By Ken Epstein

The Oakland City Council has approved a $360,000 settlement with former City Councilmember Wilson Riles Jr., who filed a lawsuit alleging that the city and Oakland Police Department violated his civil rights for throwing him facedown to the ground and arresting him when he went to a city office to complain about a zoning issue.

A City Councilmember from 1979 to 1992, Riles was 73 when the incident occurred in 2019. He filed a federal lawsuit in 2020, represented by Oakland civil rights attorney Walter Riley.

Riles was arrested at the city’s Zoning Department as he expressed his frustration about the ongoing obstacles thrown in his path in a years-long dispute with staff of the city’s Planning Department over the use of a sweat lodge to conduct Native American ceremonies in the backyard of the house where he and his wife live in Oakland.

He said the arrest occurred after he told a Zoning Department employee that the building permit they wanted and other requirements they were demanding of him were not part of the building code. He asked the employee to look at the building code, but the employee refused.

“I raised my voice and asked him to get a supervisor to talk to me,” he said. “That’s when they called the police. A Black man raising his voice should not be a threat to anyone in the city,” and is not a sufficient reason to call the police to have someone arrested, he said.

As he was leaving the office, Riles was arrested on charges of obstructing a public officer and battery of a police officer. However, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges.

The city’s settlement with Riles comes out of the millions of dollars the city set aside “to pay for bad police actions,” he said.

“I don’t believe this is justice. The city made a financial decision,” he said, figuring it was cheaper to settle than to hire outside lawyers and run the risk that Riles would win more at a trial.

“They are not going to look at their policy, they are not going to look at retraining their police officers, nor are they admitting they’ve done anything wrong,” said Riles.

Riles has a second state lawsuit against the city to demand relief from the city’s use of building code and an attempt to put a lien on his home to stop his sweat lodge. While many neighbors were supportive, officials acted on the complaints of one or two neighbors.

“They immediately assumed that we need to be shut down,” he said. “They came out here and looked for every kind of violation, including threatening property liens. The Zoning Department enforces these kind of class/race restrictions in this city, and they get away with it.”

“There’s a long history here,” Riles continued.  “Reparations should be paid for the way Black people were forced out of West and East Oakland, often enforced by the Zoning Department.”

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