Back when I was a pup, in the days long before cell phone videos and concerns about civil rights, the Honolulu Police Department had something called the Metro Squad.
They were very visible throughout the 1960s in potential trouble spots like Waikiki, where they looked for trouble and could respond in kind. They cruised the streets in plain clothes, aloha shirts to be more specific, usually four to a car, as I recall. “Mokes with badges” was our impression. I never saw them in full action, but they were legendary for meting out swift street justice. No one wanted to mess with metro.
I bring that up to make the point that rowdiness and violence in Waikiki is not new, and that a long-simmering layer of violence was part of the context for this weekend’s fatal shooting.
It was noted here last year when the video of a Waikiki street brawl surfaced on YouTube. There’s a history of attacks on gay visitors. Robberies and assaults in the heart of the tourist district appear in brief news reports all too regularly.
I’m not a late night visitor to Waikiki, so I can’t evaluate whether attempts by police and private security have put a lid on the kids looking for a fight after getting out of the clubs, but anecdotal evidence–and most interpretations of the latest incident–seem to indicate the problem continues.
So what’s involved? One comment mentioned to popularity of MMA as a contributor. There are obvious signs of ethnic tensions that are playing out, and these aren’t restricted to just local vs haole. Military-civilian conflicts. Economic resentments are likely at play. Club policies? Policing policies?
We’re overdue for a more concerted community effort to focus attention and tackle the overlapping issues.
But you can see why it’s difficult for the Aloha State to address issues of racism and ethnic violence. We don’t want to publicly admit they exist. The same likely applies to programs that would point to undesirable aspects of our flagship visitor destination.
Where does public policy go from here?
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Very good points. There is no mention of Elderts history because there is nothing worth mentioning beyond playing football in high school and being related to Sampson Satele. it’s scary how much the news is picking apart while hiding Eldert’s criminal history. It’s no coincidence that these two ended up in a confrontation.
As for the Metro Squad, that would be par for the course in another period of history, both US history and world history.
If you remember the movie “Mulholland Falls”, Nick Nolte’s character leads a squad of cops who throw criminals off a cliff on Mulholland Drive in LA. That movie was based on the real life “hat squad” that eliminated organized crime figures from LA. There were these four cops who would cruise around LA wearing fedoras, and they would target eastcoast mafioso who were trying to edge in on the action in LA. Gangsters in LA would simply permanently disappear. No fooling. (One drawback to this is that these four cops, very moralistic men, spent their lives in therapy.)
Another parallel on the westcoast with the LA ‘hat squad’ was the Communist Party in Seattle. Labor in Seattle was heavily unionized and once dominated by radicals. When eastcoast racketeers came to Seattle to infiltrate the unions, the gangsters would simply disappear.
(Also, it’s instructive to look at the services performed by a certain Harry Bennett for the early Ford Motor Company. To some degree, Bennett was simply a hired gun, a killer.)
To me, this kind of thing in a way epitomizes the distinction between the US and other countries. There are death squads everywhere, but this kind of ruthlessness in the US is pragmatic and public minded.
In northern European countries, notably in Germany, there is a tradition of idealism (e.g., the Teutonic Knights). It’s ruthless and brutal, but idealistic and public minded.
In southern European countries, notably Sicily or Spain (and Latin America), there is also a long tradition of violence, but it’s not idealistic, it’s realistic in motive, and it’s violence in the name of the family (i.e., “private minded”).
The US is not less violent, but it is unique in the motives for organized violence. Americans are not so idealistic in their violence. (If you look at the images of GI’s in WWII, they look purely practical and utilitarian in their bearing, guys who are simply in combat to “get the job done and go home”, so different from the idealism of Europeans.)
But seemingly paradoxically, it’s not a selfish violence based on family interest. The hat squad is not in it for money. That hat squad is composed of goody-two-shoes who are simply doing an ugly job because somebody has got to do it. And this is one reason why the westcoast is prosperous today and not lapsed into stagnation like, say, New Jersey: the Sicilians were kept out of the LA and Seattle.
Now, there might not be any Metro Squads or hat squads anymore, but the tone of American life might have gotten worse. The ruthlessness of American life was pragmatic and public minded. But how pragmatic or realistic was the invasion of Iraq? And what about Wall Street? It was once dominated by enormously ruthless men like JP Morgan, but these men also believed in what they were doing. It isn’t like that anymore.
I’ve lost a lot of respect for local media throughout this. By the time we find out what actually happened that night the general public will have already made up its mind about hating Deedy and sympathizing with Elderts.
Medical examiner confirms alcohol in Waikiki shooting victim’s system
By Minna Sugimoto – bio | email
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The Kailua man who was shot and killed at a McDonald’s in Waikiki over the weekend had alcohol and possibly drugs in his system at the time of his death.
The Honolulu Medical Examiner’s office on Wednesday reported that Kollin Elderts’ blood alcohol level was 0.12. He died from exsanguination due to a gunshot wound to his chest with an injury to his lung.
