Civil Rights Attorney John Burris and parents of Miles Hall to give public statements and take questions following the anticipated release of the Contra Costa DA's Investigation and Report on Friday May 7.

The Contra Costa District Attorney's Office (DA) informed the Hall family earlier this week that they have concluded their investigation into the police shooting of Miles Hall, son of Scott and Taun Hall of Walnut Creek, CA who was killed by Walnut Creek Police Officers on June 2, 2019.

Members of the DA's office said they will be releasing their report to the family and to the public tomorrow morning, Friday May 7, 2021

Burris and the Halls will be speaking to the press and a group of supporters on Friday May 7 at 1 pm in front of Walnut Creek City Hall. Community members will be there to show their support for the Halls and to continue to call for justice and accountability in the death of Miles Hall.

WHO:

Attorney John Burris, Scott and Taun Hall, parents of Miles Hall, Gigi Crowder, Executive Director of NAMI Contra Costa, and members of the FOSATH (Friends of Scott, Taun, and Alexis Hall) community, as well as family members and supporters of other victims of police violence in Contra Costa County

WHEN: FRIDAY MAY 7. 2021 at 1:00 PM

WHERE: Outside of Walnut Creek City Hall 1666 N. Main Street, Walnut Creek, CA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Release Date: Thursday, May 6, 2021 9 PM PST

Hall Family Media Contact: Patty Mitchell, mobile (408) 429-4032, admin@justiceformileshall.org

Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office To Release Investigation Report. Doesn’t Charge Officers Involved in the Death of Miles Hall, Killed by Walnut Creek Police June 2, 2019

Walnut Creek CA---

The Contra Costa District Attorney's Office (DA) has concluded their investigation into the police shooting of Miles Hall, son of Scott and Taun Hall of Walnut Creek, CA and will be releasing their report on Friday May 7. According to the Hall family attorney, John Burris, the DA has decided not to charge the officers involved in the death of Miles Hall.

Burris and the Halls will be speaking to the press on Friday May 7 at 1 pm in front of Walnut Creek City Hall. Community members will be there to show their support for the Halls and to continue to call for justice and accountability in the death of Miles Hall.

Taun Hall, Miles’ mother said, “After nearly two long years of waiting anxiously for the conclusion of what we had hoped would be a thorough, unbiased, factually accurate investigation, we learned that there will be no justice and no accountability for the indefensible actions that resulted in our son’s death -- at least not today.”

The City of Walnut Creek and the District Attorney of Contra Costa are out of sync with the rest of California and the rest of the country when it comes to ensuring accountability in police practices and policies, especially as pertains to responding to mental health crisis calls.

Taun Hall added, “We are heartbroken, yet still determined to fight for justice for Miles and for everyone who has been harmed by police brutality and denied justice in a system that stigmatizes and criminalizes people with mental illness, especially when they are Black and Brown.”

Since Miles death in June of 2019, the Hall family has worked tirelessly to advocate for non-police response to calls for help when someone is in a mental health emergency. Currently, the “Miles Hall Lifeline Act”, Assembly Bill 988 is making its way through the California legislature to fund an alternative to 911 for calls for help that do not need a police response. The Miles Hall Lifeline Act will save lives and decriminalize individuals who need help, not handcuffs.

With the decision not to charge the officers who killed Miles with a crime, the Contra Costa County DA’s office has reinforced the dangerous and stigmatizing idea that those living with mental illness, especially if they are people of color, are the criminals and that violence and gun fire are appropriate responses to their calls for help.

The Hall family is calling on the California Attorney General and the US Department of Justice to do their own investigation into the killing of Miles Hall. Miles should be alive today. The Hall family fully anticipates, given the decision not to charge or discipline the officers, that the Contra Costa DA’s report is inaccurate, inadequate, and is not what justice looks like.

John Burris, attorney for the Hall family said, “Given DA Becton’s decision not to charge these officers in Miles' death, the next step for the Hall family will not be an easy one, but it will be to ask California’s new Attorney General, Rob Bonta, and the new AG with the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, to step in and review this case. We are not finished fighting for justice and accountability in the killing of Miles Hall.”

Please read the full statement from the Hall Family here.

#MilesHall

#PoliceAccountability

#Justice

#BlackLivesMatter

#MentalIllnessIsNOTaCrime

#HelpNotHandcuffs

Feb 25, 2021

Statement of Scott and Taun Hall, parents of Miles Hall, regarding Records Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 24, 2021

Hall Family Media Contact:hallfamily@justiceformileshall.org

Statement Scott and Taun Hall, parents of Miles Hall, Regarding Records Release

Walnut Creek CA--- “The Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office inspector reports documenting officers' accounts of the shooting confirmed what we already knew: that the officers who shot and killed our son, Miles Hall, acted recklessly and should be criminally charged. What is additionally distressing are the officers' fantastical, distorted accounts of the incident that took Miles' life.

We are grateful that the events before, during, and after the shooting were documented via the officers' body cameras and other video footage as well as by eyewitnesses. Otherwise, the community and our family might never have had such clear evidence of the truth: that Miles posed no threat to officers as he attempted to run past them toward the safety of his home, and that the officers fired lethal weapons recklessly and with wanton disregard for his life.

We feel strongly that Miles' dual status as a young man in the throes of a mental health crisis and as a Black man made him particularly vulnerable to police violence on June 2, 2019. Miles needed care and compassion that day, but instead, he was met with lethal force.

