Chapter 4: It’s Complicated
Then the newspaper article came out.
On September 13, San José Spotlight published a story about campaign-sign theft in Cupertino.
Until that point, community members had been struggling to identify the person whom law enforcement had variously treated as a caller or victim whose information needed protection.
Now he was speaking publicly.
Richard Lowenthal, former mayor of Cupertino, described his campaign-sign investigation.
According to the article as summarized in the draft, Lowenthal said campaign signs supporting J.R. Fruen, Seema Lindskog, and John Tang had been placed with permission and that he had hidden AirTags in signs to catch whoever was removing them. No Scipt for Cupertino
The story landed badly with supporters of three Asian American candidates on the other side: Santosh Rao, Gopal Kumarappan, and Tracy Kosolcharoen.
They believed the coverage gave heavy weight to Lowenthal’s version of events and left readers with the impression that their side was associated with campaign-sign theft.
The Asian homeowner at the center of the midnight police visit found that implication especially strange.
According to the family’s account, he did not even know those candidates.
His involvement in Cupertino politics consisted mainly of wanting people to stop putting signs on private property.
This would have been a remarkably inefficient political conspiracy.
Step one: steal your opponent’s signs.
Step two: put the signs in your own yard.
Step three: complain publicly that the signs are in your yard.
Step four: throw them away.
Step five: somehow forget to meet the candidates you are supposedly helping.
Even by Cupertino standards, the project management needed work.
Supporters of the three candidates asked for additional fact-checking and corrections, according to the draft. They felt their perspective and the homeowners’ complaints about unauthorized signs had received inadequate attention.
At the same time, photos and neighborhood posts relating to the dispute were reportedly disappearing from online platforms.
For the community, frustration shifted from “Who took the signs?” to a much larger question:
Who gets believed?
The comparison that would not go away
The three Asian American candidates and their volunteers had their own stories about missing signs.
Campaign signs cost money. For grassroots candidates with limited budgets, replacing them repeatedly is not trivial.
According to their accounts, they had reported missing signs too.
Gopal Kumarappan’s supporters said that in one instance they had something more concrete than an AirTag location.
They had a photograph.
A resident reportedly photographed someone carrying away Gopal’s signs. The campaign’s supporters believed they identified the person as an organizer associated with a political organization supporting J.R. Fruen.
They contacted law enforcement.
According to their account, officers were not dispatched.
The explanation they say they received was that the person reporting the incident was not the homeowner whose lawn had held the sign.
That rule has a certain bureaucratic elegance.
If Campaign A places a sign on Homeowner B’s property, Campaign A apparently may have paid for the sign, designed the sign, printed the sign, transported the sign, installed the sign, and worried about the sign.
But once the sign touches the lawn, the reporting rights become… complicated.
At least that was how residents understood the initial response.
Then came another development.
According to the draft, police later clarified that the person who placed a campaign sign could also report it stolen.
Santosh Rao had a natural follow-up question.
If that was the rule, why had his volunteers’ complaints produced a different response?
The answer, according to the account:
“It’s complicated. It needs to be handled case by case.”
Ah.
The universal phrase of systems whose rules have suddenly become difficult to put in writing.
Case by case.
Cupertino is full of engineers.
Engineers tend to like deterministic systems.
Input A produces Output B.
When a rule changes depending on circumstances, they want to know the variables.
What is the threshold?
What information triggers dispatch?
Does a photograph count?
Does an AirTag count more?
Does being the homeowner matter?
Does being the person who placed the sign matter?
Does the time of day matter?
Does the jurisdiction matter?
Does the identity of the caller matter?
Nobody in the community could get a clear answer.
And that was precisely why race and political status entered the discussion.
The person whose complaint generated the conspicuous late-night Sheriff’s response was Richard Lowenthal, a White former mayor with longstanding political relationships.
The residents who say they received no comparable response included Asian American candidates, Asian residents, and volunteers associated with them.
Race alone does not tell us why the responses differed.
Political connections alone do not tell us either.
There may be neutral operational explanations.
But when one group repeatedly encounters the closed door and another person appears to receive express service, people eventually start asking who has the premium subscription.
That is the inequity at the center of this story.
The Asian candidates were not asking for Lowenthal to receive less police service.
They wanted to understand why their complaints appeared to receive less.
Santosh Rao, who serves on Cupertino’s Planning Commission, continued raising questions. Commissioner Steven Charf also wanted clarity on several issues described in the draft:
Can someone put a tracking device in a campaign sign placed on another person’s property without that property owner’s knowledge?
Who can report a campaign sign stolen?
What rules determine whether officers respond?
And when Cupertino spends more than $20 million each year on law-enforcement services, are those resources being applied consistently? No Scipt for Cupertino
These are fairly ordinary questions.
That may be what makes the story so strange.
The whole saga began with plastic signs worth relatively little money.
By the end, residents were asking about race, political connections, police discretion, public records, media coverage, property rights, privacy, and government accountability.
Silicon Valley specializes in turning simple things into complicated systems.
Usually there is venture funding involved.
This time, all it took was a yard sign.
The people trying to make sense of the situation included engineers, programmers, planners, homeowners, candidates, immigrants, and longtime residents.
They did what Cupertino people naturally do.
They gathered evidence.
They compared outcomes.
They looked for a rule.
They tried to reproduce the result.
So far, the system has produced one remarkably consistent response:
It’s complicated.
And perhaps that is the perfect slogan for No Script for Cupertino.
A town full of people who spend their careers designing systems has discovered one local system that nobody seems able to document.
The election continues.
The records requests continue.
The questions continue.
And somewhere in Cupertino, a homeowner is probably looking out the window at another campaign sign and thinking:
Maybe I’ll just leave it there until November.
This story is still on-going. Stay tuned to No Script for Cupertino.
This is what’s happening in Cupertino. Our story has no script.