 Live, it's a nine o'clock clock on a given Wednesday. I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech, and more specifically, this is Community Matters, with Steve Ohm, he's a candidate for prosecuting attorney for the city and county of Honolulu. Good morning, Steve, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, good morning, Jay, good to be here. So to follow our discussion before we began, you know, I feel this is a very important office and I feel that it has a lot to do without future, especially under the pressure of COVID and, you know, the diminution of our economy and so forth. And then of course you bring, you find yourself with baggage from the KLOF scandal and maybe in the prosecutor's office itself. I mean, there's so many challenges, there's so much baggage to deal with. Why in the world do you want this office, you know? Well, my wife and I both started there. So we care about the people, we care about the institution, we know how important it is. So I do feel a sense of obligation, you know, to go back, clean it up, train the deputies, bring in some good people and maybe make it the best office it's ever been. Oh wow, how do you do that? I mean, what specifically is, you know, lacking now and how do you fix that? Okay, well, I think the election really is all about restoring trust to that office. That's what people tell me all around the island when I go talking. And I first wanna thank all the voters in the primary because I was gratified and humbled with that result. I won all the districts island wide from Waianae to, you know, Hawaii Kai from Pearl City to Kanioa. And I think it reinforces that they want a proven leader to get back in there, straighten it out and get things back to the way they ought to be. So there are many things that need to be done. I think you have to make sure you go in and create a culture of high ethical standards, essentially of doing justice, not just winning cases. It means training the deputy prosecutors so they are as ethical as can be and as skilled as they can be. So you can negotiate plea agreements from strength, you can win more cases. We have to certainly look at anything Kathy K. Loa had done, any of the cases she touched, make sure there's nothing wrong there. Or if it is, we'll take appropriate action up to and including dismissing cases. It means being a full partner with all the other law enforcement entities. The attorney general, the US attorney working closely with HPD because they're your main partner in doing so many things. And they all have to be done at the same time. But it also means bringing in good supervisors who have a good moral compass. You don't want to micromanage people so you want to hire good people and have them do their jobs. And I think I have a good history of getting good supervisors under me because I've done this before when I was at the prosecutor's office before I was first as felony team captain. You know, when you always get offers to go into private practice and civil and make more money or become a criminal defense attorney, make more money. But I was committed to that, you know to the prosecutor's office. And so I was a felony team captain. Then I was head of district and family court when the deputies first joined the office. So I had Loretta Sheehan. I had Ron, now Judge Johnson, Tom Brady, Kevin Takata helped. You know, we made it into a trials division and I had the deputies in their suits at eight o'clock on Saturday morning after being in court all week over in district court to learn how to pick a jury, how to do opening statements, how to do direct exam, cross exam. You know what it takes. You don't learn that stuff in law school. You've got to actually learn it on the job and we did it together. So, you know, my parents taught my older brother Robbie and me to be respectful of everybody, be, you know, courteous to everybody, but also that nobody gets anything done by themselves, right? It's, it takes a team, it takes a group. Has the, I mean, I don't know about how it is now or even, you know, in view of the Kathy and KLOI issue, has the prosecutor's office ever gone political? I mean, has it ever been, you know, politicized in your recollection? No, I mean, it's, it was very strong from a trial attorney standpoint when I first joined it back when Charles Marsden was prosecutor. I remember. The focus there was going after organized crime and he had a personal reason with his son and that was important. But I think what I can bring to it is when I was your attorney, I made getting the federal agencies working together and then working with the Honolulu Police Department my number one goal, because they each bring something to the table, whether it's expertise, wiretap capability, maybe certain funding, but HPD is on the street every day, they've got the snitches, people trust them, they've passed them information. It was horrible to see the criminal investigative unit get dragged through the mud, you know, with KLOI because when I was your attorney, they were a great group. And