For most of the past five years, Honolulu police officers shot, or shot at, criminal suspects a little more than twice a year on average.

Then came 2009. So far this year, there have been seven "officer-involved shootings."

Three of them happened last month alone.

In all three of those cases, young male drivers tried to flee and struck, dragged or came close to running over police officers in the process. Two of the three suspects were driving stolen vehicles.

The result: three men shot and wounded, three more nonfatal officer-involved shooting cases for the Honolulu Police Department's Internal Affairs Division to investigate, three more for City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle to review — if asked.

"The prosecutor's office will make a determination if the shooting is justified if we are asked by the police department to do so," Carlisle said. "Otherwise, that determination will be made by the Internal Affairs Division at the police department."

The number of officer-involved shootings on O'ahu pales in comparison to many Mainland cities, but Carlisle said he can't remember three of them occurring in a single month.

But he said he is "not necessarily" alarmed by the cluster of incidents.

"What is alarming here is that in these stolen car cases, we have people shrieking off and doing everything possible to escape instead of simply submitting to a car theft arrest," Carlisle said.

He said that as of early this month, the police department had not asked his office to review any of the three nonfatal November shootings.

All fatal officer-involved shootings are automatically routed to the prosecutor's office, according to police department regulation, for review and a determination as to whether the shootings were justified.

A determination by his office can take as little as a week if the police Internal Affairs investigation is complete, Carlisle said.

"Or it could take as long as several months if there is a lot of follow-up work to do, which may include our own investigation and evaluation of the circumstances," he said.

He estimated that he has reviewed 25 to 50 officer-involved shootings during his 13 years as prosecutor. In none of those cases did he find the shootings unjustified.

By way of comparison, a Citizens' Police Review Board in Oakland, Calif., in a December 2008 forum, learned from the Oakland Police Department and the Oakland City Attorney's Office that there were 45 officer-involved shootings in that city between 2004 and 2008, all of which were deemed justifiable.

Carlisle said he "wouldn't be surprised" to learn that the behavior of the three men in the November cases "was crystal-meth related."

"Ice causes more problems than you can imagine for our police officers," Carlisle said. "What I fear most about these three incidents is that they are ice-related. I'm not saying they are, but the three individuals' utter disregard for themselves, for the police officers and for the public in general suggest that they are."

In a comprehensive look at 11 years' worth of officer-involved shootings, the San Diego County District Attorney's office found that amphetamine or methamphetamine was present in the blood of 64 of the 114 people killed by various law enforcement officers between 1996 and 2006.

The San Diego analysis looked at 200 shooting cases reported by the 18 law enforcement agencies operating in the county. Exactly half of the cases involved San Diego Police Department officers.

In 13 of those cases, San Diego law enforcement officers were responding to calls about stolen vehicles, calls that led to officer-involved shootings.

Ronald Becker , a professor of criminal justice and criminology at Chaminade University, is not so sure that crystal meth bears an all-powerful cause-and-effect relationship in car-theft suspects who attempt to evade and escape from police officers.

"The human body is a wonderful chemical production facility," Becker said. "When someone is out there running from the police they develop tunnel vision, the 'fight or flight' instinct kicks in."

And when that happens, adrenalin overwhelms the rational thought process and someone behind the wheel of a stolen car will try anything and everything to avoid being arrested even without methamphetamine in their system, Becker said.

Honolulu's new police chief Louis Kealoha, who was sworn in Nov. 25, said earlier this month that the three officer-involved shootings in November warrant looking into to see if changes need to be made.

"Our officers are highly trained, and I am very confident in their abilities," Kealoha said when he met with the media for the first time as chief on Dec. 8.

"Still, three incidences in a month is a cause for concern, and I will be asking my staff to look into these incidences to see where we can improve or where changes need to be made in terms of our training or our policies," Kealoha said at the time.

Honolulu City Councilman Donovan Dela Cruz, who chairs the council's Public Safety and Services Committee, said there hasn't been any public outcry over the three shootings.

"I don't have any statistics, but just anecdotal ly based on my talking-story with the police officers out there, they seem to sense there is a lot more brazen (criminal) behavior today than in the past, resulting in these kinds of things," Dela Cruz said.

Public safety has to be balanced with the safety of police officers who work at protecting the public, Dela Cruz said.

He said the Public Safety and Services Committee does not meet again until January.

"We want to give the (police) chief time to look into it. I'm not sure we need to do anything legislatively at this point to protect either the public or our police officers," Dela Cruz said.