Tuesday, June 11, 2019

[Contra Costa County] Mother of Walnut Creek police shooting victim calls for changes in the way cops handle mental illness

Hundreds attended a vigil in Walnut Creek Saturday to remember Miles Hall, who was killed by Walnut Creek police officers after his family called 911


Blog note: this article references Santa Clara County and Contra Costa County grand jury reports.
When Taun Hall called 911 last Sunday, she thought police could help subdue her son Miles, a 23-year-old who suffered from mental illness and was in a state of extreme agitation. She did not expect the 23-year-old would end up dead.
Speaking out publicly for the first time since the police shooting that killed her son, Taun Hall vowed to hundreds of family, friends, and community members gathered at a vigil Saturday night that Miles Hall’s death “would not be in vain.”
She said the family would channel their grief into challenging what she described as a broken system of dealing with suffering from mental illness — one in which police encounters with those suffering from mental illness too often end in death.
“I felt like I was on a journey to save this boy’s life. We tried everything we could over the last three years,” Taun Hall said. “Unfortunately, we had to use police resources and they failed him. The system failed him.”
The family and their supporters have called for transparency in law enforcement investigations into the officer-involved-shooting that killed Miles Hall, and an assessment of how the Walnut Creek Police Department trains officers and works with mental health professionals to deescalate crises involving those suffering from mental illness.
A Change.org petition titled “Remember Miles” calls for the department to “amend their protocol regarding critical incident calls involving mentally-ill subjects,” provide every officer with crisis intervention training, and review its use-of-force guidelines.
“I always knew deep down inside, Miles was here for a different calling,” Taun Hall said Saturday. “There is going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of training, and a lot of change.”
The Love Not Blood Campaign, a San Jose-based grassroots organization started by Cephus “Uncle Bobby X” Johnson — the uncle of BART shooting victim Oscar Grant — has joined the Hall family in their efforts.
Johnson spoke at the vigil Saturday, imploring the educated suburban professionals who make up much of the Walnut Creek community to use the platform afforded to them by their relative affluence to push local government officials into making changes.
“We have an opportunity, with this crowd here, to truly bring systemic change and to put the issue of mental health on the platform where it should be,” he said.
There are no official statistics on how many fatal police shootings involve victims suffering from mental illness. But several high-profile incidents have drawn attention to the issue in recent years, including a December shooting in Redwood City in which police officers killed 33-year-old middle school teacher Kyle Hart after his wife called 911 to say Hart was attempting to take his own life.
In Santa Clara County, a grand jury report found that nearly 40 percent of officer shootings between 2013 and 2017 involved someone who was mentally ill.
Nationwide, studies have found that people with mental illness are at least seven times more likely to be killed by police than the rest of the population — and that as many as one in four fatal police encounters involve people suffering from mental health issues.
In Walnut Creek, some attendees at the vigil, as well as a local mental health professional, suggested that Hall, who is black, faced a heightened risk of being killed by police. Across the US, black men are more likely to have fatal encounters with police than any other group, including the mentally ill.
“A person like Mr. Hall, who has a mental health condition and who is African-American, is at highest risk,” Gigi Crowder, executive director of Contra Costa’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said Saturday.
Though a 2015 state law set minimum standards for police training in behavioral health, experts say that the amount of training and the tactics adopted by different agencies for deescalating crisis varies widely among jurisdictions.
A 2017 Contra Costa grand jury report found that only about 30 percent of officers in the county have taken crisis intervention team training, a 32-hour course that instructs officers how to recognize someone who is suffering from a mental illness and resolve standoffs in a nonviolent way.
In an interview, Walnut Creek Police Chief Tom Chaplin said the city’s officers have daily experience in diffusing potentially volatile situations involving people in crisis. In the incident that resulted in Miles Hall’s death last week, he said, officers had no choice but to open fire.
“We responded to the situation and to help in any way we could,” Chaplin said. “Unfortunately, we were required to use deadly force.”
“Everybody involved his heartbroken for the family,” Chaplin added. “We’re members of the community. This is a tragedy and not the outcome any of us wanted.”
According to the police department, officers encountered Hall after responding to several 911 calls, including from Taun Hall, about a man who was reportedly threatening his grandmother in her home on Sandra Court. Taun Hall told dispatch that her son suffered from “mental health problems,” and was threatening the family with a metal pole, police said.
When officers arrived on the scene, they found Hall holding what police described as a metal crowbar. (At the vigil Saturday, Taun Hall described the object her son was holding as a “garden tool.”)
According to the police department’s account of the incident, the officers ordered Hall to drop the crowbar, but he ignored the commands and ran at them with the bar in hand.
One officer fired less-than-lethal bean bags, police said, but failed to subdue Hall, who continued to run toward the officers. At that point, police said, two officers fired their handguns.
The Contra Costa County District Attorney is conducting an investigation into the incident, in addition to the department’s own internal review.
Chaplin said Friday that the DA’s probe is expected to conclude this week, at which point he said police would release body cam footage of the incident.
He reiterated Saturday that the footage would show why the use of lethal force was necessary.
“It will become self-evident that officers were dealing with a very short period of time,” Chaplin said. “There are situations where there are opportunities to talk to people and negotiate. That wasn’t the case in this tragic event.”
At Saturday’s vigil, as the crowd raised candles in the gathering darkness, Miles Hall’s friends, neighbors and relatives remembered him as bright, caring, curious young man who was like a “big brother” to many.
The event drew many of the young man’s former classmates from Las Lomas High School, as well as teachers and parents from Parkmead Elementary, the public school in a leafy, older neighborhood near downtown where Hall grew up — and where he died.
On Friday, Walnut Creek police identified the five officers involved in last Sunday’s shooting as Officer Tammy Keagy, Sgt. Holley Connor, Officer KC Hsiao, Officer Matt Smith, and Officer Melissa Murphy.
Connors, a 12-year veteran of the department, was one of four Walnut Creek officers involved in the 2012 fatal shooting of 22-year-old hairdresser Anthony Banta Jr.
Police have not identified which of the five officers discharged their weapons at Miles Hall. All five officers have been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates the shooting.
Walnut Creek Police Lt. Andy Brown said Saturday that all of the city’s officers annually attend Crisis Intervention Behavioral Health training, which is offered through the state Commission on Police Officers Standards and Training.
Three of the officers involved in the shooting attended the training in May, while the sergeant on the scene is on the department’s crisis negotiation team, Brown said. Another officer, a 17-year veteran, had recently been on special assignment with a Mental Health Evaluation Team. 
“In rapidly and dynamically changing circumstances, officers are required to make split second decisions to protect themselves and others from imminent threat of death or serious injury,” Brown said.
June 9, 2019
East Bay Times
By Martha Ross


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