Vigil honors Chinedu Okobi

Sheriff’s officials have said that Deputy Joshua Wang attempted to stop Okobi for jaywalking.

Video released by the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office showed that after Wang approached Okobi in his patrol car, Okobi crossed the street outside of a crosswalk apparently to get away from Wang.

Several other deputies approached Okobi, Wang deployed a Taser, and the deputies ended up in a violent struggle with Okobi that resulted in his death.

Since then, Okobi’s family sued the Sheriff’s Office and activists have pushed for a moratorium on Tasers, which caused two other law enforcement deaths in the county last year.

They have won some reforms, such as pending revisions to the sheriff’s use of force policy, implicit bias training and equipping deputies with defibrillators.

But the activists say the reforms have not gone far enough and they are concerned with a lack of transparency from the sheriff’s office and other county officials.

“I don’t think there has been anywhere near enough progress,” said Regina Islas, an organizer with the Justice for Chinedu group. “It has been maddeningly slow.”

Islas pointed to a Reuters report that 49 people had died by Tasers in the U.S. last year and three of those were in San Mateo County.

Despite that, she said that she thinks county officials have been reluctant to move forward with reforms and only community pressure — including from Okobi’s sister Ebele Okobi, who is a Facebook executive with a large platform — have led to the modest reforms being implemented.

“There’s never a sense that we are allies, that we have similar concerns and that is extremely frustrating,” Islas said. “This has been a key problem for the entire last year is this absolute intransigence about not being transparent.”

For example, the San Mateo County counsel declined to make a draft use of force policy public, even to the Board of Supervisors, ahead of a meeting about the policy in July.

That policy has yet to be implemented. Islas said that the American Civil Liberties Union Mid-Peninsula chapter has now received a copy and the Sheriff’s Office will receive comments on it over the next few weeks.

“Right now it is imperative that as much as the community as possible give feedback,” she said.