Yvonne Almond was supposed to be in court to face one of 233 charges she has been hit with in the past year for being homeless in Honolulu. But when the judge in Courtroom 7D called her name, she was nowhere to be seen.
The judge promptly dismissed her case anyway, for lack of evidence. In barely a minute and with a few key strokes by the court clerk, the case was closed and Almond’s latest charges — sitting or lying on a public sidewalk and littering — went away.
That had been the outcome for Almond dozens of times already this year and would be again just a week later.
It is the cycle of Honolulu’s stepped-up campaign against homelessness, a revolving door in which many are cited over and over again for taking up space in public areas, with little lasting effect.
A few hours after the October hearing, Almond could be found seven blocks away in Chinatown sitting on a disposable blanket next to a stained diaper, a torn sheet, a flattened cardboard box and a tube of skin lotion. Her wheelchair was parked nearby.
She looked far older than her 68 years, wild-eyed with thick hair that appeared to once have been blond. She cursed at a companion. She spoke of a lost son, about winning a scholarship in Southern California. Her sentences ran over each other. She lit a cigarette and kept talking.
In August 2024, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi made an ambitious pledge to drastically reduce the number of people sleeping on Honolulu sidewalks, in its parks and on its beaches after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for cities to enforce anti-camping regulations.
He said he would get at least 1,000 people off the street in a year.
“I’m going to be very aggressive about that, and you’re just going to begin to see it now,” Blangiardi told Civil Beat.
An analysis of tens of thousands of court records by Civil Beat shows how aggressive the city’s enforcement has been. Police issued almost 11,000 citations in the 12 months following Blangiardi’s promise — a 60% increase from the year before. Violations of the sort Almond was charged with last month quadrupled.
Yet while the number of citations ballooned, the number of people being cited did not, holding firm at about 3,200. In many cases, police are simply penalizing the same people more frequently, some dozens, even hundreds, of times. Sometimes even multiple times in the same day.
What’s unclear is whether increasing the number of tickets meted out to those who often face intractable challenges, many dealing with addiction and mental illness, has resulted in any significant reduction in homelessness.
In the vast majority of cases, people are cited and their cases are dismissed. Citation after citation says they refused services. Of the 10 people police cited the most last year for homeless-related crimes at least seven appear to still be on the streets. The man they cited the most, 286 times, is missing.
City officials said there were 1,700 admissions into the public shelter system in 2025. But they can’t say how many of those ended up back on the street.
People on the frontlines of helping homeless people on Oahu say progress is halting, and there is far to go.
“If you get one person off the streets, you see like three or four new people (back) on the street,” said Castro Masaniai, outreach program manager with the Institute for Human Services, Oahu’s largest homeless services provider.
It’s a cycle trapping everyone involved: the businesses and residents whose worlds are disrupted as people fall apart on their doorsteps, the police tasked with both helping homeless people and keeping them in line, the judges whose courtrooms are filled with ghost cases where no one is really expected to show up or change their ways.
For people living on the streets, the rapid fire citations are another headache in lives already filled with pains and indignities small and large.
“It’s constant,” said Sharolyn Rodrigues, a former police officer who now spends much of her time in Thomas Square guarding shopping carts full of her belongings and tending to four small dogs.
Police cited her 46 times in the year after Blangiardi made his bold statement — nearly once a week.
Rodrigues, now 54, was fired by the Honolulu Police Department in 2014 for assaulting a civilian she said had attacked her daughter and then lying about the incident. After that, her life quickly fell apart.
She’s both resigned to the enforcement routine and practiced at it. When she is cited, she moves on — down the street or around the block and then, eventually, back to the park. Sometimes, Rodrigues said, when she is arrested on a warrant for not showing up in court, she will spend a night or, if it’s the weekend, two in jail.
“It’s all,” she said, “a waste of time.”
‘Lying On Every Corner’
Minutes into her shift on an October Thursday, Honolulu Police Officer Molly Wilt pulled over on South Beretania Street and called out her car window to a man sprawled on the sidewalk, his dark hair matted on the pavement, his slippers askew.
