The Washington Post
By María Luisa Paúl
Ammon Fepuleai said he didn’t have a single drink on the night of Nov. 7, 2023. But when he pulled up to a Honolulu police sobriety checkpoint, an officer claimed to smell alcohol anyway.
Body-camera footage later showed Fepuleai followed instructions during a field sobriety test, showed no signs of impairment and blew a 0.00 on a breathalyzer, court records state. Still, officers arrested him, shut down the checkpoint early and drove Fepuleai to a police station, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii.
Fepuleai, who was visiting Hawaii for his cousin’s wedding, is now one of three lead plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit alleging that the Honolulu Police Department has been unlawfully arresting sober drivers in an aggressive push to boost DUI arrest numbers — often without probable cause and in violation of due process rights.
The ACLU of Hawaii, which filed the suit in state court, says it has identified at least 127 people arrested from 2022 through 2024 whose breath or blood tests showed a blood alcohol level of 0.00. Nearly 9 in 10 were never charged with any crime — not even a traffic violation.
“The bottom line is this totally undermines the public’s trust in law enforcement — not to mention that false arrests are unconstitutional,” said Wookie Kim, legal director at ACLU of Hawaii.
In a statement, the Honolulu Police Department told The Washington Post that it is taking the allegations “very seriously” and has launched a comprehensive review of all impaired-driving arrests dating back to 2021. The case-by-case audits will aim to identify “negative patterns” and improve training, the department said, and will be conducted “with the utmost care and integrity.”
The department is also opening internal investigations into the arrests of the suit’s two other plaintiffs, Sarah Poppinga and Tanner Pangan, as it had previously done in November in the case of Fepuleai.
“We are dedicated to upholding public trust and will take appropriate action should any misconduct be found,” the statement added.
According to the lawsuit, officers have been encouraged to prioritize arrests over accuracy because high DUI numbers help the department secure federal highway safety grants — and because individual officers allegedly benefit from internal incentives, like being allowed to end their shift early (and still get paid in full) after making a DUI arrest.
That culture, the lawsuit argues, has fostered an “egregious and longstanding pattern of arresting people … without probable cause and/or without due process.”
Quotas in law enforcement have long drawn criticism for encouraging superficial enforcement and potentially abusive policing. While this may be one of the first high-profile cases involving alleged DUI arrest quotas, similar pressure tactics are widespread, said Michael Alcazar, a retired New York Police Department detective and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“Whether it’s written or unwritten, there’s definitely quotas,” Alcazar said. “And if you don’t meet them, you might not get promoted. You might not get days off. So officers start hunting for activity.”
In Honolulu, allegations of wrongful DUI arrests began to surface after investigative journalist Lynn Kawano of Hawaii News Now began reporting on the issue. What started as a story about Fepuleai’s arrest on Nov. 7, 2023, evolved into a series documenting dozens of similar cases — drivers who blew 0.00 on breathalyzers and were still arrested.
“It became very clear that there was a pattern,” said Kim of the ACLU. “So we began investigating this issue, too.”
The ACLU of Hawaii pored over the department’s data for DUI arrests taking place between 2022 and 2024, and found several “concerning red flags,” said senior staff attorney Emily Hills.
Most arrests didn’t result in charges, she said. Clusters appeared at the end of each month, a pattern Hills said “raises questions about quotas” when monthly data is compiled. The attorneys also noticed a spike in drivers refusing secondary chemical tests, like a blood or urine test, evidence that is considered more accurate and admissible in court.
“We’ve been told by multiple people that police officers are encouraging them to refuse testing, sometimes by saying they’ll have to stay in jail overnight to get one so it’s better for them to just refuse,” Hills said.
Many people, she added, weren’t informed by officers — as required by Hawaii law — that refusing a chemical test is treated as a legal admission of intoxication and can lead to an automatic license suspension. Yet even in those cases, Hills said, the administrative office reviewing suspensions frequently dropped the cases after a preliminary review, suggesting to Hills that the arrests may have lacked basic legal footing.
The ACLU sent letters to Honolulu police leadership in November, and again in May, urging policy reforms and misconduct investigations. Two plaintiffs, Fepuleai and Pangan, also filed complaints with the department’s Professional Standards Office. But after months of outreach, Hills and Kim said the department showed no signs of changing course.
“There were at least four attempts to address this, and each time the department said, ‘Our officers did nothing wrong,’” Kim said.
With the lawsuit, the ACLU is seeking injunctive relief to halt the department’s practice of arresting drivers without probable cause or due process, and a court order declaring those actions unconstitutional.
“For each person that an officer takes into custody and has to process for arrest, if they’re not intoxicated, that means that officer is not spending their time looking for the people who really are,” Hills said.