An incident where schoolchildren were hit with pepper spray at an Oʻahu school has added momentum to calls for counselors, not cops, on campus. 

In late February, a Honolulu police officer deployed pepper spray against Kapolei Middle School students while trying to break up a fight, a rare use of force against Hawaiʻi minors in an educational setting. 

Emily Hills, senior attorney with the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, said she would like to see more counselors and mental health professionals addressing issues on campus rather than police, who can sometimes escalate tensions.

“We are talking about kids in school and concerns about criminalizing behavior that really should be better dealt with through school officials or authorities,” she said. “Aside from whether or not this is constitutionally excessive force, was this really necessary?” 

A police officer told attendees at a neighborhood board meeting that the officer used the pepper spray because he was outnumbered. 

School safety is an ever-present concern and high-profile fights in recent years led parents and politicians to  in some OÊ»ahu schools. School resource officers were  in KaimukÄ«, Kapolei and WaiÊ»anae in January. 

There was no SRO present during the February middle school incident but some advocates, say is was nonetheless a sign there should be less police presence in schools, not more. They want to instead see a focus on getting more counselors and therapists in schools to help address student mental health and behavioral issues to prevent problems such as fights and bullying. 

“It’s shocking to think of pepper spray being used with children that age,” said Deborah Bond-Upson, president of the organization Parents for Public Schools. “I just think we need to do everything we can to make the atmosphere in our schools more peaceful and positive.” 

Bond-Upson was pushing this session for passage of , which would be a first step toward requiring licensure for school psychologists in HawaiÊ»i. HawaiÊ»i is the  that doesn’t require its school psychologists to be licensed by the state board of psychology. 

The Education Committee deferred the bill last week, which generally kills a bill’s chances of making it through session. Committee Chair Donna Kim did not respond to a request for comment on why.

The Department of Education is also asking the Legislature for , who are school psychologists assigned to work with students with the highest levels of mental health needs. 

The interventionists would focus on assessing a student’s risk of self-harm or harming their peers and also help with transitions if the student is referred to an educational placement outside of a traditional classroom setting. 

Bond-Upson said she wishes more mental health support could help prevent fights and serious bullying from happening in the first place. She fears the use of pepper spray in response to the fight at Kapolei Middle School will lead to more negative consequences for students. 

“I’m afraid it alienates them from the police. I’m afraid it makes them less comfortable being in school,” she said. “So I would just want to see that we do everything we can to avoid that kind of situation, and one of the biggest things we need to do is to really fund psychological support in our schools.”

Three Students Arrested 

The fight at Kapolei Middle School broke out around 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 24. A group of girls had attacked another girl, Honolulu police Cpl. Roland Pagan shared at a public meeting. 

A responding officer, who would be the only officer on scene, grabbed one of the girls who was assaulting the victim and attempted to arrest her. A group of girls then grabbed the officer and other kids grabbed ahold of the girl he was trying to arrest, Pagan said. At that point, the officer used pepper spray. 

The incident occurred after school near the back entrance of campus, according to a statement from Department of Education spokeswoman Nanea Ching. School officials didn’t know how many students were involved, but she said no serious injuries were reported and those who were affected by the pepper spray were near the officer. 

One girl was arrested on a charge of third-degree assault, and two others were arrested for resisting arrest. Police declined to provide the ages of the girls and said they would not release further information.

Christine Denton, spokeswoman for the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office, said the office is prohibited from discussing juvenile cases. Criminal justice records involving minors in HawaiÊ»i are shielded by law from public view. 

In a letter sent home to parents, Kapolei Middle School Principal Daryl Agena said the pepper spray was deployed to “disperse the crowd and restore order.” 

Leslie Keating, the parent of an eighth grader at Kapolei Middle School, brought up her concerns about the incident at a Makakilo-Kapolei-Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board meeting in February. She said her son was not present during the fight, but she was worried about the use of pepper spray on young students. Kapolei Middle School includes grades 6-8, and students could be anywhere from 11 to 14 years old. 

