Editor’s Note: Katie Shapiro was one of two Cypress residents who joined a districting lawsuit that ultimately compelled the formation of single-member districts in the city. She and Dr. Malini Nagpal reported harassment, both online and in-person, following their decision.
By Katie Shapiro
Fear begins in small geographies. Not in grand political theaters or sprawling metropolises, but in meeting rooms with fluorescent lights where voices echo too loudly against bare walls. Fear begins in a Facebook comment deleted after an email arrives with the word “libelous” marked in its verbal flesh. Fear begins when you find yourself awake at 3 a.m., wondering what resources the city might marshal against you, calculating the asymmetry of power between a lone resident and a municipal machine.
I live in Cypress, California, population 50,000, a place too small for most maps that aren’t focused specifically on Orange County. In this small place, I have learned how tyranny operates at its most mundane and therefore most perfect level.
Here is what happens: You attend a city council meeting. You stand at the podium when your name is called. Your three minutes feel both eternal and insufficient as you question the no-bid extension of a trash contract after the company received a 30% rate increase. Later, someone—perhaps the city manager will call you out by name from the dais. Shame will be invoked. Your patriotism toward this small patch of earth will be questioned.
This is how it works in small places. Until someone decides to fight back.
Or perhaps you write something online. A critical observation about a contract handed to a law firm with connections to council members through the Boys & Girls Clubs. Within hours, the city attorney contacts you directly. He doesn’t explicitly threaten a lawsuit, but the word “libelous” appears, and you understand the message as clearly as if it had been painted on your front door.
I deleted my comment not because it was incorrect but because I understood the math: “The city has unlimited resources to fight a lawsuit, but I don’t.” This simple equation governs everything in Cypress. It shapes what questions get asked and which ones die unspoken.
Even when someone claiming to be a city employee sends harassing text messages to your personal phone, targeting you for having spoken at public meetings, you find yourself navigating a labyrinth of indifference. Police officers tell you it’s “impossible” for the sender to be a city employee because they know all of them. The city manager responds only after repeated prompting, his reply perfunctory and dismissive.
What does it mean to live inside this small geography of fear? It means learning to measure your words with the precision of someone defusing a bomb. It means watching others do the same, until public discourse becomes a series of careful gestures signifying nothing.
Yet the strange alchemy of intimidation sometimes fails. Consider the case of Douglas Dancs, the former Public Works Director with 32 years of experience who recently appeared at a city council meeting meant to celebrate City Manager Peter Grant’s decade of service.
“As for the recognition of the city manager,” Dancs said plainly, “in my opinion, the City Council should fire the city manager for cause.”
As he began to explain that his opinion “stems from alleged unlawful acts of misconduct,” the city attorney interrupted him mid-sentence, calling his comments “completely inappropriate” for a public setting.
What followed was a strange choreography of power. Dancs invoked his First Amendment rights and referencing state laws that permit employees to discuss “unlawful acts in the workplace,” the city attorney counter-invoking confidentiality agreements, the mayor offering Dancs the chance to continue while everyone understood he could not.
This is the moment when the small geography of fear reveals its true dimensions. It exists not just in what is said but in what remains unsaid, not just in actions taken but in questions never asked.
Meanwhile, City Manager Grant’s yearly salary and benefits package exceeds $470,000 in a city of 50,000 residents. His contract has been amended to prevent council members from making “disparaging comments” about him and to prohibit his firing three months before or after an election. His spending authority has mushroomed from $25,000 to $50,000, allowing him to approve contracts without public discussion. The city manager can also approve capital improvement projects up to $100,000 without Council approval.
These are facts, documented in public records, reported in local newspapers. They are not libelous statements. They cannot be, because they are true.
But truth exists in an uneasy relationship with power in small geographies. It becomes a kind of quantum particle, observable only under certain conditions, collapsing under direct pressure.
Fear begins in small geographies, but it need not end there. The atomization of fear depends on isolation—on each citizen believing they alone have noticed something wrong, they alone have been singled out.
But what if we were to map the small geography of fear together? What if we recognized that the email I received, the public shaming of George Pardon, the silencing of Douglas Dancs, the retaliation against Councilmember Frances Marquez (who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after facing systematic retaliation for supporting district-based elections)—all exist on the same topographical map?
When Dr. Malini Nagpal and I decided to join the Southwest Voter Registration Project’s lawsuit against Cypress for violating the California Voting Rights Act, we knew the cost would be high. Not just potentially financial, but personal. We challenged a system that, for too long, allowed the city to maintain at-large elections that diluted minority voting power. The council voted 4-1 in closed session to fight our lawsuit, spending approximately $2 million in taxpayer dollars to resist what every other city in similar circumstances had eventually accepted: that district-based elections provide fairer representation for all residents.
Our act of courage, small as it may have seemed at the time, eventually led to district elections and the emergence of new leadership. Mayor David Burke, a UCLA-educated attorney and family man whose qualifications read like a template for ideal public service, has brought a new energy to the position. Yet even with his election, the culture of silencing dissent continues beneath the surface. The machinery of intimidation runs too deep to be dismantled by a single election.
Consider how intimidation works at the local level. It doesn’t announce itself with dramatic gestures. It slips into the room quietly, dressed in procedural language. It says: This comment is potentially libelous. It says: These complaints should not be made in a public setting. It says: Shame on you for questioning volunteers.
The genius of local intimidation lies in its deniability. In its ability to make you question not just your conclusions but your very perception. Did that really just happen? Am I overreacting? Is it worth the fight?
But I’ve learned something important in the years I’ve spent watching Cypress politics unfold. Fear is contagious, yes, it is, but so is courage, like when former Councilmember Frances Marquez continued to question, despite being censured, and having her council salary suspended. Like when Douglas Dancs appeared before the council, knowing the forces arrayed against him. Like when residents continue to show up at meetings, despite knowing their names may be invoked with derision.
These small acts of courage create their own geography, almost like an alternative mapping of our shared civic space.
The true perversion of local governance occurs when those sworn to serve the public interest instead use public resources to shield themselves from accountability. When the machinery built to facilitate democracy is repurposed to suppress it.
When Dr. Nagpal and I visited the Cypress Police Station to report harassment from someone claiming to be a city employee, officers dismissed our concerns as “impossible.” When I followed up, asking to speak with Chief Mark Lauderback, I was told to “go through the chain of command.” City Manager Grant only responded after Mayor Pro-tem Anne Hertz-Mallari intervened on my behalf, twice, and even then, his reply was patronizing and dismissive.
This pattern repeats itself endlessly in our small geography, where accountability evaporates like morning dew under the harsh sun of administrative indifference.
I sometimes wonder what City Manager Grant truly fears. Is it accountability? Transparency? The exposure of whatever “unlawful acts of misconduct” Dancs was prevented from articulating? Or perhaps it’s simpler than that—perhaps what power fears most is the lone voice that refuses intimidation, that keeps speaking even when speaking carries a cost.
Fear begins in small geographies. But perhaps that’s also where it can be most effectively confronted—in city council chambers, on social media, in conversations between neighbors. Perhaps that’s where we remember that in a democracy, however imperfect, power ultimately resides not with those who administer our cities but with those who inhabit them.
For those watching this small drama unfold in Cypress, remember: This isn’t just about one city manager or one small city.
It’s about the space democracy requires to breathe. It’s about what happens when that space contracts. It’s about the distance between the ideal of local government and its sometimes-corrupt reality.
And it’s about the simple, revolutionary act of continuing to speak, even when the small geography of fear suggests silence as the more prudent course.