“Hi Levan, how are you?” Wilt said, stepping out of her patrol vehicle. “You know you can’t lay on the sidewalk.”
The man started to rouse himself and she offered to help. He struggled to sit. “Watch out for the poop,” she warned, pointing at a brown smear on the sidewalk near his feet. She pulled one of his slippers into place.
“You’re just getting a warning today,” Wilt said. “You’ve got to walk to the park, it’s right there, please.”
The sit-lie ordinance is a staple of Wilt’s policing routine in Chinatown, her patrol beat for more than two years. It requires a verbal warning first. Then, if someone is spotted again within 24 hours, they can be cited — handed a slip of paper that instructs them to show up in court.
Wilt knows most of the homeless people she encounters, and has warned or cited many of them multiple times. Her manner is warm, if efficient. She carries fig bars to dole out, and a pack of cigarettes to lift people’s spirits when they need a smoke.
It wasn’t too long into the morning that she spotted Almond, who she knows so well she stopped to ask her about her medications.
It was a circular conversation: Almond said she was going to meet her caseworker. Wilt asked when and where. “I don’t have a caseworker,” Almond said.
“Yvonne’s crazy, poor thing,” Wilt said as she stepped back into her vehicle.
This time, Wilt didn’t give Almond a warning because she was not breaking the law. She was sitting on the wall overlooking the Nuʻuanu Stream, not on the River Street sidewalk.
The crimes homeless people are charged with under the stepped up enforcement are generally sitting or lying on public sidewalks between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m.; blocking sidewalks with tents or other belongings; and engaging in such telltale activities as camping in a public park at night or having a shopping cart in a park.
For Wilt, the combination of laws, the sit-lie ordinance in particular, are essential tools in the daily push to preserve law and order.
“Imagine how Chinatown would be if we had nothing to move people to get up off the sidewalk,” she said. “We’re not out to make anybody’s life harder … but if we didn’t enforce it, people would be lying on every corner.”
Over the course of three hours, in interactions with 10 people who live on the streets of her beat, Wilt issued four sit-lie warnings but no citations.
One warning went to a woman wearing a yellow wraparound lava lava and halter top, lying near a bus stop on South King Street. Sitting up grudgingly, she gave her name as Helen. Wilt asked her, “Do you want shelter information?” but got no response.
“So, you’re just going to be getting a warning for sitting on the sidewalk, OK,” Wilt said, taking the woman’s photograph for her records. “You can’t sit on the sidewalk in Chinatown between Richards, Nimitz, Aala and Vineyard.”
Wilt asked if the woman wanted some water and said she would return later with some. As the officer drove away, Helen lay back down.
During her shift, Wilt tries to distinguish between what she terms the “letter of the law, and the color of the law,” the latter meaning she sometimes cuts people slack if they seem to be trying to cooperate.
In an encounter on Nuʻuanu Street, the color of the law won out.
Wilt asked one homeless man to help her hoist another — an elderly man named Jerry Clark — into his wheelchair from where he’d been sleeping half in an entryway, half on the sidewalk. It took more than five minutes and afterward she packed Clark’s backpack with his belongings, which had been strewn around him, then gave him a cigarette and lit it for him.
Clark had been cited nine times since January for violating sit-lie, sidewalk nuisance, sidewalk obstruction or park rules laws, plus multiple other times for drinking in public. This time Wilt cut him a break.
“I could give him a sit-lie citation, but he obviously needed help,” Wilt said later. “It’s not like he was unwilling to get in his wheelchair and was like ‘F you, I’m not getting off the sidewalk.’”
The Revolving Door
The mayor is quick to point out that even before the Supreme Court ruling, the city had stepped up, investing millions to add 1,000 new shelter beds and increase treatment slots, along with creating an island-wide outreach team to respond to people in crisis.
