Smearing of K.C. Lum now a little clearer

According to a report in The Garden Island (“Former police chief wants name cleared,” A1, July 19), the state Attorney General’s office has ended an investigation into whether former Kaua‘i Police Chief K.C. Lum altered a government document, returned to Lum the personal property it seized last September on the eve of election season, and released the affidavit it filed to justify the search warrant.

Dropping the investigation comes as no surprise because the county’s charges against Lum were baseless from the beginning. No surprise, either, because charging Lum would also have required charging his attorney with lying to cover up for Lum and thus risking losing his license to practice law. (The attorney said that a transmission error that occurred in his office is what led to Lum’s unwitting distribution of a two-page version of a three-page letter.) The article pointed out the irony that the AG’s office created a similar transmission error when it omitted a page from the affidavit it sent to Lum’s attorney and dismissed its own error as inconsequential.

Would it have made any difference to the AG and the judge who authorized the raid on Lum if county officials had told them that Lum corrected the transmission error on his end as soon as Mayor Bryan Baptiste’s administrative assistant Gary Heu informed him that the two-page version of the letter was defective and that Lum informed the Kaua‘i County Council about what had happened before they launched their public attack accusing him of tampering with a government document?

Apparently blinded by rage because the two-page document was posted on a local Web site and not promptly removed, members of the council interpreted the transmission error as a deliberate act designed to impugn their reputation and their rectitude because the defective letter omitted information that Lum might be offered a chance to return to a lieutenant’s position after the finance director canceled his contract as police chief. (Who cooked up the ploy of having the finance director fire Lum by canceling his employment contract has not been revealed, but the ploy clearly violates state law and the charter and exposes the impotence of the Police Commission.) Council members concluded that the omission of this munificent offer resulted not from a transmission error but from a dark conspiracy. They retaliated by initiating the charge that Lum tampered with a government document.

It was evident then, and more evident now, that the baseless charge against Lum and the AG’s decision to cooperate by going forward with the raid on the eve of the primary election, both of which received extensive media coverage, had the effect of undermining Lum’s bid for a seat on the council.

This is politics at its worst, not only because of the damage to Lum but also because it amounts to an assault on the integrity of the electoral process by planting suspicions of criminality in the minds of voters about a candidate who had no time to counter the smear campaign.

The outcome of this “investigation” is an eerie reminder of the outcome of the witch hunt against Police Commissioner Carol Furtado, in which the hearings officer refused to sustain any of the charges the Ethics Board brought against her and the board then refused to clear her name publicly by promptly cleaning up its communication with her and failed to apologize to her for the trumped-up charges it made against her.

Both cases remind voters of the awesome powers they delegate to elected officials and their appointees — not just statutory powers, but also the power by virtue of their positions to manipulate, intimidate, retaliate and obfuscate. Reminders, too, of how extremely difficult it is for the public to call to account those who abuse or misuse the powers delegated to them as a public trust.

• Horace Stoessel is a resident of Kapa‘a and a regular contributor to the Forum page.