By appointing Kenneth Binder as San Mateo’s new sheriff, the county’s board of supervisors bypassed the will of the voters. We should adapt that as the national standard.
A sheriff wields enormous power and position on a local level, yet we elect them in the same political fashion as we do city councilmembers and school boards. But today’s sheriffs oversee multimillion-dollar agencies, manage jails and set enforcement priorities that shape entire communities.
In theory, this allows informed and nuanced voters to split their ballots, allowing them to vote in the sheriff they feel is best qualified regardless of political affiliation while otherwise voting down the party line.
The recent fiasco shows the result of this approach in practice: instability. The previous sheriff, a historic first in many respects, didn’t even finish her term before allegations of misconduct and abuse of power surfaced. The community watched as the board stepped in, removed her, launched a full search and selected a successor. And while I’m sure outliers exist, as far as I can tell, no one really batted an eye.
So why not do away with the process that got us here?
The Mercury reported the county’s efforts to investigate, litigate and ultimately remove the former sheriff cost taxpayers more than $4.6 million. That figure doesn’t include the countless hours of staff time, community division and the paralysis within a department already struggling with in-custody deaths, mail backlogs and morale problems. The cost of electing an unfit sheriff was paid not just in dollars but also in public confidence.
This is the fatal flaw of the “elect your sheriff” model. It assumes voters have the same access to information as a hiring committee, when in reality, the office requires deep administrative experience, a record of integrity and the temperament to manage hundreds of employees and millions in public funds. Elections reduce that complex hiring decision to a popularity contest shaped by slogans, mailers, donor lists and how popular the folks above you on the ballot are.
San Mateo is hardly an outlier. Santa Clara, San Francisco and Los Angeles have all faced their own sheriff department crises in recent years. The pattern isn’t partisan or regional. It’s structural.
Yet every major city in California, even those that dwarf the collective population of San Mateo County, for example, San Francisco and Los Angeles, select their top law-enforcement officers through appointment largely without incident. Background checks and public hearings help city managers, mayors and commissions weed out bad candidates; and if their relationship breaks down, they can be replaced. Sheriffs, by contrast, can only be removed through resignation, recall or (as San Mateo just demonstrated) a multimillion-dollar legal battle followed by a constitutional workaround.
County boards of supervisors are already elected by the public. By transferring appointment power to them, voters gain the direct benefits of election without the risk of an unqualified or politically entangled individual slipping through the cracks. The process would look more like hiring a police chief and less like electing a mascot.
If we’re serious about restoring trust in law enforcement, we have to start with how we choose its leaders. Binder himself, in his first remarks as sheriff, spoke about the need to “stabilize the organization” and rebuild credibility. The irony is that the process that brought him in, an appointed search with interviews and public forums, is exactly the one that should be standard from the start.
We should view San Mateo’s chaos as a costly civics lesson for the nation as a whole; a reminder that these are executive decisions, not political ones, and we should treat them as such.
Eugene M. Hyman is a retired Santa Clara County Superior Court judge.