that's, you know, how we got started investigating Gary Rodriguez, the head of the United Public Workers because somebody from that unit called us up and said, hey, I've got some information, I wanna pass it on to you and help you hear about it. And because they trusted us to do the job, take the time to do a good investigation and keep our mouths shut. And it took three years to do that investigation. Well, speaking of organized crime for a moment, you know, the miski case has really disturbed a lot of people. I can tell you it's disturbed me, I always felt it, whatever Hawaii was, it wasn't that. And we've had other incidents that I felt named Rothman years ago. And, you know, there are people who, you know, could be characterized as organized crime, but miski murder for hire, that's very, very troubling. And I wonder what your reaction is to that, to the extent that you can speak about it. Now, what is your reaction to that? Are you as offended as I am by what can be done about it? We can't tolerate that in this community. Absolutely. And there have been organized crime cases before. Certainly when, you know, Marslyn was active then, you had different ethnic groups running, different organized crime groups. And when I was US attorney, there was organized crime running, gambling and gambling goes often at the heart of this, right? Down in Chinatown, we did lots of cases, 32 defendants that way. And then sooner after I left, Tom Brady was the lead attorney in that polygolf course shooting that was very violent, was, you know, was murdered there, but it was fighting for control of gambling security operations. So what, like you said, what's been public reported in miski is disturbing in the miski case because it's been going on for a long time. And again, these kind of cases take years to investigate because usually law enforcement hears about it when it's been an ongoing operation. That's how you find out about it. And then you go back in time historically to see what you can put together, dots you can connect, are there wiretaps you can do, are there people, you know, who have been charged with other crimes who might want to be turning government witnesses. But it takes that kind of thing. The federal prosecutors and the Honolulu prosecutors shouldn't be doing the same cases in most of the time. It's not efficient. No, it's not. And the fed should be taking their time, looking at things, you know, organizations, things like that, not individual cases unless it's in the service of that kind of thing. But then getting the feds and HPD because I don't know anything more than you do about MISCII, but I guarantee you HPD has been involved in investigating. They're looking back at records. They're, you know, the feds are very good about making a paper trail in any case because as you know, in court, often witnesses either know somebody on one side or the other, jurors are often gonna, you know, take any testimony with a grain of salt. But if you have paper showing it, it's like the paper cases, the bank fraud and stuff against the KLO is, you know, our slam dunk because it's hard to fight a piece of paper. Yeah. Well, yeah, true. It is hard to fight a piece of paper. And moving from that to the issue of whether, you know, we have, we have physical crimes. We have classical criminal activity covered by criminal statutes and all that. And then we have white collar crimes, which are not classical crimes. And they're not property crimes directly. They're not physical force crimes. They're not, you know, the classical felonies. And I wonder how you feel about that. What's more important? I mean, in a way, that kind of white collar crime is corruption and it's at the core of our business community. And it has a very negative effect on the confidence of the people in the government to let it go on that everybody can cheat. So what are your thoughts about which one is more important? They're both important. And but like you say, it often gets treated and not quite as seriously. So when I was the US attorney, I liked the fact that the federal guidelines had white collar criminals going to prison as well. And I think in the state system, the judges have tremendous discretion about prison or probation, you know, in or out, that kind of thing. And often the white collar criminals, I think do get treated more leniently that way. When I was a judge, there were all these campaigns spending violations. And I would typically, you know, put engineers or lawyer into jail for like 10 days for this. And I was accused of being a till of the hunt with this, you know, because none of the other judges sent anybody to jail. And they said, well, this has been going on for a long time. It's like, yeah, you didn't invent this, but you kept this corrupt system going. And so when you read reports about, you know, even allegations about the postmaster had employees make donations and then get bonuses. That was exactly what we had cases here all about. You know, the corporation would pay people back if they would donate money. And