A San Franciscan candidate for Honolulu Police Chief hopes to be “the last outside chief in Honolulu.”
Dave Lazar is one of three nominees for O‘ahu’s top cops selected by the Honolulu Police Commission. Formerly with the San Francisco Police Department for 33 years, Lazar is one of two candidates from the Mainland, the other being Georgia resident Scott Ebner.
But while Lazar told Aloha State Daily that his outside perspective is what the Honolulu Police Department needs right now, he added that his hope is to strengthen the department enough that it can shape the next generation of leaders without having to look farther afield.
“I want to get the culture in such shape where, in terms of succession planning, you bring that next generation of leadership in internally, and they’re part of the reform effort, they’re part of all the changes,” Lazar said.
Lazar’s highest priority changes, he said, will be to improve transparency and accountability within the department, something he said is sorely needed.
“The prior chief did not last his full term,” Lazar said. “There was an interim chief, and then the chief before that didn’t last her full term, and the chief before that was, you know, indicted and arrested for corruption. So this is a department that is in need of strong leadership, is in need of tremendous support and it needs a chief that has their backs.”
If selected, Lazar said he wants to modernize HPD, implementing technology and other best practices being adopted by other police agencies around the country. As an example, he addressed HPD’s clearance rate, the proportion of cases the department closes; the most recent data from the state Attorney General found that only about 20% of cases ended up closed in 2024.
“That’s the perfect example of why change is needed,” Lazar said. “Because if the most current data you have is 2024 and not the first quarter of 2026, that’s one thing that we need to fix.”
Lazar said that, in the SFPD, the homicide clearance rate was upwards of 80% — HPD’s homicide clearance in 2024 was 57% — thanks in part to better adoption of data integration technologies that allow officers to analyze relations between data points much more efficiently.
Of course, Lazar added, HPD also has a significant staffing shortage that stretches investigators thin. He echoed comments by fellow chief candidate Mike Lambert that improving the working conditions of HPD officers is key to improving officer retention.
“When we talk about retention, it’s about wellness,” Lazar said. “Do they have wellness opportunities? Is there a path on career development? Do we really support them personally and professionally?”
Like Lambert, Lazar wants to invest into HPD’s infrastructure and resources, saying that “you feel good about where you work because things are modern. You feel like leadership cares about you because you’re being provided with the equipment you need to do your job effectively.”
However, unlike Lambert, Lazar took a hardline stance against HPD ever collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I come from a department where we don’t cooperate at all with ICE,” Lazar said. “That’s what I’m used to, that’s the right thing to do. If I’m selected as chief, we will not cooperate whatsoever with ICE. We will not participate in anything they have going on.
“We’re not going to transport for them, we’re not going to support them, we’re not going to respond to any of their calls, we’re not going to set up perimeters,” Lazar went on. “Those are the policy decisions that will be made on my watch.”
Lazar acknowledged that there may be incidents where a criminal investigation overlaps with an ICE operation, but he said that HPD’s actions would remain separate from ICE’s.
If selected, Lazar said he will work with the Honolulu community and the State of Hawai‘i Organization of Police Officers to develop specific policies for how HPD handles immigration questions.
“I would work very hard to promote to the entire community that they need to report crime, that they can come to the HPD and report crime, that we want to help them regardless of their immigration status,” Lazar said. “We can’t let our officers be out in the community without any direction from leadership in order to make sure that they are covered in what they do.”
By the same token, Lazar said efforts to improve the transparency of HPD will help emphasize the diversity of the department: “If you look around at HPD, and they come from different backgrounds and different ethnicities … you build a tremendous amount of trust.”
While Lazar’s own background is largely separate from Hawai‘i, he has some family ties to the island. His wife of 32 years comes from a Hawaiian family and he has “plenty of aunties and uncles” across the island, he said.
Lazar, who is 55 years old, retired from SFPD in 2025, having never been permanent police chief there, although he had stints as acting chief between 2022 and 2024. He said that, by the time of his retirement, he no longer had interest in the top job, and much of the department’s leadership was also retiring amidst a mayoral transition.
Nonetheless, he said that he still has “so much energy,” and soon decided after retiring that he wanted to keep working. Lazar said SFPD was in a very different place when he began his career — “in need of reform, in need of technology” — in ways similar to how HPD is today.
“It’s almost like I get to repeat that experience [with SFPD],” Lazar said.
If selected, Lazar said he thinks he “probably has a good 10 years left” before leaving the job.
Whether Lazar gets the job will be determined on Wednesday. The Police Commission will conduct final interviews with all three candidates Tuesday, and make a final selection the following day.
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