Making an In-Person Public Comment at An Upcoming Council Meeting
Council welcomes public comments at each regularly scheduled Monday evening Council meeting.
If you are interested in speaking at a Cleveland City Council, please read the revised rules and procedures for public comments and fill out the online form below.
Submitting a Registration to Speak
Anyone who is interested in addressing Cleveland City Council at a public meeting must register with City Council prior to that meeting.
Registrations may be submitted:
- By using the online form below
- In person at Cleveland City Hall, Room 220, 601 Lakeside Avenue NE. Paper forms are available to register.
- By downloading this form, filling it out, and emailing it to publiccomment@clevelandcitycouncil.gov or dropping it off at Council offices.
Registration Periods
Registrations will ONLY be accepted between Noon on Wednesday and 2:00 pm on the same day as a regularly scheduled Monday evening Council Meeting.
Council allows no more than 10 people to comment at its regularly scheduled Monday night meetings. Registration will close as soon as the first 10 people sign up. Each registrant will be allotted 3 minutes to speak.
Registrations will only be accepted for making comments at the next regular meeting; registrations for any future meeting will not be accepted until the Wednesday before the meeting. Early, incomplete, or false registrations will be rejected.
Notice of Registration
If your registration is successful, you will be notified by email or phone.
Accommodations
If you need assistance due to a language barrier or disability, please let us know at least three (3) days in advance by going here to make a request.
Attending Council Meetings
Cleveland City Council meetings are held in the Council Chamber on the second floor of Cleveland City Hall, 601 Lakeside Avenue, East.
Visitors may park for free at the upper lot behind City Hall after 5:00 pm on days when Council is meeting.
Public Record
Please remember that all registration information and public comments are public records and can be subject to public record requests.
Decorum
Cleveland City Council must maintain orderly, efficient, and productive meetings to ensure the important business of city government is completed. Council has developed a set of rules and procedures that allow the public to be heard in a fair and orderly manner. These rules and procedures apply to all speakers, and Council does not discriminate based on the speaker's identity or viewpoint or the content of the speech. Please read Council's revised rules and procedures for public comments before you register and before you appear before City Council.
Please note: Anyone attending a Cleveland City Council meeting is prohibited from engaging in any action or behavior that substantially interrupts, delays, or disturbs the due conduct of the proceedings of the Council; such conduct includes but is not limited to: handclapping, stomping of feet, whistling, making other loud noises, yelling, or similar demonstrations. Any person who violates any of the above may be immediately removed from the Council Chamber.
Rules for Speakers
- Speakers may not yield their time to other speakers.
- Speakers shall only address the topic they registered to speak about.
- Speakers' comments shall not be frivolous or repetitive.
- Speakers shall not use language that is obscene or likely to produce imminent unlawful action.
- Speakers shall address all comments to the presiding officer.
Prohibited Items
- Signs, posters, banners, placards, or similar items
- Food and drink
Make a Comment In Person at a Council Meeting
To sign up to speak during the registration period (Noon Wednesday through 2:00 pm Monday before Council Meetings) click this button.
You will be notified by email or phone if you are one of the ten people who will speak.
Make a Comment Online
If you would rather submit your comments in writing, please fill out the form below.
Written public comments will be published on this page and delivered to all Councilmembers before the next full Council Meeting after they have been submitted.
Public Comments
Filter By
I am a resident of Cleveland, and am quite glad and relieved to hear that the City Council has voted against renewing the expensive and incredibly invasive Flock contract. However, I'm extremely concerned, due to this company's track record of egregiously violating the fourth amendment rights of Clevelander's specifically and American's in general, that they will not stop recording and collecting our data unless their hardware is physically removed from our streets. If we have no contract with this company, surely the hardware is no longer necessarily right?
I strongly encourage the members of Cleveland City Council to enact legislation to have these cameras removed. Flock will not stop recording simply because they have no contract, and furthermore it is my genuine belief that they will continue recording and storing data so long as their hardware is able to do so, regardless of whether they're "allowed" to or not.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing how things move forward.
Flock Safety markets itself as a public safety tool, but the evidence tells a more complicated story. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have extensively documented how this system enables warrantless tracking of ordinary drivers across thousands of agencies with a single database query. While Flock promotes the technology as a crime-fighting resource, it functions as a nationwide surveillance network that local governments do not fully control once they opt in.
The consequences are not hypothetical. Here in our own region, activists uncovered hundreds of immigration-related queries run through Shaker Heights' Flock database, with law enforcement agencies logging 273 searches listing "immigration" as the reason, 187 of those in January alone. When a community using Flock works directly with ICE, every other community in the network is also sharing data with ICE, whether they want to or not. Closer to home, Cleveland audit logs revealed more than a million searches each month by police nationwide, including federal agencies, and the city itself was compelled to ban immigration searches and implement a reproductive care filter after discovering how the data was being used. In Texas, a Flock-connected officer searched 83,000 cameras nationwide to track a woman suspected of self-administering an abortion.
The Fourth Amendment questions remain actively contested. A lower court in Virginia initially ruled that Flock's pervasive surveillance constitutes an unconstitutional warrantless search, though that ruling was later reversed on appeal. The underlying legal debate is far from settled, and any city adopting Flock today is assuming real legal and constitutional risk on behalf of its residents. The hardware itself poses independent security concerns. Researchers demonstrated that by pressing a button on the back of a Flock camera in a specific sequence, a Wi-Fi access point is created that grants full access to the device. The cameras store hard-coded Wi-Fi credentials transmitted in unencrypted plaintext, and they run on a version of Android that was discontinued in 2021 and carries hundreds of known vulnerabilities. Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi have called on the FTC to investigate Flock Safety for negligently exposing Americans' personal data, noting that Flock does not require its law enforcement customers to use multi-factor authentication. No matter what assurances the company provides, once cameras are installed, the city does not truly control the data they generate.
Studies have also shown that these cameras are disproportionately concentrated in Black and low-income neighborhoods, subjecting residents to surveillance at rates far exceeding those in predominantly white areas. Black community members and leaders and the officials who represent them, should be especially alert to this pattern, not reassured by it.
At least 30 localities have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025, including Cambridge, Eugene, Santa Cruz, and Flagstaff, and that number has continued to grow. In Staunton, Virginia, the city terminated its contract after Flock's own CEO referred to critics as being part of a "coordinated attack" seeking to "defund the police" and "normalize lawlessness" - a statement that reveals a great deal about how the company views the communities it serves. It is also worth noting who funds this company. Flock Safety's most recent funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Founders Fund, two venture firms that have been vocal supporters of the current federal administration and whose politics are well documented. Inviting a corporation with those financial ties into your public safety infrastructure is a decision that deserves serious scrutiny.
Cameras do not prevent crime, and the AI systems built on top of this footage introduce their own risks, including the possibility of manipulated or misidentified images being used as evidence. This technology should not be treated as a neutral public safety upgrade.
I respectfully urge you to prioritize transparency, civil liberties, and genuine community input before committing public funds and public trust to a surveillance system our city cannot truly control.
Submissions are accepted up to 5 hours before a hearing if time slots are available