it's the same kind of thing. And, you know, it's important because white collar crime, political corruption, unlike violent crime, I think you really can deter it because nobody thinks about what the penalty will be before they hit somebody over the head with a bottle in a bar, right? Or attack somebody on the street. But if they're looking at cheating on the system, whether it's campaign donations, other white collar fraud schemes, they are thinking through this. And that's why when I was U.S. Attorney, and then when I was a judge, I would treat those cases very seriously. As a judge, there was a guy named Tim Janis who was a disbarred lawyer and CPA. He had been convicted in federal court on the mainland of ripping off elderly clients. He came here and at the time, the Salvation Army didn't do a background check for that kind of crime. They did it for people working with little kids. Well, he got placed in charge of planned giving. And so he did the same scams here. And when he came in front of me and he was convicted, I gave him 30 years in prison. And I said, I hope you've ripped off your last senior citizen. Because there are people that are praying on other people and they're not the most common ones. But when you catch them, you wanna really hammer them. And part of that is to protect other people for the future. But part of that also is anybody thinking about doing that should realize if they get caught, there's gonna be a real price to pay. Yeah, speaking of senior citizens, I've seen a number of articles about how in the time of COVID, in the time of vulnerable senior citizens who can't fight back so easily, they become targets. And a lot of people do purse stealing and the like. The people who attack senior citizens, are they entitled to special consideration and sentencing because their victim was a senior citizen? Well, right now, there's already built into the law that if the person is older, the sentence can be stronger. I've resisted people asking how about sentences, make it against tourists, make it higher. And I've resisted that kind of thing. Every case is important. Some people won't remember it, but when I was U.S. Attorney, we had a purse snatching thing that was going on for a couple of years, there were hundreds of victims. Japanese tourists were being targeted. And it got so bad, the council general sent an open letter to the mayor saying, if this doesn't stop, I'm gonna tell the Japanese tourists not to visit Hawaii anymore. COVID aside, Hawaii tourism without Japanese tourists would be a disaster. But again, it was working, the U.S. Attorney's office, FBI, HPD, HPD had done a lot of investigative work. And we ended up getting the whole ring. I don't remember the star advertisers doing another editorial saying, in this case, we approve of harsh sentences because of the damage they caused. And I mean, literally, it was thousands of cars stolen because they parked one at Capilani Park and then cruise to Waikiki, a guy would reach out of the rear window and grab onto a woman's purse and drag her until she let go of it. Pelvises were broken, it was violent stuff. And it didn't care, they just didn't care about people. And so it was very fortunate, John Payton was the lead on working with that and the ringleader pled guilty and he caved and then everybody else did too. And I think people will take advantage of it now, but one thing as a judge, and if I become the next prosecutor, I'm the rare criminal justice person who looks at data and research to drive criminal justice policy. Because for too long, it's been an anecdote, it's been gut feeling, it's been, we've always done it this way. There's a better way to do things. So I actually looked at the numbers from HPD and in the last year, crime is down. It's actually down. I think it's because people are staying home some. There have been some horrendous examples. And if you're the one getting your purse stolen or you're the one getting assaulted, you're not gonna feel like crime is down at all. And I completely get that. But in this day of 24-7, cable news and people looking at the phone notifications when there's a crime, I think it can make, if you actually have a purse in the street, it's crime higher now than it was 10 years ago. I would bet you 90% will say it is. And crime has been dropping for the last 30 years. That's, there's certain neighborhoods of course that are gonna be higher. But if you look island wide or statewide, no question about it, whether it's violent crime, whether it's property crime, it has been dropping for 30 years. You know, you talk about public policy and it strikes me just in this conversation that either de facto or de jure, a prosecuting attorney does have a hand, if you will, in public policy. Because you can make choices about what you prosecute and what you don't. You can examine data about things that are troubling in the community and then come up with solutions to deal with the things that bother you. So can you comment on that for a minute, Steve? And tell us what your thought is about