Honolulu Weekly

A conveniently vague way to describe Chinatown is to say that it has character. It is colorful, filled with diverse people and alive—for better or worse—at all hours of the night. Chinatown is buzzing with energy, brimming with creativity, seedy after nightfall and all the things people say about developing neighborhoods in their post-ghetto, pre-gentrification stage.

It’s not uncommon to overhear those who claim Chinatown as their own say how nostalgic they’ll be for this in-between stage once Urban Outfitters and fancy gelato parlors finally set up shop, but it’s also true that the neighborhood’s darker reputation scares away enough people that business owners worry about their futures—particularly amid rumors that it’s getting worse. The thing is, it’s not.

Police have beefed up Chinatown patrols at the request of business owners, but say they don’t see a trend or uptick in violent crime.

“There have been a handful of visible incidents,” said Lt. Walter Ozeki of the Honolulu Police Department’s Narcotics Vice Division. “Crime as a whole has not gone up and we can’t make that generalization.”

Still, those few incidents—anecdotes about knives being pulled on innocent bar-goers and display windows being cracked—are enough to have Chinatown’s patrons take matters in their own hands.

Late last month, a group of them met, along with some Chinatown residents, police officers, neighborhood board members and representatives from the Business Improvement District, which oversees Fort Street Mall, to discuss drafting an official request to the state liquor commission to deny renewal of liquor licenses for what they call “nuisance” establishments, or bars where violent or criminal incidents allegedly originate. The group’s main focus is on the Mall Café, formally known as Club Pauahi.

“This is my favorite neighborhood,” said Burton White, general manager of the Hawaii Theatre. “We are Honolulu’s most colorful neighborhood and I think we should celebrate that, but these are problems we need to discuss.”

White and others have amassed stacks of police reports detailing incidents that occurred in and around the tiny bar. He describes fights, drug deals, even stabbings. It comes after a past attempt by Chinatown business owners and residents to have the bar’s liquor license revoked—an effort that many say they feel was mishandled or brushed off by state officials.

But representatives for the liquor commission say they first have to assess the situation themselves, a process that started last week and which, so far, has resulted in eight major and minor violations—the nature of which investigators say they can’t disclose until the related legal process is complete—against the bar.

“If there’s a rumor or if there’s someone saying something that we cannot confirm, as far as we’re concerned, that is not a fact,” said Liquor Commission Administrator Dewey Kim. “We try to be fair and we’ve made that very clear when we’ve met with Chinatown business owners. Many people who have licenses invest a lot of money into their business, so we really have to investigate them thoroughly.”

But the police, too, have their eye on the Chinatown establishments that are notorious for illegal activity.

“Drug use is the biggest nexus to all the other problems,” said Ozeki. “Often times you see prostitution, property crimes or violent crime as a result of drugs. You see it every day. Crystal meth is the king in Hawaii and Chinatown is a major distribution area.”

The drug remains a problem but police officials’ efforts to curtail crystal meth abuse are working, largely because they’re targeting those who are higher in the chain of command than street dealers.

“Crystal meth abuse has declined,” said Ozeki. “Arrests have gone down and seizures have gotten bigger. It’s an indication that we are better able to go after the right people.”

In 2006, police made 478 arrests and seized 78 pounds of crystal meth, compared to 399 arrests and 96 pounds of the drug seized in 2007. Last year, police made 277 arrests and seized 223 pounds of crystal meth.

“The focus is in the right place,” Ozeki said. “We’re looking at the big picture rather than all of the little pieces of the puzzle.”

Those little pieces—the individual drug abusers that wander Chinatown, the here-and-there establishment that attracts derelicts, the bar-goer that starts fights in the street—those are day-to-day concerns for the Chinatown community.

It’s a community that is working with police and working with each other, forming citizens’ watch-groups to patrol the streets at night, reviewing resources available to them in order to find out how to best handle the problems that arise so as to ensure safety in the neighborhood they love and believe in. Increased discussion about safety concerns in Chinatown show not a worsening problem but a stronger-than-ever commitment to a positive direction for the neighborhood. In the meantime, police continue to keep a watchful eye.

“We have shifted personnel here,” said HPD Maj. Clayton Saito. “We can continue that, to be quite honest, until the next issue comes up somewhere else that may require us to shift again.”