[420 Girl]

Hawaii - "Ambiguous" wording in Hawaii County's so-called "Peaceful Sky" law needs rectifying because it's hampering the Police Commission's work, says the panel's chairman.

The voter-approved initiative that took effect in November 2008 requires police to give the lowest enforcement priority to people at least 21 years old who grow, possess or smoke marijuana on private property. Possession is capped at 24 plants or 24 ounces of processed pot.

The Peaceful Sky Alliance, previously known as Project Peaceful Sky, pushed for the legislation that passed by nearly a 10,000-vote margin.

But police, citing overriding state and federal anti-pot laws, have continued to conduct marijuana raids. They arrested 197 people for pot offenses during the first five months of last year, according to Police Department statistics that the law requires be compiled every six months.

The enforcement activities have generated complaints that police are violating the law. Some of the allegations have been filed with the nine-member Police Commission, which last month postponed acting on two in hopes of getting the County Council to clarify the law.

Thomas Whittemore, commission chairman, made that formal request to County Council Chairman J Yoshimoto of Hilo in a Dec. 29 letter.

"In reviewing the aforementioned lowest law enforcement priority of cannabis ordinance, the commission has concern surrounding some of the ambiguous verbiage," Whittemore wrote in his two-page letter.

Yoshimoto said while he doesn't recall Whittemore's letter, he'll honor the request by asking the county's top civil attorney to "review the legal aspects of the law" to determine if clarification is warranted.

"I think that would be in the public's best interest," Yoshimoto said.

When council members earlier this month discussed a nonbinding resolution asking the state Legislature to decriminalize marijuana, the debate became so heated that North Kona Councilman Kelly Greenwell, author of the measure, threatened to resign if his colleagues voted against his proposal. Council members did just that, however, and Greenwell withdrew his threat.

The council's decision to place the enforcement question on voter ballots even though it didn't generate the minimum number of required voter signatures prevented lawmakers from correcting "the obvious ambiguities in the law as presently written," Whittemore noted in his letter.

"The commission feels it cannot perform its Charter-mandated requirement of investigating and reviewing complaints made by the public against the Police Department and its personnel since the underlying law concerning this particular issue is wrought with ambiguity," he added.

Specifically, Whittemore is asking council members to answer three questions: Does the law legalize pot; is the Police Department prohibited from receiving money for marijuana eradication; and is the department banned from spending county money for that purpose.

"I would suggest to Mr. Whittemore that he read the law and read it through because it's all spelled out in the ordinance," Wolf Daniel Braun, Peaceful Sky Alliance president, said Wednesday after being read portions of Whittemore's letter. "I don't think the law needs to be revised."

It states that the council "shall not authorize the acceptance ... of any funding that is intended to investigate, cite, arrest ... adults for cannabis offenses in a manner inconsistent with the county's lowest law enforcement priority."

Similar wording is used to bar the county from spending "any public funds" for anti-marijuana efforts not allowed by the law.

"It makes it less legal," Braun said when asked if the law legalizes marijuana use.

If anything needs amending, it's laws making pot illegal and regulating its use for medical purposes, said Braun, who took issue with the Police Commission's work.

"I feel the Police Commission is not living up to its Charter-mandated responsibilities," he said. "There's no teeth to the Police Commission. They can't really do anything."

According to the Charter, the all-volunteer commission is responsible for reviewing the Police Department's yearly budget, appointing and removing the police chief, and investigating complaints against on-duty officers. The commission cannot impose penalties, but rather is limited to forwarding its investigative findings to the chief.

A proposed Charter amendment that would have created a new office of police oversight and complaints, complete with the power to subpoena police officers, was defeated by the council in April 2008.

A similar effort failed two years earlier when lawmakers decided not to ask voters to create an independent police auditor to investigate complaints against police officers.

In February 2007, the commission stopped forwarding complaints about police to independent investigators, opting instead to let the department's Internal Affairs Unit handle that task.

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