meet with them, you always have to have a meal in Chinatown. Yes. You got a favorite Chinese restaurant or two that you want to share with them? I know you got to be politically correct, but you know, when you're owner for Chinese food. You know, I want to be honest to say I've never had a bad meal in Chinatown. Ah! You can tell he was a government judge. Good answer. But I will say I did thoroughly enjoy the meal we had together at Golden Palace where I believe you tried the chicken feet. Yes. I did. Well, you know, and Chinatown is just a wonderful place and I think, and that's why it's so attractive for tourists because of its authenticity and its history. Captain, I want to come back to you. We have an annual conference called the Visitor Public Safety Conference every year where we as a tourism industry come together and we sit down with HPD and all the law enforcement stakeholders and business owners and the community and try to identify the hot button issues. And we kind of say, look, we're in it together. Let's work together and collaborate on this. And so in our conference that we had this earlier this year, Captain Ballard came and Deputy Chief McCarthy. They always participate. And she said in no uncertain terms the number one issue for HPD is homelessness. And she appealed to us to help and assist and obviously we're all ears. And she talked in particular about a certain model that came from the city of Seattle, the LEED program. And we got together and as you all know, we were able to find some matching funds from the state in which we awarded some dollars to the Hawaii Harm and Health Reduction Center led by Heather Lusk. And we gave them a $90,000 grant to go forward in this mission and collaborating with HPD. We also gave $15,000 to the Chinatown Improvement District for their citizen patrol program. That being said, I wanna acknowledge and credit Hawaii Tourism Authority, the stadium. I wanna acknowledge the legislature and Governor Ege for proving these matching funds that we were able to parlay into giving these two worthy organizations that are very integral to what you do in Chinatown. Well, can you drill down on that initiative that really seems to be making a difference and they have a creative guy like you implementing it? Right, so yeah, LEED is Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion. It was brought by Heather Lusk in her organization who she sits over the LEED Huey for Hawaii. So of the many creative things I've done, that I did not create, I do participate in anything that's a great idea. So when I was invited to hear about their great idea, I just had to go ahead and support it. The data is there to back it, that the diversion does work. And again, it's not gonna be for everybody, but for a subset of the population, it can definitely make an impact and improve the community because for every one person that's diverted out of the jail system, out of that revolving door and gets help for mental health or substance abuse, that's one less individual that we can count as homeless. And again, particularly into the Chinatown area. So the LEED initiative, we do support diversion and it's one of the main diversion programs that we're looking at to move forward. It's always the devils in the details and China iron out a memorandum of agreement into how that process would work. But we're definitely interested in supporting it and making sure that when we do encounter individuals that could benefit from a program that Heather and her team have put together or brought here to Honolulu that we go ahead and send in that direction instead of through jail, just to be released in the morning and back out on the street. Now I was impressed with the statistics that Heather provided to us to demonstrate why this would be a good contribution to them of $90,000. But what I really find very refreshing, it kinda helps negate a stereotypical image of how HPD is involved with the homeless situation. You usually talk about them helping to move the homeless out of the parks or any legal areas or people talk about how they get excited to get in life. But this one here is really a different approach because as you say, it's all about diversion. Correct, so we definitely wanna be, I'm gonna say more dynamic in the way that we approach it, right? It's very easy and it's very impersonal to just give someone a ticket and walk away. It's very impersonal to just arrest someone, drop them off in jail. What it does take is somebody to ask somebody why are you out here, why it keeps you out here and is there a possibility of me diverting into a service rather than jail? So we definitely wanna have a softer approach because we realize the data. And again, everything goes on to data. The data shows that you can have a positive effect on someone without having to arrest them and it's something that Chief Ballard has supported. So walk us through how it happens. So you come across a homeless individual and what are the kind of things that you're looking at to say to yourself, you know what, this person could be a good candidate for this diversion program. Right, so again, we're all in discussions on how the actual process, but some of the ideas that have come out is that an officer encounters someone, say perhaps for a part closure. If the officer is the complainant, meaning a member of the public has not called on that individual, it's solely on the officer. We can have the option