Hawaiʻi school panic button program stalls as contractor faces federal bribery probe

Two years after Hawaiʻi launched a $7 million effort to equip public school campuses with panic buttons, only one school in the state has the technology installed — and it is not using it. The company contracted to provide monitoring services for the program, SaferWatch, is under federal scrutiny after its former chief executive was charged with bribing a New York Police Department officer to pressure local officials to spend millions of dollars on school panic button systems.

Two years after Hawaiʻi launched a $7 million effort to equip its public schools with panic buttons, only one campus in the state has the devices installed — and that school is not using them. The company contracted to provide monitoring services for the program, SaferWatch, is under federal scrutiny after its former chief executive was charged with bribing a New York Police Department officer to pressure local officials to spend millions of dollars on school panic button systems, according to reporting by Honolulu Civil Beat distributed by the Associated Press.

The Hawaiʻi Department of Education has pushed back the rollout timeline by several years, citing prolonged negotiations with staff unions over how the technology — which includes GPS tracking and camera feeds — will be used, as well as unfinished agreements between the DOE and the state Department of Law Enforcement. A statewide deployment, originally targeted for the 2026–27 school year, is now years away.

Federal Scrutiny and State Procurement

Hawaiʻi Department of Law Enforcement Director Mike Lambert said the state followed proper procurement procedures in securing its three SaferWatch contracts and has not been accused of wrongdoing. The federal government has requested the state’s procurement documents for the SaferWatch technology, Lambert said.

The contracts were executed under Lambert’s predecessor, Jordan Lowe, who resigned from the Department of Law Enforcement as several staffers were under investigation for misconduct and harassment.

The state’s relationship with SaferWatch began in 2023 with a $97,000 contract to use the company’s software to monitor potential threats against the governor and lieutenant governor, Lambert said. In December 2023, the department entered into a larger, five-year, $7 million agreement for school safety monitoring. A third contract in spring 2024 awarded the company $1.85 million over five years to operate tip lines allowing residents to submit anonymous crime reports by app or online form.

Current SaferWatch CEO Rob Flippo said in an emailed statement that the tip lines have drawn thousands of reports since 2024 — including more than 500 illegal fireworks reports in the final two days of 2025 alone.

“I can’t disagree with the product,” Lambert said. “Even though it has this dark cloud over it, the product itself serves its purpose.”

Costs and Procurement Detour

The state has spent at least $1.5 million to purchase an initial batch of panic buttons for 100 of its 258 DOE-operated schools, according to Assistant Superintendent Sean Tajima. More purchases will be needed before the program can reach every campus, and total costs have not yet been determined.

Some schools will also need new cameras installed to transmit video feeds to SaferWatch’s mainland monitoring center, Assistant Superintendent Amy Peckinpaugh said. The pilot launching in August will not involve the camera-monitoring features.

“It’s going to be quite pricey,” Peckinpaugh said, adding that the department does not yet have full cost estimates.

In spring 2024, SaferWatch hired former Honolulu council member and lawyer Ernie Martin for $20,000 to lobby the state Legislature, according to a disclosure filing with the State Ethics Commission. Martin said in an emailed statement he secured an additional $5 million appropriation for school security in the DOE’s budget. Despite SaferWatch’s lobbying effort, the state chose a different company — Centegix — to supply the actual panic button hardware, because the SaferWatch product was too expensive to scale statewide, Tajima said.

“To scale that from a pilot to going statewide just wasn’t fiscally responsible on our part,” Tajima said.

SaferWatch remains responsible for monitoring threats reported through the buttons, regardless of which hardware is used, Lambert said.

Unions, Delays, and Redistribution to Other Agencies

Staff unions representing school employees have raised concerns about whether the panic buttons could be used to track workers’ locations on campus, Lambert said. The technology does require real-time location data to identify where an emergency is occurring. School staff will not be required to use the buttons, Tajima said, and he said he expects a union agreement to be reached soon.

The five-year software license giving SaferWatch’s monitoring system access to DOE facilities will not begin until all schools have access to the technology, Peckinpaugh said.

While schools await the full rollout, the state has redistributed panic buttons and software purchased for the DOE to other agencies, including the Department of Human Services and lawmakers at the state Capitol, Lambert said. As of fall 2024, four legislators carried panic buttons in the Capitol building; Lambert said the department plans to extend that to all legislators.

State Sen. Karl Rhoads, who received a panic button after facing death threats, said he stopped carrying it once those threats subsided. He said DOE campuses should still use available technology to improve emergency response.

“It goes without saying that we should keep our kids as safe as we can, without completely turning schools into prisons,” Rhoads said. “I’m all in favor of doing what we can to take prudent precautions.”

In the 2022–23 school year — the most recent year for which data are publicly available — 26 DOE students were dismissed for bringing a firearm to campus.