The law was named for Miles Hall, a 23-year-old Walnut Creek man with schizophrenia shot dead by police in 2019. It ordered California to link its 988 mental-health line to 911 by July 1, 2024. Two years past that statutory deadline, the state still hasn't done it.

AB 988 — the Miles Hall Lifeline and Suicide Prevention Act — was supposed to make sure that people in a mental-health crisis could be routed away from armed police and toward trained counselors. But the piece of the law meant to make that seamless, a system that lets 911 and 988 hand calls back and forth, is years overdue. According to an NBC Bay Area investigation, the delay is tangled up in California's separately troubled Next Generation 911 modernization, run by the same agency, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. The upshot: Californians in crisis are still largely reaching 911, and police, when the whole point of the law bearing Hall's name was to give them another door.

Read the statute and the timeline is not ambiguous. AB 988, signed in September 2022, formally names itself the "Miles Hall Lifeline and Suicide Prevention Act." It required the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) to verify — "no later than July 1, 2024" — interoperability "between and across" the 911 and 988 systems, so an operator could transfer a caller from one to the other. That deadline is now more than two years gone.

The stakes are not abstract. California fields roughly 25 million 911 calls a year, and about 30% carry some kind of mental-health component, Narges Dillon — president of the 988 California Consortium and executive director of Crisis Support Services of Alameda County — told NBC Bay Area, whose Investigative Unit first reported the delay. "If we think about even 1% of those callers really being better served transitioning to a 988 center, we're talking about 260,000. Those are real people," Dillon said.

Why the holdup? Cal OES has told lawmakers the 988 transfer technology can't fully advance until the state finishes deploying its Next Generation 911 network — a project NBC Bay Area has documented for two years over cost overruns and misrouted and dropped calls. A recent legislative outcomes review cited by the station found the full 911 rollout could take another four years. In other words, the crisis-line fix is hostage to a bigger IT project that is itself running late.

The money adds to the frustration. Cal OES says it received an initial $7.5 million appropriation for the 988 project in 2022-23 and roughly $29.9 million a year since 2023-24, and had spent about $24.5 million through May 2026. Dillon argues that cash is going to a system "that no one knows what's happening with" rather than to the crisis centers straining under demand. "That lack of accountability I think is concerning at multiple levels," she told the station. Cal OES responded that its 988 technology money is not earmarked for crisis centers — that center funding runs separately through the California Health and Human Services Agency.

In Sacramento, the Steinberg Institute — the nonpartisan behavioral-health advocacy group founded by former Senate leader Darrell Steinberg — has been pressing the same question. "How has California fallen so far behind on progress on a federally mandated program with dedicated funding, broad stakeholder support and overwhelming public need?" the Institute's Tara Eastman asked at a recent hearing, per NBC Bay Area. The group has spent this year lobbying to align the state's 988 funding with actual 988 response; in June it publicly backed an Assembly plan to do exactly that.

Cal OES declined NBC Bay Area's interview request but said in a statement that "every 9-8-8 center can transfer calls to another 9-8-8 center or connect callers directly with a 9-1-1 dispatch center when emergency assistance is needed," and that those connections meet state law. Lawmakers who reviewed the system were unimpressed, finding only "baseline interoperability" that already existed on the legacy technology. An upgraded transfer platform exists, but by Cal OES's own account it is running as a pilot at just one of California's 11 crisis centers.

For Taun Hall, Miles's mother, the delay is measured in more than fiscal years. She has said 911 dispatchers didn't have the tools to get her son the right help in 2019 — and that, six years on, those tools still aren't in place. "Any moment that it is delayed could be a life that is lost, like Miles," she told NBC Bay Area.