“These are chemical weapons that have chemicals that we don’t know the long-term effects of,” she said. “I’m not okay with it.”  

Pagan said he is unaware of any long-term effects of pepper spray. 

“Pepper spray is one of our lowest-level uses of force,” Pagan told the neighborhood board, “and he used it because he was outnumbered.” 

‘Extreme Force’

Keating told Civil Beat she doesn’t agree with the use of pepper spray on students or adults, but she is especially concerned about its use at a middle school where some children may have asthma or other breathing issues that make them particularly sensitive. 

“I mean, some of these kids weigh 80 pounds, they don’t have adult bodies yet,” she said in an interview. “So using pepper spray on them, I don’t know, it very much irked me.” 

Jannet Lee-Jayaram, an emergency pediatrician and clinical associate professor with the University of Hawaiʻi’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, said pepper spray isn’t known to have long-term effects, but it can cause injuries to the lungs and eyes, including corneal abrasions from people rubbing their eyes too hard after exposure.

In the short term, pepper spray can cause intense pain in the eyes, irritation in the nose and lungs and burning of the skin. 

The use of chemical agents, like pepper spray, sits in the middle of the spectrum in . The policy ranges from techniques with the lowest risk of injury to those with the highest risk of serious injury or death. 

The first three options are officer presence, verbal directions and physical contact. Chemical agents, including pepper spray, are listed as the fourth option. The options escalate from there, including using physical strikes, canines or even firearms. 

The policy states that the use of chemical agents on a crowd should be directed by an incident commander on scene unless an officer believes someone is in immediate danger of serious injury or death. 

Wookie Kim, legal director of the ACLU of HawaiÊ»i, said it’s difficult to determine whether the officer’s use of pepper spray in this scenario was justified without knowing more of the details. But, he noted of chemical agents should be reserved for the most threatening scenarios. 

In an instance like this one, which involved young people at school, other deescalation methods should have been considered first. 

“We should be very concerned about the use of such extreme force with middle schoolers,” he said. 

‘Counselors Not Cops’ 

Pepper spray has been used at schools before in HawaiÊ»i — and around the country. 

In 2023, Honolulu police officers  to break up a fight at Kapolei High School. Paramedics treated multiple students for exposure but no serious injuries were reported, according to an HNN article from the time. 

In other parts of the country, however, children have been hospitalized from pepper spray exposure at school. 

In February, a 12-year-old in Tulsa, Oklahoma, went to the hospital after  students participating in an ICE protest outside their school. In September, 32 students and faculty members at a Florida high school were hospitalized after school police and administrators  to break up a large fight. 

The incident at Kapolei Middle School brings up the question of whether police officers should be the ones addressing student behavioral problems on campus, Kim, of the ACLU, said.  

“Our whole position is that we shouldn’t have substantial police presence on school campuses,”  he said. “We want counselors, not cops.” 

The focus, many advocates and parents say, should shift to getting more mental health support for students. 

During the last Education Committee, committee members and testifiers discussed HB1889 and debated whether creating a license structure would help or hinder the Department of Education’s ability to recruit more psychologists and fill its vacancies. 

Currently, a psychologist  to work as a school psychologist in HawaiÊ»i. 

While advocates say creating a license structure would create training and ethical standards for the position, Sen. Donna Kim questioned whether adding the requirement would create more bureaucratic hoops for school psychologists to jump through.  

But Bond-Upson, of the Parents for Public Schools group, said requiring licences would allow eligible services in schools to be reimbursed by Medicaid. 

Overall, she said she hopes the pepper spray incident can lead to change in how behavioral issues are handled at schools. 

“I am heartbroken that the police had to enter the situation,” she said. “And that’s why my first responses are, ‘What is it we can do to make the atmosphere of the school such that this kind of alarming behavior does not happen to kids and with kids?’”

