Undersheriff Dan Perea, who by law and custom should have been the natural interim leader, was dismissed from serious consideration
by Marvin Ramírez –
November 14, 2025 – San Mateo County has crossed a line it cannot uncross. With the appointment of Ken Binder as sheriff — installed through a process controlled entirely by the Board of Supervisors — the county has replaced the will of the voters with the will of five elected officials. The Board may call the process “transparent” and “participatory,” but no amount of community forums or multilingual outreach can erase the reality: the public was invited to speak, not to choose.
This appointment does more than fill a vacancy. It rewrites the meaning of the sheriff’s office itself. In California, the sheriff is intentionally not a political appointee. The office exists outside the control of boards and mayors so that no law-enforcement chief becomes an extension of political power. That safeguard has now been breached.
Binder — a seasoned law-enforcement leader from Santa Clara County — may very well bring order, but he arrives without the mandate that gives a sheriff legitimacy: the people’s vote. The Board’s decision ensures that the county will go nearly five years without a sheriff chosen by its own residents. That is not stability. It is disenfranchisement dressed up as reform.
Supervisors congratulated themselves as they appointed Binder. They spoke of “a new spring,” “a new beginning,” and “a moment of unity.” They applauded the public forums, the questions submitted, the meetings held in multiple languages. But one truth remains unspoken: the community was never given the power to decide.
Public comment is not democracy. A multilingual website is not democracy. A forum streamed on Zoom is not democracy.
Democracy is the ballot box — and the ballot box was bypassed.
The Board emphasizes that Binder’s qualifications justify their decision. But qualifications are not the issue. Legitimacy is. Even the most qualified sheriff must derive authority from the governed, not from political appointment.
Equally concerning is the unmistakable effort to wipe clean any continuity with the prior administration. Undersheriff Dan Perea, who by law and custom should have been the natural interim leader, was dismissed from serious consideration. Now, under Binder, his future is uncertain. That exclusion reveals something deeper: a deliberate clearing of the deck, a reshuffling of power, and a restoration of the same internal alliances that Sheriff Corpus once challenged.
Independence — the cornerstone of the sheriff’s office — has been replaced with dependency. Binder begins his term tied not to the electorate but to the Board that appointed him, the same Board he will one day be expected to scrutinize or resist when circumstances demand it. That structural tension is exactly what the Constitution sought to avoid. Now, it has been locked into place.
Supporters of the process insist that the public was engaged at every step: 7,600 website visits, hundreds of questions, dozens of speakers. Yet none of it was binding. None of it replaced the power of the vote. And none of it restores the principle the Board has now severed — that the sheriff belongs to the people, not to politicians.
San Mateo County now faces a sobering reality: the shield of constitutional independence around the sheriff’s office has been pierced. A precedent has been set that future boards may use whenever an elected sheriff becomes inconvenient or politically undesirable.
This editorial is not about Ken Binder the man. It is about the method that installed him. The county’s democratic order has been weakened, not strengthened, by a process that may have been open to the eye but closed to the will of the people.
And so we pose a question that every resident of San Mateo County must confront:
If the people cannot choose their own sheriff, what other offices will soon be declared too important, too urgent, or too “crisis-ridden” to trust to voters?
This is not the restoration of faith that the Board promises. It is the quiet erosion of electoral power — the beginning of a new political norm in which democratic inconvenience justifies democratic override.
Let us be clear: The sheriff is not an administrative hire. The sheriff is the people’s guardian of justice. And when the people are denied the right to choose that guardian, something far more important than a single office is lost.
What has been wounded is not simply a process.
What has been violated is not only a tradition.
What has been ignored is not merely a vote.
What has been broken is the very foundation of local democracy.
If San Mateo County is to repair that foundation, the path is unmistakable: return the sheriff’s office to the ballot and restore the people’s authority. Public comment cannot replace public consent. And no amount of applause in the Board chambers will drown out this truth:
Democracy begins with the voter — and it dies when the voter is replaced.
