Kathryn “Kate” Steinle was 32 years old on July 1, 2015, as she walked along San Francisco’s Pier 14 with her father and a friend.
Somewhere behind her on the Embarcadero at that moment was José Inez García Zárate, handling a pistol he found under a bench. He fired one shot. That shot hit Steinle in the back. Her father and friend performed CPR, paramedics arrived, but her aorta had been pierced and she died in a hospital two hours later.
In 2017, García Zárate was acquitted on charges of murder and manslaughter, but no one denied he fired the shot, and no one denied some other facts about him.
“A little bit of common sense and discretion might have prevented the killing this month in San Francisco of Kathryn Steinle — a victim not only of random gunfire but of the mindless handling of the city's immigration policy,” wrote the editorial board of USA Today on July 15, 2015.
García Zárate, USA Today noted, “had a felony drug record going back 20 years, had been deported five times and had repeatedly sneaked back into the USA … [he] was in the San Francisco County jail in April and should have been deported yet again. Federal immigration authorities had lodged a ‘detainer,’ seeking to get custody and do just that. All they needed was a call or other contact from the sheriff's office.
“The contact was never made, not because of some ghastly mistake or miscommunication but because of a city ordinance that prohibits police from honoring detainers except in rare cases. And, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, because of a policy by the local sheriff that bars contact with immigration authorities. After a local charge against Lopez-Sanchez [as his name appeared in early reporting] was dropped, he was held for three weeks, then put on the street.”
One of the top three candidates to be the next chief of the Honolulu Police Department is San Francisco’s David Lazar, whom Aloha State Daily profiled on Monday.
Near as I can piece together from Lazar’s bio, he was a captain in the San Francisco Police Department at the time of Steinle’s shooting, then rising to commander in 2017 and then assistant chief before retiring in 2025. We can safely assume he alone did not set the policies that had made San Francisco a “sanctuary city” in 2015, where immigration law would be selectively ignored.
But Lazar has already told us where he wants to take Honolulu. Here’s the relevant quote from our interview with him:
“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.”
The Honolulu Police Commission is scheduled to make a decision today between Lazar, Mike Lambert and Scott Ebner. We profiled Lazar and Lambert, Ebner did not respond to us.
The commission is comprised of Chair Laurie Foster, Vice Chair Jeannine A. Souki, Vice Chair Chris Magnus, and members Kenneth Silva, Elizabeth Char, Blake Parsons and Gary A. Yabuta.
The commission can be reached at 808-723-7580, or by email at policecommission@honolulu.gov, if you have thoughts to share on their selection.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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