UVALDE — U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said some victims of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting would have survived if Texas law enforcement officers — who waited more than an hour to confront the gunman — had followed “generally accepted practices.”

Those assertions came Thursday after the U.S. Justice Department into the hundreds of Texas law enforcement officers’ fumbled response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, finding “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”

The long-anticipated 575-page report detailed the many catastrophic errors of the May 24, 2022 response, but concluded the most significant was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.

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Garland called the response “a failure that should not have happened” and said he apologized to the relatives of the 21 killed and the 17 injured in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” Garland said.

The report noted that since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, American law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter while everything else, including officer safety, is secondary.

“These efforts must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available,” the report found. “This did not occur during the Robb Elementary shooting response.”

Instead, officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect, even as children and teachers . The report noted “multiple stimuli indicating that there was an active threat,” including that an Uvalde school police officer early on told other law enforcement that his wife, a teacher in Room 112, was shot. It took 77 minutes for officers to confront the shooter. died that day and 17 others were injured in one of the country’s worst school shootings.

The report also found failures in leadership, command and coordination, noting that as more officers, including supervisors from other agencies, descended on the school, no one set up an incident command structure or took charge of the scene.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed on ambulances and children with bullet wounds were put on school buses.

Gupta also criticized misinformation and conflicting accounts that officials disseminated to Uvalde residents and reporters after the shooting.

Supervisors from the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the Uvalde Police Department, the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office, and the Texas Department of Public Safety “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated the communication problems and overall confusion.

Some failures may have been partly a result of policy and training deficiencies, the report found, noting that the school district police department suggested wrongly in prior training that active shooter situations can transition into hostage or barricaded incidents. DPS lacked an active shooter policy, as did the county sheriff’s office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the 149 Border Patrol agents who responded.

The report also found that key officers, including Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas who arrived within minutes of the shooting, had no active shooter or incident command training.

The vast majority of 380 officers from more than a dozen local, state and federal agencies who responded to the school had never trained together, “contributing to difficulties in coordination and communication.” The report said the “lack of pre-planning hampered even well-prepared agencies from functioning at their best.”

Among its recommendations, the report said that officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect. Law enforcement training academies must ensure active shooter training instructs how officers should distinguish between active threats and barricaded or hostage situations. And officers should be prepared to approach the threat using just the tools they have with them, which is often a standard firearm, the report noted.

The federal review by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was announced just five days after the shooting. It was led by Orange County Sheriff John Mina, the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando. In that incident, officers waited three hours to take down the shooter who had barricaded himself with victims in a bathroom.

A Justice Department and National Policing Institute review of that Florida law enforcement response was far less critical than the Uvalde report. It found that Florida officers mostly followed best practices, although it stated the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.

In the Uvalde review, the federal team reviewed more than 14,100 pieces of data and documentation, including policies, training logs, body camera footage, audio recordings, interview transcripts and photographs. The team visited Uvalde nine times, spending 54 days there, and conducted more than 260 interviews with people from more than 30 organizations and agencies, including law enforcement officers, school staff, medical personnel, survivors and victims’ families.

The Uvalde report’s release comes two months after ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and PBS’ Frontline published into the response after gaining access to a trove of investigative materials, including more than 150 interviews with officers and dozens of body cameras. The material showed that the children at Robb Elementary followed active shooter protocols, while many of the officers did not. It detailed how officers treated the situation as a barricaded suspect rather than an active threat even as evidence mounted quickly that children and teachers were injured and with the shooter.

The investigation also analyzed the active shooter training of the local and state police officers who responded prior to the gunman being stopped, finding some had not taken any active shooter training based on their state records. Of those who had, they most commonly only received the training once during their careers and hadn’t taken it in four years or longer.

The Tribune also revealed that to confront the gunman because he had a deadly AR-15 rifle. With the Washington Post, ProPublica and the Tribune found that and that two children and a teacher were still alive when they were rescued more than an hour later, but then died.

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