Policing Suburbia: A Case Study of Racist Policing Practices in San Mateo, California

After the murders of both Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of the police in the Spring of 2020, protests around the country rose up in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Such was the case in San Mateo County, a mostly suburban jurisdiction in the San Francisco Bay Area. Much like the rest of the protests around the country and the world, the San Mateo protests were full of signs and chants demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, amongst countless other Black victims of police brutality. Amongst these names, one of the most frequent that came up in the San Mateo protests was Chinedu Okobi, a Black man who was killed in 2018 by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s department after being stopped for jaywalking. Much like many of the other cases, the officers involved in the killing of Chinedu Okobi were never prosecuted or held accountable for their actions (Peele 2019). The incident has received a fair amount of local news coverage (Schuesller 2018; Peele 2019; Salonga and Savidge 2019), and even attracted the attention of national news outlets, the vast majority of which called into question the officers themselves, as well as the District Attorney’s refusal to press charges against the officers (Boyette and Cullinane 2018; Eligon 2018; Beckett 2018). Despite the national news coverage of the incident, there exists very little publicly available information on the policing practices of police departments operating within San Mateo County.