Officers flouted their responsibility to de-escalate at the scene and turned to gunfire instead of following Walnut Creek Police Department protocols for interactions with people in a mental health crisis. Further, these officers did not follow their plan and the assignments given by the lead officer.

It has been nearly 21 months since Miles was killed. We are concerned both with the excruciatingly slow pace of the investigation and with the integrity of the original lead investigator who managed the case and oversaw the collection of inspector reports: Barry Grove.

We are aware that Mr. Grove has made racially charged statements on social media, which has undermined our faith in his ability to carry out his duties equitably and appropriately. We also understand that Mr. Grove is no longer assigned to the investigation of the police shooting of our son.

We look to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office to ensure that a thorough, unbiased, factually accurate investigation has ensued since, and we anxiously await completion of the review.

We request that the investigation into Miles' death conclude no later than March 31, 2021. It is our fervent hope that justice will soon be served, so that in due time we may be able to focus more fully on healing and continuing to honor the life of our beloved son.”

For more information, including video of what happened on June 2, 2019, please go to www.justiceformileshall.org

Jan 26, 2021

FOSATH Public Comment for Special City Council Meeting: Listening Sessions Read Out

Updated: Jul 13, 2023

Link to Special City Council Meeting Agenda for Tuesday January 26, 2021
Jason Seals & Associates Report

I am speaking on behalf of Friends of Scott, Alexis, and Taun Hall (FOSATH), a group of citizens who came together to ask the city to make changes after Miles Hall was killed by Walnut Creek police while in the midst of a mental health crisis.

In October of 2019, FOSATH conducted a large community forum, to share our grief over Miles’s death and to hear what our community wanted to do to address this tragedy.

During this session we heard about unequal treatment based on race in our community, and the profound ways in which Miles’s death impacted so many of our neighbors.

While the idea of community listening sessions to address the harm and subsequent damage to trust resulting from Miles's killing had been presented to the City by FOSATH before that October, the interest in pursuing these sessions in collaboration with the City was only strengthened by what we heard and experienced during our community forum.

We continued to push City leadership to create Listening Sessions, feeling that a city-wide effort would be beneficial for City leaders to listen to citizens and neighbors talk freely, outside of the strict limits of public comment periods, about their experiences with racism and law enforcement responses to mental health crises in Walnut Creek. To deeply listen and not defend, and from that listening, make substantive changes that start to make Walnut Creek a safer place and create a culture of belonging, accountability, equity, and healing.

FOSATH is proud to have initiated this effort and to have worked in often difficult collaboration with the City laying groundwork for rebuilding trust in our community, particularly for those most affected by mental illness and racism.

We are grateful that the City dedicated time and resources to conduct these Listening Sessions. The Jason Seals & Associates report is for the most part comprehensive and contains recommendations which could be profoundly helpful if made actionable. We are pleased that the Listening Sessions lifted up voices that are not often heard. We particularly note that the Listening Sessions reinforced the need for 24/7 mental health crisis support. We appreciate the City Council’s leadership in continuing to advocate for the crucial services that will help ensure that what happened to Miles never happens to another person in Walnut Creek.

In addition to the call for more robust mental health crisis support, we wish to highlight the following key themes and insights from the consultants’ report:

The need for an increased willingness by City leadership to address the needs of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color.
A more explicit recognition of systemic issues that lead to racial bias and a lack of real racial equity and justice.

We also wish to draw attention to the following analysis and recommendations from the consultants’ report:

Following recent events, there is a growing distrust among some community members, City leadership, and law enforcement. Viewing these community members as a ‘vocal minority’ and discounting their voices perpetuates the marginalization of these community members and also neglects the impact this distrust has had on the collective tone of Walnut Creek.
Keys to rebuilding trust are transparency, ownership, and community building.
It is critical that City and WCPD leadership take a position that acknowledges the existence of systemic racism in our city and society and how it appears in the form of implicit/explicit bias, the disproportionate treatment of minoritized racial/ethnic groups, and the social inequities correlated with rates of crime, arrests, and imprisonment.

We anticipate the City will commit to taking deliberate action on the recommendations of the Jason Seals and Associates Report. We hope that your process of creating and prioritizing those actions will follow the report’s strong recommendation to include voices from across our community to co-create and implement real change. According to the report, it is critical to success to include the incoming Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, the Chief Community Advisory Board, FOSATH, members of WCPD, and others.

FOSATH and the City agree that Miles’s death was a tragedy. But we still disagree on responsibility and accountability for his tragic killing. We feel that we have divergent narratives regarding Miles’s death, specifically around police accountability, the timing of officers being returned to active duty, and the need to improve police use-of-force policies and training.

The Listening Sessions, and subsequent actions taken by City leadership as a result of this report, could provide a chance to recalibrate our relationship and for the City to rebuild trust with the community. We are encouraged to see the potential for movement.

We welcome you to join in a meaningful partnership with the Miles Hall Foundation to create positive initiatives that the City can support, champion, and help lead as you do with other non-profit organizations working for the good of the community.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Hall family for their loving persistence in protecting families from the painful loss of future Miles Halls. Thank you Taun, Scott and Alexis Hall for turning pain into purpose.

In closing, we pause to honor the life of Miles Hall by saying his name. MILES HALL!

Link to Special City Council Meeting Agenda
Jason Seals & Associates Report
www.zoom.us webinar ID: 924 8023 4644 / Passcode: 598367