public policy and what your thought is about lobbying. Peter Karla used to go to the legislature every year seeking changes to tune up the power of the prosecuting attorney. And in many ways he was successful. But what are your thoughts about public policy and the job? I think it's very important and I think people expect it and I've been in the system for a long time and you know, my opponents in this kind of race have tried to say always part of the old system. It's like, I have been against the status quo and trying to improve it from day one. In any job I've had, whether it was training deputies or HPD at the prosecutors, whether it was doing weed and seed. And if I get in, we're gonna do that again starting in Chinatown at Cali Palama. We reduced crime by 70% there, 7-0. And that changed the character of both neighborhoods. Back before that local people were afraid to park their cars there and walk around in Chinatown, it was too dangerous. Now, unfortunately it slipped back somewhat but we will get it straightened out again. But the prosecutor, either the Honolulu prosecutor by themselves or working together with the neighborhood prosecutor and the attorney general have a law enforcement coalition where they can take a package of bills up. And that changes, you know, you can help victims, you can make laws more effective. When I was, every 10 years, the legislature asked the judiciary to chair a review of the penal code. And first Chief Justice Moon asked me because to chair it, it's 29 members, right? All the prosecutors, defense counsel, OHA, the victims rights group, you know, it's a herding cats operation, right? But he asked me to do it in 2005 and then Chief Justice Recton will ask me to do it in 2015. We came up with 84 recommendations in 15 and two of them got rid of mandatory minimums for drug cases because we realized by this time that sending somebody to Halava prison, no, requiring a judge to send somebody to Halava prison for possession of a small amount of drugs after a couple of convictions, it does not make any sense. Again, research shows treatment for drug use is more effective in the community than it is behind bars because it's too artificial in the environment, behind bars. So I don't believe in policy and being part of that. Legislators wanna ask you questions. They wanna know if we support this bill that will increase funding for substance abuse, are you gonna say we're soft on crime? And I certainly won't. I mean, that's part of the solution. And understand this, I say this as the toughest sentence there in circuit court. I was the first career prosecutor to be appointed to circuit court in Honolulu ever. So I sent more people to prison. I sent more consecutive sentences but that was the really violent, dangerous ones. And that's probably 35% of defendants in sentencing but they should go to prison. That means the other 65% can and should be placed on probation and we have successful initiatives like drug court, mental health court, hope probation that can help people succeed. And when they succeed, that's good. That is good public safety policy too. You were involved in setting up, what was it, the drug court here in the first second? Say it again. Hope probation. Can you talk about it? Yeah, well, on regular probation, the probation officers maybe have 150 clients each. Hard to supervise. And if they wanted to bring them back to court, it was for a revocation of probation and to get the underlying five or 10 year prison sentence. And we have good POs. They're all social workers from UH. They care about their clients. But the sanctions part was screwed up because no good PO should wanna send somebody to prison for five years for a couple of dirty urine tests. So I thought to myself, how did we raise our kid? How were we raised? And my guess is, if you did something wrong as a kid, your parents did something about it immediately. And that's how you tie together bad behavior with a constant. So something, I mean, that's simply the idea. So somebody shows up, test positive for drugs. These are instant tests. If they admit it, they get arrested on the spot. They go to the jail. We have a hearing two business days later. And I let them out because they screwed up by using. But then they didn't come in and lie about it or worse yet run away. We're trying to do something very difficult here. We're trying to change people's thinking to change their behavior. If they test positive and deny it, it's possible it's a false positive. We set it to a lab for a gas chromatograph test. But if it comes back, they get 15 days in jail if it's positive. And we'll let them do it on five weekends if they're working. But again, we don't want them to lie about it. We don't want them to be in denial. If they run away and law enforcement asks to look for them, it's 30 days in jail. And if that happens repeatedly, they go to Halawa. The greatest thing about hope is how well it works. We had a randomized control trial study by Pepperdine and UCLA. Our state attorney general's office looked at it first and the results were great. But you know the line in court, an expert witness is a guy from out of town with a briefcase, right? So when Pepperdine and UCLA came, they did a randomized control trial study, 500 defendants, two thirds in hope, one third in probation as usual. And a year later, the people in hope had arrested for new crimes, 55% less often than the control group on regular probation. And they got sent to prison for 48% fewer days. In criminal justice, a 10% reduction of recidivism is caused for celebration, 50%, unbelievable. 