Michael Anderson sat near the back of Cleveland City Council’s high-ceilinged chamber, leaning forward with his arm and head on the bench in front of his, trying not to nod off amid the rapid drone of a Monday night meeting in February. He’d come straight from work and was just bone tired.
The friend sitting next to him nudged him. “Mike, did you hear?”
“No, what?” he asked, sitting up.
“It passed.”
While the weary Anderson half-listened, the clerk of council had read aloud descriptions of all the bills on the agenda, then the votes, which had already been cast. And that was it. More than a year after it was introduced, more than 11 years after its namesake had died in police custody, Tanisha’s Law had passed.
“Ten years of hard grinding — it led to that one quiet moment,” Michael Anderson, Tanisha’s uncle, recalled in an interview. “Of course we celebrated later. But in that moment, I felt like I could go home.”
But before he left, the soft-spoken Anderson dutifully rose with a tight-lipped smile for a standing ovation from the council members and many of the people who had worked with him to see his deeply personal mission through. At one time or another, all of them had heard him describe what drove him: the scene relatives had described to him of Tanisha on the ground, half-naked and hand-cuffed, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and asking God to forgive the officers.
In his mind and heart, she would stay there until the law passed, he had said.
A true grassroots movement
Tanisha’s Law accelerates Cleveland’s evolution in handling 911 calls about people in mental health crises, as Tanisha Anderson was when she died in 2014. It establishes a bureau within the city’s Division of Emergency Medical Services and tasks the deputy commissioner with expanding the crisis response system.
The effort to get the bill written and passed was part of a true grassroots movement. It involved some who had been immersed in the issue of crisis response long before they met Anderson, and others who joined when the legislation was seemingly doomed. Some had their own experiences with police and mental health.
They worked independently, then in small groups, then in a broad coalition that formed around Anderson and his determination to build something positive and lasting from tragedy.
Progress was slow and sometimes deeply frustrating. They succeeded because they seized opportunities to learn and to recruit allies, focused on one clear goal and refused to give up. But it all started with one man who never saw himself as an activist until fate issued the challenge.
Why was Tanisha ‘treated like a criminal’?
Michael Anderson was living in North Canton in November 2014. When his sister called at around 1 a.m. on a weeknight, he immediately sensed it was bad news.
“Mike, I think Nee Nee is dead!”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, still groggy.
“They called 911 for the ambulance,” she explained. “Tanisha and the police got to tussling outside. They held her down, and she stopped breathing!”
He dressed and drove straight to the Ansel Road home of his other sister, Tanisha’s mother, Cassandra Johnson. “She was just sitting there, rocking,” he recalled. “She was rocking back and forth, but she wouldn’t talk.”
A family member had called 911 for help with Tanisha, who was 37 and had struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She was home after a six-week involuntary commitment that had ended a few weeks before.
On the night of Nov. 12, 2014, her family called 911 asking for an ambulance to take her back to the hospital. The dispatcher sent police instead.
At first Tanisha agreed to let the officers take her to a hospital, but a struggle ensued; officers and family members later blamed each other for her sudden agitation. Whatever the cause, her family watched in horror as officers cuffed Tanisha and pinned her down on the sidewalk.
By the time a supervisor arrived, Tanisha had been subdued on the cold concrete for at least 21 minutes, according to an investigation. She was not breathing. An ambulance took her to a hospital where she was pronounced dead soon after midnight.
Three weeks later, the U.S. Department of Justice released the report on its 20-month investigation into complaints of excessive force by Cleveland police. Among the findings was a pattern of “unreasonable force against individuals with mental illness,” even when no crime had been reported. Too few officers had received crisis intervention training, and there was no system in place to prioritize sending CIT (crisis intervention team) officers on such calls, the report said.
That lack of training was a key part of the message when the Anderson family held their first press conference just before Christmas. They sat at tables in front of two banners featuring Tanisha’s graduation photo and a poster-sized reproduction of police training standards from the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
“What we don’t understand is why Tanisha was treated like a criminal,” said Michael, who spoke first.
