Excerpts:

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, protest movements have pushed big cities to reform their policies on when a police officer can use force. According to the database Mapping Police Violence, homicides by police in America’s thirty largest cities have declined by about thirty per cent since the year before the Ferguson protests. Yet they have not decreased nationwide. In rural and suburban areas, police killings have been on the rise for years, and roughly three-quarters of police homicides now occur in those areas. The killing of Monterrosa received some national media attention, because of the moment in which it occurred. But in Vallejo it was one more in an ongoing litany of police killings.

When Monterrosa was young, the neighborhood where he grew up, Bernal Heights, was largely Black and brown, but as tech companies moved in San Francisco became richer and whiter. Now, Monterrosa’s mother says, their family are the only Latinos on the block. Sean encouraged her to know her rights as a documented immigrant. His mother generally thought that the police were a force for good, but Sean disagreed, saying that they were out to get Black and brown people.

Vallejo, a postindustrial city of a hundred and twenty-two thousand people, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park and for its musicians: E-40, Mac Dre, H.E.R. Its per-capita income is less than half that of San Francisco, and its population is more diverse, split among whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Its police force, however, consists largely of white men who live elsewhere. Since 2010, members of the Vallejo Police Department have killed nineteen people—a higher rate than that of any of America’s hundred largest police forces except St. Louis’s. According to data collected by the anti-police-brutality group Campaign Zero, the V.P.D. uses more force per arrest than any other department in California does. Vallejo cops have shot at people running away, fired dozens of rounds at unarmed men, used guns in off-duty arguments, and beaten apparently mentally ill people. The city’s police records show that officers who shoot unarmed men aren’t punished—in fact, some of the force’s most lethal cops have been promoted.