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Honolulu Police Chief David Lazar has ended an agreement that let IRS Criminal Investigation access the department’s automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) data, and he has said HPD will not share that data with anyone, federal agencies included. The change is an announced direction, though. The published ALPR policy still allows sharing with other law-enforcement agencies when the chief or a designee approves it, and HPD’s replacement public policy was still being drafted when Honolulu Civil Beat reported the story in October 2026.
What happened
According to Honolulu Civil Beat, IRS Criminal Investigation reviewed 2,036 vehicle-detection files recorded between May and September 2026. The files came from 10 fixed cameras in Waikīkī and 60 mobile cameras used around Oʻahu. Each record contained license-plate information, a vehicle image, and the date, time, and location of the detection. The reporting says five months of that data remained in the IRS’s hands when the article was published. Honolulu Civil Beat’s report is the primary account of these details.
How the agreement was made
The agreement was signed by then-interim Chief Rade Vanic in September 2025 and co-signed by the IRS in December 2025. Vanic said IRS Criminal Investigation requested the memorandum of understanding and that internal stakeholders had a chance to weigh in. Lazar, who took office July 2, said it was the only license-plate data-sharing agreement he knew of at HPD and that it did not fit his vision for the department.
Civil Beat reported that Vanic signed without the knowledge of the Honolulu Police Commission or City Council members. Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam said the agreement had never been raised with the council, which he said should have been the forum for discussing and approving agreements of this kind. The IRS did not respond to Civil Beat’s questions about how it used the vehicle information.
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What is not yet public is the memorandum itself. The reporting does not reproduce it, so its full terms, the safeguards it contained, and what happened to the accessed files after access ended are not established.
Published policy versus the announced direction
HPD’s ALPR policy is Policy 4.57. The HPD policy page for automated license plate readers posts it, and the Policy 4.57 PDF carries an April 24, 2023 public-release date. The table below compares that written rule with what the chief has announced.
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| Issue | Published Policy 4.57 | Chief Lazar’s announced direction |
|---|---|---|
| Sharing with other agencies | Data may be provided to a requesting law-enforcement agency or personnel only with approval of the Chief of Police or designee. This is an approval mechanism, not a ban. | No sharing of data with anyone, including federal law enforcement, according to Lazar’s statement reported by Civil Beat. |
| Retention | Downloaded data is purged after 90 days, unless it has become evidence in a criminal or civil action or is subject to a lawful action to produce records. | Not stated in the reporting reviewed. |
| Audits | Not stated in the policy language reviewed. | Quarterly audits tracking how many data requests were made and by whom, with redacted results to be made public, per Assistant Chief Brian Lynch and Lazar. |
| Individual access to own records | Not stated in the policy language reviewed. | Lynch said a person may be able to request their own vehicle-detection reports, but not another person’s. No request process was described. |
The practical consequence is that the written rule and the chief’s announcement currently point in different directions. Until HPD publishes a replacement policy, a reader should treat the 90-day purge and the approval-based sharing rule as the operative written text, and the no-sharing position and audits as announced plans. Civil Beat reported that HPD was still preparing a public-facing policy explaining its data use, and Police Commission chair Laurie Foster said the commission would seek assurance that the new position is followed.
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Civil Beat reported that HPD operates 70 Motorola cameras: 10 fixed cameras in Waikīkī and 60 mounted on patrol vehicles. The mobile program has been running since 2012. These are police-owned agency systems, not consumer devices.
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HPD also ran a Flock camera trial between September and December 2025 using three cameras, then returned them without signing a contract. The department asked that pilot data stay internal and said a review of its portal found no pilot data remaining. Lynch’s comments on the vendor were blunt: “We’re not touching Flock,” and “We’re avoiding Flock like the plague.”
City ordinance, as Civil Beat described it, limits static cameras to Waikīkī and Chinatown, and HPD has said it wants to work with the City Council to expand that capability. HPD has published notice that it wants to activate ALPR capability on 20 cameras already installed in Chinatown, and the 10 Waikīkī cameras were expected to be considered for overt use during the Honolulu Marathon in December 2026. Neither step is settled, and the ordinance and any later council action should be checked before relying on those details.
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Why civil liberties groups are focused on the database
Wookie Kim, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaiʻi, said the episode “really underscores the importance of making sure that safeguards are in place for data storage and sharing when these technologies are deployed locally.” Her broader concern is the aggregation effect. “It’s not an instance of just a single observation by a police officer of someone’s whereabouts or conduct,” Kim said. “It’s the kind of creation of this database that can be mined to piece together a picture of someone’s life and their whereabouts.”
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What to watch next
- The replacement HPD policy. Check whether it is published and whether its sharing terms match the chief’s no-sharing announcement, and whether it replaces or amends Policy 4.57.
- The signed IRS memorandum. Its release would show what access and safeguards it actually provided.
- The status of IRS-held files. Whether they were deleted, retained, or restricted after access ended has not been confirmed.
- The first quarterly audit. Its scope, timing, and whether redacted results are published will show whether the audit commitment is real.
- Council action. Any move on the ordinance limiting fixed cameras, the Chinatown activations, or the Marathon deployment.
Readers who want to know whether their own plate data was involved can ask HPD for their vehicle-detection report, but the process and its limits have not been published in the reporting reviewed, so they should confirm with the department directly.
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