The ME’s office also says a preliminary toxicology screen detected more than one drug in Elderts’ system. However, the office will not disclose what was detected until it can receive confirmation from a mainland lab.
One thing about MMA: many of the martial arts forms (kajukenbo, kenpo karate) that are utilized in sport fighting originate from Hawaii.
(The most popular form of jujitsu in the world is not Brazilian “jiutitsu”, but rather Danzanryu (“sandalwood island”) jujitsu, which was created in Hawaii.)
Perhaps more martial arts forms have originated or been developed and refined in Hawaii than anywhere else in the world, perhaps even more so than in China. This is extraordinary. One reason for this is WWII. There was an influx of white American soldiers into Hawaii in WWII, and local men sometimes had to deal with a certain mainland element who weren’t particularly well educated and who were deliberately inflamed with race hatred by their superiors after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Now, was it really that bad in Hawaii back then?
Well, I have a round-about answer to that difficult question.
I remember seeing an interview with the Hollywood movie producer Robert Evens, who produced the movie (among others) “Love Story”. I remember seeing it as a kid, and finding it incredibly boring and unrealistic, with all these movie stars in turtleneck sweaters walking around the Harvard campus in the autumn. Really contrived, really boring.
But in the last couple of minutes of the movie, Ali MacGraw is suddenly in the hospital, she says that she feels cold, and suddenly she is dead. WHAT THE HECK! Ryan O’Neal is suddenly walking in the snow outside the hospital and runs into his snobby father (Ray Milland), who is humbled. When the father apologizes, O’Neal says “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” WHAT THE HECK? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!
I was about ten years old when I saw that, and it was really disturbing. When I see Ali MacGraw in reruns of “The Getaway” with Steve McQueen, I feel haunted by death.
Anyway, that movie saved Robert Evans’ studio, bringing in about $200 million (and Evans married MacGraw). In the interview, Evans laughed about how unrealistic the movie was, but noted the terrible impact of the final scene. He said, “Movies aren’t about how things are. They’re about how they feel.” Bingo.
And that explains how people feel about the US military in Hawaii — and about this APEC event and this Waikiki shooting. Some Hawaiian activist claim that Hawaii is under military occupation. Well, even in WWII under martial, Hawaii did not have the kind of occupation that existed in Europe under the Germans or in Asia under the Japanese. But emotionally there is a disturbing disconnect with the military here. That’s how it feels.
Now, this sense of alienation could go back further, to the time of the Massie case and even further to the overthrow of the monarchy.
This brings me to another Hollywood celebrity interview, this time the married life of the actor Sean Penn. He was once in a shouting match with his then-wife Robin Wright, and he grabbed her arm. She had been abused as a child, and as soon as he grabbed her arm, she flipped out. The marriage was over right then. He said that when you grab the arm of a woman who was seriously abused as a child, she has a kind of flashback into a nightmare.
I kind of think that this is what is happening with this Waikiki shooting. A certain segment of the public is having a flashback to the Massie case. But this isn’t exactly the Massie case.
This Waikiki violence reminds me of an incident where a local man with a bad history punched a tourist in the head, killing the tourist instantly. The tourist was on that veranda on the pier off Waikiki, watching a sunset at the time. The local man testified that the tourist was a racist who was “laughing at me”. Witnesses testified that this was not the case, and the man’s family testified that the man was actually a missionary passing through Hawaii, that he would never laugh at anyone.
I think that what exists in this case is a kind of paranoia and ignorance on the part of the murderer. But why does that exist? I think that people who have been colonized for decades or even centuries like the Koreans and the Irish develop a kind of deep-seated inferiority complex. However, they get over it eventually through a mix of rebellion, independence and success.
But people in Hawaii are neither especially rebellious nor is the economy especially dynamic. So when mainstream American culture becomes the standard by which one continuously measures oneself, and when one becomes self-conscious about a cultural gulf between “us” and “them”, one feels like there is this population of 300 million Americans who think Hawaii is a joke. It isn’t like that at all. But it feels like that.
The remedy is to create a new ideal. I think things like teaching Hawaiian in the schools have a subtly transformative effect on self-esteem in that the message it sends is that those people we see on “American Idol” are not the ideal to imitate. You need a new ideal, especially in a global age and in an age of American decline.
khon2.com:
Shooting victim Kollin Elderts had alcohol in his system
Updated: 11/09 7:25 pm
The Honolulu medical examiner’s office says the man a federal agent allegedly shot and killed inside a McDonald’s restaurant had alcohol in his system.
The office said Wednesday that Kollin Elderts’ blood-alcohol level was 0.12 percent, based on blood drawn during an autopsy.
The 23-year-old Kailua man was shot in the chest Saturday during an altercation at the Waikiki McDonald’s.
State Department Special Agent Christopher Deedy is charged with second-degree murder and was released after posting $250,000 bail.
Police would not comment on whether an alcohol test was administered on the 27-year-old agent. He was in town to help with security at the APEC events.