Hawaii cops get monster raise

Tenari Ma’afala (second from right), president of the power house police union SHOPO in Hawaii, prepared for a year for the arbitration which landed his members – 2200 of them – a 16.5% raise over 4 years. Read the story and learn more.

“16.8 percent salary hike over the next four years.” Seriously, if they don’t already, every union in the nation ought to look to SHOPO for guidance – the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers (SHOPO). These guys know what they are doing.

As I’m sure most people have noticed, we live in delicate economic times. The Hawaii Tourism Authority has released regular reports for the last year showing ever greater numbers of visitors coming to Maui and the rest of the state, but for many individuals and small businesses that aren’t tied to the big resorts, times are definitely not easy. The economy is nowhere near as bad as it was four or five years ago, but we’re also not living in boom times.

In other words, it’s the perfect time to give all cops statewide a giant raise. Few other workers will see anything like a 16.8 percent salary hike over the next four years, but then again, they don’t have a union like the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers (SHOPO) backing them up.

Seriously, if they don’t already, every union in the nation ought to look to SHOPO for guidance. Those guys, who represent 2,200 cops statewide, get things done. This is the same union, that when confronted with some meddling University of Hawaii journalism students who asked for Honolulu PD’s Internal Affairs records back in the early 1990s and went all the way to state Supreme Court to get them, instead turned up lobbying heat on the Legislature and got a special exemption written into the state open records law preventing disclosure of such things as the names and status of disciplined cops.

And while I know that cops around the state haven’t gotten a raise since July 2011, how many workers around Hawaii have seen salary hikes of any real size? But what’s really amusing about the news of the raises is how public officials–who tend to enjoy being the same side as the police department–are dealing with it. Not the ambivalence in the quote Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa gave to KITV for their story on the raises:

“While we were surprised at the level of this award, we feel that the arbitration process needs to be respected,” Arakawa said. “The arbitrator was given information by all participants and knew full well the circumstances of the counties and the state and we fully support his decision.”

– Anthony Pignataro, Mauitime.com