After a nearly year-long search that drew 41 candidates nationally, the Honolulu Police Commission selected David Lazar as Honolulu's next police chief on May 20, 2026. Lazar, a retired assistant chief from the San Francisco Police Department with 33 years of service, received five of seven commission votes, defeating local favorite Mike Lambert — the former HPD Major and Hawaii Department of Law Enforcement director who had the support of nearly 90 percent of SHOPO union members surveyed.
Commission Chair Laurie Foster said the community wanted "transformation, modernization and change." Lazar acknowledged the difficulty directly: "It's not easy coming from the outside, and I come from a place where outsiders were not welcome." He would be the first Honolulu police chief in more than 90 years who has never worked for the department.
ISPI's analysis focuses on what Chief Lazar needs to understand that 33 years in San Francisco did not prepare him for — and it is not the cultural adjustment. It is the structural conditions of island law enforcement that no mainland experience, however extensive, provides.
448 vacancies and a retention crisis with a specific cause
Chief Lazar inherits a department operating at approximately 80 percent of authorized strength — 448 sworn officer vacancies as of February 2, 2026, a figure confirmed in HPD Interim Chief Rade Vanic's budget testimony. Vacancy rates grew 32 percent over four years despite signing bonuses, expanded recruiting, and a 27 percent SHOPO pay increase enacted in November 2025.
A chief from San Francisco will recognize vacancy as a familiar problem. The San Francisco Police Department has faced its own staffing challenges. What will not be immediately recognizable is the structural mechanism that drives Hawaii's crisis — because the mechanism is island-specific.
ISPI's Research Report HI-03 documents that Hawaii's law enforcement staffing crisis is a retention failure, not a recruitment failure. HPD consistently attracts qualified applicants. The problem is that trained officers leave for mainland departments within five to ten years. The departure driver is the real compensation gap — not the nominal salary gap. An HPD officer earning $85,000 annually faces a median Honolulu single-family home price of $1.1 million. A mainland officer earning $70,000 in a market with median prices below $400,000 achieves homeownership that the Hawaii officer cannot. That calculation drives lateral transfer decisions. Signing bonuses and base salary increases address the nominal salary gap. They do not close the real compensation gap.
The interventions with the strongest evidence
Non-salary compensation mechanisms that directly address the real compensation gap produce documented retention improvements that equivalent base salary increases do not. The three interventions with the strongest evidence in comparable high cost-of-living law enforcement markets are: housing assistance modeled on Hawaii's teacher housing program; student loan forgiveness vesting over five-year service commitments; and cost-of-living supplements indexed to Hawaii's actual housing cost index rather than national benchmarks.
These are not novel ideas. Hawaii's teacher housing program demonstrates that housing assistance works as a public sector retention tool in the Hawaii labor market. The mechanism has been proven. It has not been applied to law enforcement.
What island law enforcement means structurally
San Francisco is a dense urban environment with mutual aid from surrounding Bay Area jurisdictions, a deep officer bench that absorbs personnel decisions, and a cost-of-living crisis that is severe but still within a continental economy where adjacent lower-cost markets exist. Honolulu is an island. The nearest mutual aid is 2,500 miles away. The officer bench is thin enough that personnel decisions — suspensions, terminations, injury-related absences — have operational consequences that continental departments do not face in the same way. The workforce irreplaceability constraint that ISPI documents as the defining condition of small island organizational management applies, in modified form, to HPD itself.
Chief Lazar has committed to being the "last outside chief" of HPD — to developing the next generation of HPD leadership from within. That is the right instinct for an institution that depends on officers who know Honolulu's communities, its geography, and its social structures in ways that no amount of mainland experience can replicate. The framework for building that institutional depth from within — and for retaining the officers who will become the next generation of HPD leadership — is what ISPI's research provides.
An open offer
ISPI's Research Reports HI-03 and WP-05 provide the independent evidence base on Hawaii law enforcement workforce conditions, compensation structure, and the specific intervention design with the strongest documented retention evidence. Both are available free at ispiglobal.com. ISPI is available to brief Chief Lazar's office directly on the island-specific structural conditions that make Hawaii's law enforcement workforce challenge different from any mainland equivalent he has navigated before.
The community asked for transformation. Transformation in Hawaii law enforcement requires understanding the island structural conditions that have made the current vacancy crisis persistent. That understanding starts with the research.