In an interview, he also emphasized the urgency of acting. At the last official count, at least 3,000 people were living outside on Oahu, making it one of the island’s most pressing issues.
“We’ve got 99% of the people wanting us to do something with the person who’s out there on the sidewalk in their neighborhood, perhaps defecating on their sidewalks, out of their minds,” Blangiardi said. “They don’t know what to do with it. And that’s what we’re trying to deal with.
“At the same time, we’re not just picking them up, telling them, go down the street, we’ll take your stuff and get out of here. We’re not doing that.”
That was an echo of statements he made in his 2020 election campaign, when he criticized his predecessor Kirk Caldwell’s homelessness policy, known as compassionate disruption. That approach, which emphasized sweeping encampments as a way to prod people into services, “only moves the houseless in circles to other neighborhoods and parks and then back again,” Blangiardi told the ACLU during his campaign.
Yet more than a third of the homeless citations issued in the year following Blangiardi’s promise went to 170 people each cited at least a dozen times. More than half of cases involved someone cited six or more times. And of all the citations issued that year, 83% went to people cited more than once.
It’s become a tired story for the attorneys assigned to represent Honolulu’s homeless defendants, First Deputy Public Defender Hayley Cheng said.
“We see the same individuals over and over are coming back through the system in the same exact situation with the same exact offenses,” Cheng said. “On its face, that’s indicative that we’re not or the system is not addressing the underlying issue, which is the fact that they are houseless.”
And as the cycle of the same people getting repeatedly cited continues, another does as well: Most cases don’t go anywhere.
Sometimes that happens even before the first court date. At other times it comes later in the process, at the arraignment or after defendants have been assigned a public defender and plea deals are made. Judges sometimes rule to dismiss cases or prosecutors elect not to pursue them.
Of all the citations issued in the year following Blangiardi’s August 2024 promise, at least three-quarters were either dismissed by judges or dropped by prosecutors.
That proportion didn’t budge from the year before.
“That’s the part we’re stumbling over right now,” Blangiardi said of the high rate of dismissals.
Kaleb Hoosier wasn’t aware of any of that in April when he arrived in Honolulu from Oklahoma and sat down on a Hotel Street sidewalk across from the police department’s Chinatown substation. He was looking to relax.
The 36-year-old had recently spent his savings on a quixotic run for Tulsa mayor and figured Hawaii was a good place to live outside. And from previous visits to Oahu, he thought Chinatown would be hospitable to a guy down on his luck.
Within the next two months, police would cite him 10 times for sitting or lying on the sidewalk, sometimes while sleeping, and twice for drinking in public.
“I didn’t know it was illegal to sit,” Hoosier, who sleeps behind a bush not far from the courthouse, told Civil Beat in September, as his cases wound through the court system. “It shocks the conscience.”
By mid-October, though, all of his sit-lie cases had disappeared, five of them as part of a plea deal in which Hoosier pleaded guilty to drinking in public. That came with a $25 fine that was suspended on condition of 60 days of good behavior.
The day after Hoosier’s cases were dismissed, Wilt spotted him sitting on a Hotel Street sidewalk again. If she hadn’t already been on a call, she said she would have given him another sit-lie warning.
Hoosier has a lot of company getting his charges dismissed.
For example, of 19 sit-lie, sidewalk nuisance and sidewalk obstruction charges incurred this September and October by Levan Balatti, the man Wilt gave a warning to at the start of her shift, 16 were dismissed or dropped. Balatti pleaded guilty to one sit-lie charge. The other two have yet to be resolved.
Then there is Rodrigues, the former police officer: 47 of the 51 charges she faced in the year after Blangiardi’s vow were dismissed or dropped. Three cases are not yet resolved, and for one, she accepted a no contest plea, meaning she didn’t dispute the charge.
In Almond’s case, of the 80 charges against her that year that have been resolved in court, just one resulted in a penalty: a two-day jail sentence with credit for time served and a $30 fine that was waived.
For Wilt, the police officer, it’s a dispiriting reality.
