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Honolulu police are putting a lot of effort in busting gaming establishments. But what’s really the point?

Wow! Phew! Holy kamoley!

Thank all the stars in heaven and the entire Honolulu City Council that yet another illegal game room was shut down this week.

That brings the grand total just this summer to four illegal game rooms being shut down by the Honolulu Police Department.

And probably many more being opened in other locations, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that illegal game rooms, what with their video-top tables all lined up in neat rows and walls of brightly colored flat screens, represent a clear and present danger to all of us here on Oʻahu.

How? Not quite sure. But the vehemence with which the cops and the city are going after these places sure makes it seem like they’re a scourge on the island and a threat to every single person who calls Oʻahu home.

Maybe they lead to fights and shootings, but the fights and shootings tend to happen within the walls of the game room, not spill out into the community at large. It’s mostly a self-contained kind of criminality. It is probably unnerving to live near an illegal game room and have that element so close to home, but it’s not much fun living next to a monster house either and we know that once those things go up, nothing ever brings them down.

The amount of cash HPD has seized in these frequent game room raids is unimpressive. In July, a joint operation of the Honolulu Police Department’s Narcotics and Vice Division, Crime Reduction Unit and Specialized Services Division busted in to two illegal game rooms and took 20 gambling machines, illegal drugs and $3,615 in cash. The Girl Scouts selling cookies outside Foodland have a bigger till than that. Maybe it’s all cryptocurrency or Apple Pay or Venmo, but we never hear about that.

We do hear about all the game room busts, though. The media gets pictures courtesy of the Honolulu Police Department. They want us to know that stuff is getting cleaned up in the community and we are safer because of their efforts. They want Big Hero Credit.

Not so much the cops, though. The politicians. Law enforcement is simply doing the politician’s bidding. Recently, the City Council and the mayor decided game rooms were among the most heinous influences on our community, so they passed laws and held press conferences, talking big and looking tough. (Notice nobody added in stopping chicken fights because … ah, that’s cultural and no elected official wants to wade into that messy debate.)

Shutting down game rooms is an easy win. The perpetrators are just sitting there, transfixed like deer in the headlights of the gaming machines. They probably don’t even look up when the squad busts through the door.

The cops get the sexy headlines about shutting down something bad, and they only have to arrest one or two people. It’s not like rappelling by helicopter into a pakalolo patch like in the old days of Green Harvest or having to put on hazmat gear to take out a meth lab.

It’s not like shutting down monster homes or illegal vacation rentals, which go unbothered until they’re grandfathered. Monster homes greatly impact neighborhoods, but the city has been limp about enforcement. Shutting down a game room, however, has the swagger of film noir.

All of this comes under the file of weird stuff that happens when politics gets in the way of policy or practicality. Like the State Auditors’ report that came out this week that found former Gov. David Ige’s proud project to put air conditioning in hundreds of the hottest public school classrooms fell far short of the goal, went far over budget, and in many cases, solved one problem only to create another.

I visited a class at Nānākuli High School a few years back where the kids were, no joke, wearing jackets and fur-lined parkas because it was so cold in the classrooms. They told me that there was no way to shut off the solar AC unit, but that once the sun went behind the mountains, the classroom would be sweltering again. That was all about David Ige trying to prove he was the savior of the public schools and touting his 100% renewable energy policy, which sounded great on paper but in reality has proven again and again to be expensive and impractical.

Yes, illegal game rooms should be shut down. That’s not something the city should ignore. But it would also be great to put that same kind of effort into other problems that affect more citizens more significantly every day.

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