The family had stayed away from protests like those for Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who was gunned down by a police officer just over a week after Tanisha’s death, he said that day, because “that’s not who we are. We’re looking for something else here. We’re looking for solutions. … I believe in my heart that there will be a Tanisha’s Law. I believe in my heart that this situation will be able to help people.”
As the family’s attorney wrapped up the press conference, Cassandra Johnson abruptly decided to speak. Her grief was now coupled with anger, she said. But she was haunted night and day by the sound of Tanisha screaming “Mommy! Mommy, help me!” from the sidewalk.
‘A complicated legal mess’
In early January 2015, about seven weeks after Tanisha’s death, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner said that she had died as a result of being restrained and ruled it a homicide. Soon after that, the Anderson family sued the city and the officers in federal court.
The city settled the suit for $2.25 million in 2017. But it would be another year until a grand jury would consider criminal charges against the officers.
Evidence from the Cleveland Division of Police internal investigation was included in the case file that the division handed off to the county prosecutor — a huge blunder because it violated the officers’ rights. For more than three years, multiple agencies handed the file back and forth, removing material to try to repair the damage. It ultimately landed in the Ohio Attorney General’s office, where a special prosecutor said he’d never seen “such a complicated legal mess.”
In the end, a grand jury cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing. The jurors never saw the Cuyahoga County medical examiner’s determination of homicide. Instead, they saw the results of a review by another county’s medical examiner who blamed Tanisha’s death on a “cardiac event” related to heart disease.
By this time, Cassandra Johnson had asked the family to stop fighting. She had lost all trust in the city and the justice system, and the prolonged grieving was taking a toll. The once happy, funny woman who loved to cook for everyone had stopped laughing and barely ate.
“I’ve never seen somebody’s personality just turn off like that,” Anderson said.
He respected her wishes, but after Cassandra passed away in 2021, he got back to work.
A stranger’s kindness changes everything
There was little in Michael Anderson’s past to suggest that he’d one day receive a standing ovation from Cleveland City Council.
As a teen in Cleveland, Anderson “kind of got lost in the streets,” he said. He was using intravenous drugs by age 15. He did a year in juvenile detention and later, as an adult, two separate prison sentences.
“Even after having kids, that didn’t stop me,” he said. (He has six.) He was in and out of treatment programs until 2007, when he quit again and it stuck. “I got tired of living like that,” he said.
He attended Stark State College in North Canton, and his experience there informed an important part of his strategy when he resumed work on Tanisha’s legacy: finding allies. He always admired his much younger classmates’ enthusiasm, confidence and apparent ease with public speaking and with engaging with strangers.
He started at Cleveland State University, where Tanisha had once studied journalism. Some faculty members and students there helped him rebuild awareness of her death and legislation to require more crisis training for Cleveland police.
Then one day in early 2023, Anderson was driving past the campus of Case Western Reserve University and suddenly thought: law students. Could they help? He parked and started looking fo the law school.
An elderly woman who walked with a limp saw him and asked if he needed help. He explained and the woman said to follow her. She walked him to the office of the Social Justice Institute, which was in the opposite direction she’d been headed but she didn’t mind.
Anderson wishes he had gotten her name to thank her because her kindness that day made all the difference.
‘So much brain power we could put to work on this’
Law professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway is director of Case’s Social Justice Institute but wasn’t in that office the day Michael Anderson showed up. The office administrator emailed the professor.
“I had no idea where it would go or how it would turn out,” Hardaway said in an interview. She and a colleague met Anderson at a coffee shop. Hardaway came away deeply impressed by his quiet tenacity. She had been raised to respect elders, and that was how she saw him, a sage.
In February 2023, Hardaway invited several law school groups to meet Anderson and hear his story. Among the two to three dozen who showed up, filling the mock court room, were Michael O’Donnell and Alexandra Mendez-Diez, members of the Student Legislative Initiative of Cleveland (SLIC), a group formed in 2020 to support local public safety policy initiatives.
