Los Gatos Hate Crimes Meeting Takes Unexpected Turn

LOS GATOS, CA — The Los Gatos Town Council Tuesday intended to discuss the recent rise in hate crimes aimed at Asians and Asian Americans, but its meeting turned into an unexpected gripe session by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The meeting took place a week after someone shoved a woman of Filipino descent to the ground while she walked in Los Gatos and told her to "go back to [expletive] China." It was the latest in a rising spate of hate crimes and incidents targeting Asian Americans in the Bay Area and around the country.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen and other community leaders ran the council through the definitions of hate crimes and hate incidents and discussed the recent trend in hate crimes and how the public should respond when witnessing a hate crime.

But when Mayor Marico Sayoc opened the forum to public comment, she didn’t hear what she anticipated.

Several people said they had been discriminated against or felt unsafe because they were wearing Trump apparel. One speaker, who identified herself as the local chapter lead for ACT for America, an anti-Muslim advocacy group, asked where the council was getting its data regarding hate crimes and said she had seen different information on OANN and The Epoch Times — both far-right media outlets that have repeatedly peddled conspiracy theories and misinformation. Another person said they had been attacked for not wearing a mask.

A speaker also accused the council of “pushing the narrative of racism,” which was the “real hate crime,” and added that it created division, comparing the situation to the behavior of the German government during the Holocaust. That false equivalence caused one of the panelists, Rabbi Melanie Aron, who has a Jewish congregation in Los Gatos, to respond that she was “shell shocked.”

“I want to speak not only for myself but for the entire Jewish community to say how appalling it has been to us to hear these false equivalencies of the experience of Jews during the Hitler regime,” Aron said. Sayoc then apologized to Aron.

The meeting “did not go as I anticipated, and it was extremely difficult to listen to the false equivalences used last night,” Sayoc said in an email to Patch Wednesday. Sayoc also serves as president of the Cities Association of Santa Clara County.

“Even though these conversations are difficult, they are needed, and I am not dissuaded,” she added.

“We are committed to ensuring that Los Gatos is NOT a place where hate, in any form, is welcome,” the town of Los Gatos said in a statement posted to Twitter Wednesday morning. "Los Gatos does not tolerate intimidation, hate speech, violence, brutality, or injustice in any form."

Councilmembers agreed that all should feel welcome in Los Gatos regardless of their political beliefs. Some pushed back on what they had heard.

“I don’t want to hear false equivalencies about indoctrination,” said Councilmember Maria Ristow. “I don’t believe when someone tries to tell me that masking is political — it’s science.”

Councilmember Matthew Hudes suggested that the town work with schools to better educate people on recognizing the root causes that lead to hate and division. “It’s clear from listening to comments that there is a difficulty in people objectively understanding bigotry and where it comes from,” Hudes said. “There’s a lot of work in this public expression, but also training minds to recognize when this prejudging is occurring, when false equivalency is apparent, when a news source is not based on facts at all.”

Sayoc's intent in putting the issue on the agenda was to allow those in the shadows to come forward and for the community to let them know that their fears are validated, she said. But after hearing the comments, it was clear to Sayoc that people in Los Gatos don’t feel safe, and “we have lots of work to do.”

“It is absolutely evident that we need to actually listen to one another and stop talking over each other, and making presumptions that because we stand a certain way, we look a certain way or we may speak a certain way, that we come from a certain political ideology that is trying to indoctrinate the other,” she said.