“I pretty much assume that they’re all going to get dismissed,” she said. “But all I can do is my job. What I would really like to see is these people get real help and get off the street, and then I can stop tagging them.”
Prosecutors said when they decide whether to take on a case they must use a different yardstick than police do when citing or arresting someone.
Under probable cause, police can arrest or cite someone if they believe the facts show they are breaking the law. But the goal of a prosecution is a conviction, which can result in punishment, and that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, said Florence Nakakuni, head of the misdemeanor prosecution division of the Honolulu Office of the Prosecuting Attorney.
“We have a higher burden of proof, because in all of these cases, the person is subject to going to jail,” Nakakuni said.
Through a Judiciary spokesperson, First Circuit judges declined a request for an interview about the high rate of dismissals. But Cheng, of the public defender’s office, said the numbers show the charges being used against homeless people aren’t “the most significant or important.”
The justice and correctional systems, Cheng said, are overloaded with more serious criminal matters and don’t have the capacity to deal with thousands of people who take up space on sidewalks or in parks.
“We process them and allow them to just maybe plead to one, dismiss the others, just as a way to resolve their cases,” she said. “But on the back end, what is really being done to help these individuals? We’re just cycling them through.”
Refused
The notations are found on citation slip after citation slip: “Refused shelter” or “Refused services.”
Wilt has come to expect it.
On her shift, she made the same offer during each exchange: “Do you need shelter?” There were no takers.
“They always say ‘no,’” Wilt said. “They don’t want it.”
For many people who are homeless, especially if they struggle with mental illness or substance abuse, it is a hard step to take, said Connie Mitchell, executive director of the Institute for Human Services.
“People are kind of trapped in a system, you know, that doesn’t really guide them to maybe what they need,” Mitchell said, “but also they won’t accept what is really needed.”
Wilt has seen firsthand how this cycle can lead people dangerously downhill.
Take Orlando Javierto, known on Chinatown’s streets as a former welterweight boxer who now frequents the area around Maunakea Marketplace.
In a 2020 video interview with a food blogger posted to YouTube, Javierto appeared to be already homeless but indicated he slept at times in a friend’s shop. He easily recalled his childhood in the Philippines, the start of his boxing career, his emigration to Hawaii, his military career, his children.
Five years later, Javierto, 74 — cited 29 times in the year after Blangiardi set his goal to get 1,000 people off the street — has slipped far from that capable state, unable to answer basic questions about himself, or even recall the YouTube interview.
“Orlando is very sweet,” Wilt said. “But you can’t have a conversation like that with him anymore.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed through legislation to create a separate process to allow judges to order people into court-supervised treatment for schizophrenia and psychotic disorders if certain criteria are met, including that their condition is deteriorating. That program, launched in 2023, is aimed primarily at homeless people.
Current Honolulu laws don’t offer means to compel homeless people into treatment in most cases.
Under the state’s ACT law, a court can order treatment for mental illness or addiction that compromises judgement on two conditions: The person has refused it in the past and is considered a potential danger to themselves or others. But hurdles include a requirement that someone who knows them petition for treatment, a shortage of attorneys to take on cases and a shortage of beds as well.
Only about 50 people have been ordered into treatment in the 12 years since the law was passed.
Blangiardi has called for more attorneys to step up. The mayor also said the city will soon have access to another tool, an existing state law that allows people to be taken into custody for 48 hours for short-term hospitalization for psychiatric evaluations.
“We’ve been hamstrung,” he said, “and we’re very, very close to being able to deal with people who refuse service.”
Even from the perspective of someone whose business is delivering services to homeless people and getting them off the streets, a degree of police enforcement is called for, said Mitchell, of IHS.
“Ultimately what we’re dealing with here is a situation where people are occupying public spaces illegally,” she said. “The big question is can they be led to make a different choice. In some cases they can, in some cases not.”
For Jasmine Ochimas, it was yes, then it was no.