33 states are doing versions of this. Unfortunately, as you know, trying to implement or replicate an idea from one place to another is extremely difficult. So some places are doing a well, getting good outcomes. Washington state is the best example. Some places have screwed this up, have only focused on the sanctions part without the other two legs of it, the probation officers and the judges. But the results have been wonderful. But it strikes me that this, you know, you talked about collaboration among various law enforcement agencies and a kind of team arrangement. Probation officers, probation officers are part of the civil service. They may or may not be effective human beings, I'm sorry to say. They may meet your expectations and do the job and implement a program like this well, or maybe some of them don't. How do you make sure that the probation officers that are responsible for implementing a program like this are the right ones? Well, part of it is leadership in the probation department. So the first unit we started with was the high-risk unit. Any sex offender not sent to prison, put on probation, is in that unit. And also people that are failing at probation on regular probation and maybe getting a revocation to go to prison, they get transferred to that unit. And so Shirley Noy was head of it. She's smart, she's organized, she's kind of a hard ass. And she told the POs, you know, you're gonna lose some discretion at the front end. You've gotta violate them every single time when they do this. That's how it's gonna have credibility. And that's how it started. And it was just one judge at the beginning. So I was very consistent. Cause my whole view of discretion has changed through this process because for a defendant, if he and his friend both smoke meth and go into the office and are both testing positive, if they're not treated the same way, they think that is unfair. That's arbitrary, the PO is prejudice. One may not agree, oh, it's my 10th time and the other, it's only a second time. But that's the, so what we did in hope is the sanctions are required. The POs do not have discretion on that anymore. And I was very consistent as a judge. Two days for a dirty test, you admit to 15 if you deny, confirm 30 if you run away. And that goes the same way as teaching your kids follow the rules. The sanctions are known in advance, but this suggests maybe sentencing guidelines on certain sentences for certain crimes and certain repetitions. Do we have that? Do you support that? Well, that's why when I was chairing the Penal Code Review Committee, we got rid of the mandatory minimums. Exactly what you said. We had what was called a methamphetamine trafficking case. You know, I mean statute because this started when meth exploded on the scene here, people were scared that meth was gonna tear our entire society apart and it's done a lot of damage, no question. But what was required was if you sell any amount of meth and the case because we had all these defense attorneys and prosecutors and judges, there were seven judges on this as well, including five of them were former prosecutors. The only cases we'd see in state court were a guy selling, usually a guy, a $20 bag of meth to an undercover police officer because a business owner saw a guy selling in front of his property and called HPD and said, can you get rid of this guy? Well, that kind of case, we would have to give the guy a 10-year prison test. No exceptions because he was selling meth. You'd be in favor of giving the judge more discretion. Right. And so what we did was we put meth with the other drugs and so the judge can either give him the 10 years in prison for selling drugs or put him on probation. And same thing with possession of a small amount of drugs. In the past, he was part of repeat offender. Many people had to go to prison. Now we made it probationable. So just in the last few years, hundreds of people have been given a chance on probation. And I can tell you anybody selling a $20 bag of meth, almost by definition is a user who's selling some to feed his own habit. A couple of other things, Steve. One is with all of this with the policy and the management and the public issues. Do you see yourself actually prosecuting cases? I remember Peter Carlaw, I'm familiar with that, did not prosecute cases generally. But when they had the Xerox murders, if you remember, back when this squirrel employee went and shut up the place. He prosecuted that because it was high level. I guess he thought