to divert them to services rather than take them to jail. That person would have to be screened. So a lot of the big things we want the community to understand is that we're not taking robbers and murderers and giving them a break. It's for that person that basically has done nothing else wrong in their life except for be poor or have some type of other issue that keeps them on the street. So we screen them. If they don't have any violent history, they are eligible for a leave. If you've had robberies and you're just victimizing the community, you're not eligible for that diversion. You go to jail as you should. But really what we want to do is, there's a lot of people, a lot of great people that I've met out there that are just down on their luck, maybe a few bad choices of their own, they're now in the predicament they're in, but I do believe that everyone is salvageable. Some people need a lot more effort than others, but everyone as a human being can improve and change, and that's what we want to do as a police department is give people that opportunity to improve. How many of you are involved in this effort that you lead a special unit? So there's me and I have a five under my command and it's a big hearty group. A lot of them actually have experienced homelessness as a child, so they really have the heart for it. Everyone thinks as police officers that we come from this perfect world and we get slapped on a badge and every night we beam up to the mothership to our perfect world, we don't. We take off our uniforms, we go back to our homes, we have a history within those communities that they all are complaining about and upset about, and we have the same frustrations, but we just have to be maintaining our integrity and be fair in how we're administering help. How has this been received in the Chinatown community what Heather and her organization has done in partnering with HPD? Very well, I can just say in talking with the community members that are overjoyed, that day that the gift was presented by HT and HLTA, there were just so many smiles and there was just a sense of optimism that yes, things are gonna get better, but it's exactly this, it's what it takes, it's not just government, it's not just community, it's community government and the private sector working together. Can you talk about the Chinatown Improvement District and the good job that they've done, Leastac? Yeah, so Leastac has been in the community for many years. She is one of the landowners in there. I can't even count how many meetings, community meetings I've been with Lea over the years, but she is always in the community. Almost every other time I'm in Chinatown, I will see her or her brother just walking around and she's always willing to engage and I was thinking of new ideas, I mean, over the years and it's just these small ideas but to help improve the community. I'm not, if you're aware, she came up with the idea of hanging the flower baskets on the light posts on Hotel Street to work with DTS and she actually goes and waters them herself. So it's a really great organization and it's really made some positive changes in the community. Yeah, so talk about this patrol program, this neighborhood patrol program that the money that we gave her is gonna help fund. Are you familiar with that? I'm not too familiar with that, but my understanding it is gonna be similar to other established neighborhood watches working in conjunction with HPD and I actually commend her because actually that part of Chinatown, that arts district, that's one portion that really didn't have a watch. You have those guys on Kei Kaolike and up by Lumsai Holtong, but yeah, I think so this is gonna really good fit for the Chinatown Arts District. I can actually add a little bit to that. So Lisa, she really, really went above and beyond as a community member to bring people together and she reached out to the district one's community policing team and what they identified was the issue, a lot of the issue with Chinatown is the whole private public area. So what happens is when our homeless go on to the private area, the police can't tell people to move along unless there's a representative. So she's really brought people together to fill that gap so that when an officer encounters an homeless individual on private property, there's a point of contact that we can verify whether or not they're supposed to be on property or not. Prior to initiatives that she's brought together, that wasn't an option, we just kind of had to leave them where they were. Well, folks, there you have it. We've had a very engaging discussion and dialogue with these two gentlemen at the forefront of making Chinatown a better place. They said, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you as a citizen. I want to thank you as a Waikiki Tourism Association stakeholder in all this tourism, if you will. I want to thank you as a former mayor because Chinatown is so important. It has a rich history and we want to make sure everybody remembers what's so great about it in the past, but in going forward, the best is yet to come. Absolutely. So thank you for being here. Thank you, sir. Captain, this was just to you. Yes. Keep it going. I'll try. Come in, man. Sean, keep up the great work. Go, Buffon Blue. All right, thank you. Thank you, Elani. Thank you for joining us today. We'll see you next time here on Think Tech 101 with another edition of Tourism 101.