The Oakland City Council Public Safety Committee met on November 18, 2025, to discuss several major agenda items, including a performance audit of police emergency response times, a report on domestic violence services, a crime trends update, and a controversial contract with Flock Safety for surveillance technology. The meeting began at 6:05 p.m. and included extensive public comment, with over 200 registered speakers for the Flock item alone. Chair Wong set ground rules for respectful dialogue and limited public comment to one minute due to the volume of speakers.
And about 10 to 15 minutes. Good evening and welcome to the public safety committee meeting for today, November 18th, 2025. The time is now six, six oh five p.m. and this meeting has come to order. Before taking roll up, provide instructions on how to submit a speaker's card for items on this agenda. If you are here with us in chambers and you would like to submit a speaker's card, please fill one out and turn it to a clerk representative. Your right, my left, before the item is read into record. Online speaker requests were due 24 hours prior to this meeting. The meeting came to order at 6 05 p.m. Speaker cards would no longer be accepted 10 minutes after that meeting after the meeting has begun, making that time 6 15 p.m. With that, we will now proceed to take roll. Councilmember Brown. Present. Thank you, Councilmember Five. Thank you, Councilmember Houston. Give me one second. Councilmember Houston, please unmute yourself. He's excused. And Chair Wong. Here. We have three members presence. One excuse Houston. Before we begin, Chair, do you have any announcements? Yes, I do have some announcements. Um this has been a really really difficult week, especially last week for the city of Oakland. We had two campus shootings. Um we lost um the great John Beam, and uh he was someone who was just who gave back so much to this community and had could have gone to coach to professional NFL teams, uh, really, but he actually chose to stay here local uh teaching football at Skyline at Laney College, a really uplifting disadvantaged youth, black and brown youth to give them an opportunity. Um and so um this this is part of our charge as public safety is to really look at the the gun violence issues um that have plagued our city for the last week. Um beyond that, I also just want to recognize that we have some pretty contentious items on the agenda later tonight. Um, I want to just make sure that the dialogue is respectful on both sides. I do not want anybody in the audience jeering each other, none of that. Um, and uh please just um I will, if I must use my authority as the chair of this meeting to ask people to be removed. You will be given three warnings, and after that, I will ask security to remove remove you if you cannot uh uh maintain a respectful um dialogue. And this goes again for both sides of those of you on the debate since I know there are very strong feelings on either either side. Um, and uh with and yes, the other thing I want to just uh make clear is uh public comment will be limited to one minute. I know that will be disappointing, but we legally need to get through all of the public comments, all the public commenters that come have come forward. Clerk, how many do we have? At least 200, right? And so in order for this meeting to proceed in a way where um my fellow council members and myself and staff can actually have a dialogue also with the the staff, we're going to limit it to one minute. So please do modify your planned comments uh thus. Thank you. Thank you. And now we're proceeded to item one. There are no minutes to be approved as this is a special meeting. Item two, determination schedule outstanding committee items, also known as your pending list, and you do have four speakers for this item. Okay, let's go back to announcements. It has been requested for the chair to go back to council announcements and councilmember. Yes, I will also be revising the order of the um of the items. I just want to recognize again staff's time, including staff from the auditor's office and the Department of Violence Prevention, who do not need to stay through the entirety of the of tonight's debate. That incurs overtime costs and other costs to the city that we do not want to have happen.