it was good for the job. What about you? Do you see yourself prosecuting cases as the prosecutor? I don't see myself doing that. I've done a lot of that. I did five murder cases when I was at the prosecutors. As a judge, I presided at over 200, making sure there was no prosecutor or misconduct. So I will be actively involved with training the deputies. But that's like the police chief does not go and investigate the burglar. I mean, I'm sure she could do a good job at it or chase somebody down the street. But she should be meeting with the Honolulu prosecutor. She should be talking to the troops. She should be meeting with the head of the FBI. And doing trials is fun, we have great, you really enjoy it, it's all consuming. But I have to say the tendency is gonna be, it's gonna have outsize importance whether you win or lose too. So you tend to pick cases you know you're gonna win. And in that case, there are a lot of other deputy prosecutors who should be able to do those cases. I am gonna be so busy trying to get weed and seeds started in Chinatown and Kalihi, meeting with Chief Ballard, meeting with Mark Rectonwald, who I used to work with, he's the Chief Justice at the U.S. Attorney's Office. There's so many parts to the job. It would be fun to do trials again, but I just don't see that. There's so much else that needs to be done. Yeah, and as I was telling you before the show began, I mean, I think you're gonna have more work depending on who's elected president and how we do on COVID. You're gonna have more domestic violence and all that, which the prosecutor will have to deal with that. But let me ask you this. So you're gonna run off with Megan Kaap. That's the way it is. And I would like to ask you, what's the difference? And don't tell me it's a gender difference. What's the difference between you and your opposing candidate? Well, I think a lot of it is, I have a proven record of leadership. I was a team captain, a division head. I ran the U.S. Attorney's Office. As a judge, I saw the entire system. I wasn't an advocate on one side or the other. I saw the whole system. So I have led a team of prosecutors. And I, no offense, I don't think Ms. Kao has ever supervised anybody. So the learning curve of how to learn, how to be a supervisor, let alone discovering whether you can be an effective leader or not is something people don't have to worry about with me. They know I've been an effective leader. I've led other prosecutors. And with programs like Weed and Seed, we have actually reduced crime. And people would love to see that again. And it expanded from Kalihi in Chinatown to the Alamoata area. And it should go to other communities after that. It's a good strategy of new law enforcement, a different way of doing things. I'm gonna be open to any new innovative ideas, but I'm also gonna try to do stuff that has been proven to work. So I think that's the biggest. And I think the results of the primary show that they, to bring trust back to that office, you need proven leadership. And I offered that and I can do that. I've committed to it. I have a lot of energy. I'll bring in good supervisors with me and we will get the job done. All right, Steve, we have a question. Let me take a moment. Oh, wow, this is a long question. I'll try to make it short from a viewer. So I work in the community and I have heard exactly what you said about locals feeling crime is worse now than ever. One client witnessed a police officer letting a mugger go in Waikiki last year. He said the reason was he didn't wanna be tied up in court if he arrested him. How do you propose to change the outlook where an officer is deferred from making an arrest because of potential negative consequences? There's an interesting question. So what do you say to that, Joe or Steve? Well, I would say if the guy was a mugger and it actually committed a crime, that officer should be fired. You know, and I have been training the officers at the police academy for 20 years about what, depending on what my job was, I go and talk about that. Well, this will be a part of it too. And I think what the police have done to their credit during this COVID crisis is when it's appropriate issue citations instead of making an arrest. Or if they can defer an arrest, if it's not gonna threaten public safety, then they do that. And so they have slowed the intake of prisoners into OCCC. And I think that's been part of the success about why they were able to reduce the numbers in there. But if somebody has committed a violent crime, there is no excuse for them not getting arrested. So I don't understand that. I think Chief Ballard would join me. I think Schopo would join me that an officer like that, if that was actually happening, should not be on the force. And should be disciplined immediately. Okay, Steve, I'm so nice to talk to you. There are many, many other questions. I wish we had more time. Good luck on the balance of the campaign. And we'll talk to you soon, one way or the other. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Stay safe.