Tanisha’s Law appears to be headed toward passage at city council in the new year, more than a year after it was first introduced to council and despite opposition from Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration.
The law is named after Tanisha Anderson, who died in police custody in 2014 after her family called 9-1-1 during a mental health crisis.
Her death was one of the incidents that prompted the 2014 Department of Justice investigation of the Cleveland Division of Police and consent decree in 2015.
Tanisha's Law was first introduced at council in November of 2024 to mark the 10-year anniversary of her death.
The administration and members of the safety committee argued for about two hours Thursday over whether a completely new department should be created and if it should wait until a study of 911 calls is completed. Then, Anderson’s uncle, Michael Anderson, reminded council of the incident that led to the hearing.
“I want people to remember how she passed," Anderson said. "She passed stark, butt-naked, 22 degrees cold, on cold concrete. And then she began reciting the Lord's Prayer, asking God to extend some grace and mercy towards the officers who were holding her down. So, I'm here to ask, city hall and the lawmakers here, to extend some mercy and grace towards her.”
The ordinance would create a Department of Community Crisis Response and require the city to hire specially trained dispatchers and licensed social workers who would identify and respond to calls that don’t require a police response, what’s known as a “care response.”
Cleveland Police have specialized crisis intervention officers who respond to mental health calls citywide. That program is a key part of the consent decree and has been celebrated by the independent monitor and federal judge overseeing the consent decree.
Police have also started a pilot program to send “co-responder teams”, a police officer paired with a social worker, to mental health calls. But that program ends this month and it’s unclear whether it will be extended, said community activist and former researcher at Police Matters, Piet van Lier.
“The effectiveness of their work is limited by the how the program is set up, since it's not integrated into the city's infrastructure as it needs to be,” van Lier. said “It's not diverting 911 calls away from police. It's only taking 988 calls.”
The social workers under the pilot program are employed by the social services agency FrontLine Service, while Tanisha’s Law would make them city employees. The co-responder teams usually don’t respond until a day or days after the incident.
Thursday, administration officials defended the crisis intervention and co-responder programs. A memo to council laying out their position described the legislation as “not administratively ripe” while supporting the “spirit” of the law.
The city is planning to complete a “call type analysis” to get a better idea of how many calls would benefit from a non-police response, said Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond.
“We’re also open to the idea of exploring having a care response as well because we do agree that an officer does not need to respond to all situations where someone is in mental crisis,” said Drummond.
The legislation’s co-sponsors, councilmembers Stephanie Howse-Jones, Charles Slife and Rebecca Maurer, were skeptical about whether the administration truly supports moving to the care response model.
In January of 2024, council approved a grant from the federal government that would have paid for the call type analysis, but a company still hasn’t been hired to do the work, said Maurer, who added that initial the administration opposed Tanisha’s Law based on the creation of a new department.
“I proposed ‘What would it look like for a division [instead of a department?] and all of a sudden, for the first time, in November, we got a response back saying the call type analysis is actually the first barrier,” Maurer said. “And so, when the goalposts keep shifting, that is what creates this sense of maybe we're not actually as much on the same page as we keep saying.”
Howse-Jones began working with Michael Anderson and law students at Case Western Reserve University on Tanisha’s Law in 2022. Howse-Jones said she just recently found out the call analysis hadn’t been completed yet.
“I hope that we can get to a place where we can move forward,” Howse-Jones said. “But it has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We haven't been working together. We haven't.”
Initially, the legislation’s sponsors expect a budget of around $800,000 for a stand-alone department. Once it’s up and running, the estimate is around $3 million per year.
Councilmember Michael Polensek told administration officials Thursday that council will move ahead with the legislation in the new year, likely passing something in the first quarter, and asked them to send along any recommended amendments soon.
“The train’s leaving the station, we’re going to take action,” said Polensek. “So, you can either get on board, or you get run over.”