Ochimas said she ended up homeless after getting kicked out of a clean and sober recovery house and off of her mother’s property. These days she calls the Ala Wai Golf Course home. In the year after Blangiardi announced his goal, she was hit with 50 charges of violating park rules.
Ochimas, 37, said she took advantage of the offer of services once, at the city’s mobile Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered program, or HONU, a popup offering short-term beds, washrooms and access to medical treatment and housing referrals. It’s the primary option for officers who come across someone who wants help — the one they can generally offer on the spot as an alternative to a citation.
A police officer drove Ochimas from the golf course to Kapolei Hale, where HONU was located at the time. In a week or so, she said she was referred to a women’s shelter in Iwilei run by the Institute for Human Services, but left days in after a dispute with another resident over a cigarette.
She no longer accepts offers for shelter, or for services like housing assistance, she said, because she’s not ready.
“It’s going to be a little hard for me to go into a house,” Ochimas said, “because it’s going to be hard to get used to it or to live inside.”
‘A Daily Battle’
HONU is the homeless transition service the city tracks most closely and it reveals a complex picture.
In the popup’s last 13 months — in Kapolei and at Old Stadium Park in Moiliili its current location — 957 intakes were recorded, city officials said, of which 29 were people who came and went multiple times.
For about half of those who showed up, it was a step away from the streets, at least for a while. People moved a total of 419 times from HONU into shelters — as Ochimas briefly did; 169 entered medical or treatment programs, transitional housing or permanent housing, or boarding houses, or were reunited with their families, said Anton Krucky, director of the Department of Community Services, which manages the city’s homelessness initiatives.
He counts those numbers as a success and notes that of those who enter shelter-based treatment programs, 70% to 80% do not return to the street — but he did not have data on how many people entered those programs.
The remaining 400 or so either left for various reasons, with no destinations on record, or were ejected for violating rules. Krucky wants to “improve that ratio.”
To direct more people toward resources and determine which efforts are working, the city is piloting an AI-driven system that Krucky describes as “like an air traffic center” to integrate in information from service providers, law enforcement, hospitals and state and city agencies. It’s to be set up at the department’s new School Street headquarters in January.
“The enforcement’s really not a homeless strategy,” Krucky said. “The real strategy that the mayor has for homeless is treatment and beds.”
In neighborhoods such as Chinatown, where homelessness has long been a major thorn for residents as well as businesses and their customers, the enforcement campaign has been welcome, though.
“It’s made a difference, there are less camps, put it that way, “ said Chu Lan Shubert-Kwock, president of the Chinatown Business and Community Association. Still, on a recent Saturday morning, as she passed by a ragged row of men and women collapsed against a building on Kekaulike Street, she remarked, “it is a daily battle.”
Homeless services providers also say the Blangiardi administration deserves credit for the work it’s done to add the roughly 1,000 new beds or treatment slots to the city’s inventory, often partnering with the state to purchase property or fund services.
But the city’s enforcement efforts need to be more focused on outreach and on adopting models of moving people into housing that are succeeding elsewhere, said Laura Thielen, executive director of Partners in Care, a coalition of nonprofits, and government and community representatives that coordinates Oahu homeless services and funding.
She pointed to the Encampment Resolution model, which has been used in places like Washington State, Denver and New Orleans. In that approach, outreach teams work daily with people who are homeless, sometimes for months, offering them services and support where they are, and moving them off the streets only after they have accepted help and housing has been located for them.
Because of the time it takes to develop those relationships, it can be a difficult sell for politicians and dismaying for the public, Thielen said, but she believes it is both cheaper and more effective in the long run.
“As a community member, I don’t want to see people living in our parks, but how we get to that solution can either be enforcement or enforcement balanced with true solutions,” she said. “What we’re accomplishing with the sit-lie is we’re exchanging a long-term solution for a short-term solution.”
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
By JEREMY HAY and CAITLIN THOMPSON/Honolulu Civil Beat
Honolulu Civil Beat
