Abstract

My thesis looks to highlight elites’ use of policing ideology in their quest for continued access to state power. The reforms of the Police Act of February 1, 1932, were introduced by Republican lawmakers to safeguard the oligarchic rule of the Big Five sugar companies in the wake of the United States’ Federal Government’s scrutiny of the territory’s system of law enforcement after the Ala Moana trial and the murder of Joseph Kahahawai. The reforms represented the culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and public inquiries by civic leaders, progressive women, and the territory’s English language press. In times of crisis, Honolulu’s elites turned to the international network of policing experts to reform the Honolulu City and County Police Department and affirmed its status as the protector of the ruling class. In the first chapter, I look at how the police proved instrumental in defining the notion “security” for haole elites who understood the growing presence of racialized people outside of the plantation and in Honolulu’s urban landscape as a threat to the sugar planter’s oligarchy’s social order. I examine three key moments in Honolulu’s history where elites agitated for an increase in police repression of racialized people: the 1920 Sugar Workers’ Strike, the Kaka‘ako case of 1923, and the 1924 Filipino Sugar Workers’ Strike. In the second chapter, I dig into the ideological and legislative origins of the Police Act of February 1, 1932. I identify August Vollmer as an imperial importer (Go, 2020) of militarized technologies whose Berkeley Police Department served as the principal reference for the reforms envisaged by Honolulu’s lawmakers. The principles of professional policing promulgated by Vollmer provided elites with the justification and the means to insulate their system of oligarchic control from the interference of the federal government and the majority Native Hawaiian and Asian population. The changes put in motion by the Hawaiian territorial legislative house in 1932 were cemented during the 14-year tenure of Honolulu’s second police chief William A. Gabrielson. Gabrielson, a former Berkeley Police Department officer, transformed the Honolulu City and County Police Department into a state-of-the-art police force proficient in the type of surveillance operations the FBI and the U.S. military would require the police department to conduct during the Second World War.