Trouble In America's Paradise

Within an hour of the worst mass murder in Hawaii history, local politicians were on national television stressing the abnormality of such violence in the Aloha State.

That reflex underscored the keen image-consciousness of a state fed more by tourism dollars than anything else.

Police believe Xerox Corp. employee Byran Uyesugi, 40, shot seven fellow copier technicians at his office building Tuesday before fleeing in a company van. He surrendered later in the day after a five-hour standoff with police.

"This is such a shock for us," Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris said. "This is not the kind of violence that we have in our community. Last year in Honolulu, although we're the 11th largest city in the nation, we only had a total of 17 homicides. And here in one brutal act, seven of our citizens lay dead."

Gov. Ben Cayetano, while ordering the state flag flown at half-staff, said the shootings had "disrupted the calm of our islands."

While making the rounds of the news shows, politicians, police and fire officials noted that the crime happened in an industrial district far from Waikiki, which gets the bulk of Hawaii's 6.7 million annual visitors.

Tourism was an $11.6 billion industry last year. It generates a third of the state's gross product and creates a third of its jobs.

But the visitor industry has been dealt a blow by the recent Asian financial crisis, which has hampered Hawaii's recovery from a nine-year economic slump.

In separate interviews, City Council Chairman Jon Yoshimura and Councilman Andy Mirikitani both mentioned Honolulu's low violent crime rate and the fact that tourists were not endangered.

Experts say Hawaii is one of the safest states in terms of violent crime, though it does have the fourth-highest property crime rate in the nation.

Honolulu is listed as the least violent of the nation's 20 largest cities in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 1998. Murder, rape and aggravated assault figures for Honolulu were ranked lowest of all cities surveyed.

There were 24 murders last year in all of Hawaii, which has a population of 1.2 million.

"Whenever you talk about these atypical murders — mass murder and serial killings — they really do sort of travel in a different trajectory than your normal crime," University of Hawaii criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind said.

"You try to make sense of them the best way that you can, but the typical news about Hawaii crime is that it's going down like the rest of the mainland, and our violent crime is going down."

While such tragedies are rare in Hawaii, Chesney-Lind said the public should make an effort to learn lessons from them.

"I think we should all realize that like violence in the home, violence in the workplace is an increasing problem," she said. "Our violent crime rate is so much lower than comparable cities on the mainland, I think we get lulled into thinking we have no problem at all."

By Jean Christensen