The Power Of SHOPO: Here’s How The Police Union Contract Drives Public Policy The statewide police union plays an outsized role in everything from police shootings to investigating officer misconduct. But the public is kept in the dark about important issues being negotiated in the contract.
Honolulu police officer Chanel Price was one of several officers who saw her colleague, Officer Geoffrey Thom, shoot 16-year-old Iremamber Sykap after a car chase that ended at the Ala Wai Canal.
When city prosecutors charged Thom with second-degree murder, Price was called to testify during his preliminary hearing about what she’d witnessed the day Sykap was killed.
In addition to acknowledging that she would have pulled the trigger if in the same position, she revealed that she and other officers at the scene, including Thom, wrote their reports together with a union official present in the room. That official, she said, even reviewed her report before she turned it in.