They were also among those who stayed after to meet Anderson.
Mendez-Diez was a writer and real estate agent originally from Boston who had started law school at age 41 specifically to work on mental health issues. She told Anderson a story she hadn’t shared with anyone else in Cleveland to that point. She didn’t want to detail it for the public, except to say that she has personal experience with mental health struggles and the justice system.
Soon after the event, members of the student group told Hardaway they wanted to join Anderson’s cause.
O’Donnell and Mendez-Diez organized a meeting of a couple dozen students “to kind of game plan how we wanted to tackle this,” O’Donnell said. “There was so much brain power we could put to work on this, but it was also a massive undertaking to try to coordinate all of those people to be moving in the same direction.”
Over the next several months, students graduated and new ones joined the project. A core of eight to 10 kept everything moving forward. The whole group met monthly, and smaller teams worked in between on specific tasks like learning what crisis response training Cleveland police were already receiving, how the dispatch system functions and what approaches had proven effective in other cities.
Then they presented options to Anderson: a bill focused on police training and co-response; or a more expansive and ambitious bill that would include care response models and remove oversight from the police department.
Anderson chose the latter. “He really was kind of a North Star through the whole thing,” O’Donnell said.
Anderson “always reminded us why we were doing this,” Mendez-Diez said, “that legislation like this had the opportunity to actually save lives.”
They knew little at the time about how many other people were also working, from different directions, on the same goal.
‘When the strands came together’
The 2014 DOJ report that criticized use-of-force practices led to the consent decree, which required comprehensive reform efforts and imposed federal oversight. It’s still in effect. The monitoring team that tracks progress has been largely pleased with the city’s efforts to improve officer training for crisis response.
In 2020, Cleveland police launched a co-response program, which paired a mental health professional with an officer to respond to or follow up on crisis calls. The city expanded the program two years later.
But there was also a growing group of advocates pushing leaders to focus on care response, which relies primarily on professionals or peers (trained people with lived experiences with mental health or substance use issues) instead of police.
By 2023, these advocates had organized under the banner of the Care for CLE Coalition. Members participated, with city officials, in a virtual meeting with the team behind a Tampa, Florida, care response program, visited Cincinnati to learn about another and helped the Cleveland Department of Public Health hire a strategist to guide the city’s plans.
And they successfully pushed for community input into a county-led care response pilot program.
That fall, Professor Hardaway once again played the role of connector, inviting coalition representatives to Case to meet with Anderson and the students. Attending were Josiah Quarles, director of organizing and advocacy for the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) and co-founder of REACH (Responding with Empathy, Access and Community Healing); and Piet van Lier and Bree Easterling from Policy Matters Ohio, which had been advocating for care response since 2021.
“That was when the strands came together,” van Lier said, referring to the loose network that would rally around Tanisha’s Law.
It wasn’t immediately clear how the two groups would work together, Quarles said in an interview for this story, but the potential was there. They agreed to collaborate on a crisis response panel discussion to coincide with the ninth anniversary of Tanisha’s death, which was coming up that November.
“What was important, I think, was that there was some trust earned, that folks were in it for the right reasons,” Quarles said.
Each brought different perspectives and skills to the work.
From left to right, Josiah Quarles, Piet van Lier and Bree Easterling. Credit: Michael Indriolo/Signal Cleveland/CatchLight Local
The son of immigrants with deep community ties on Cleveland’s Near West side, van Lier is a researcher and policy wonk. Much of his career has been focused on studying and promoting ways to improve public education, but he’s also worked on social justice issues such as sentencing reform. He has served on the Cleveland Community Police Commission since 2022.
Quarles, who grew up in Cleveland and Shaker Heights, is a seasoned activist who said he’s had police draw guns on him six times in his life. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, he started researching ways to limit police involvement in situations in which they’re as likely to do harm as good. He reached out to crisis response experts in other cities, then organized like-minded local people to attend and speak up at public meetings.
Cleveland native Easterling is a military veteran and self-described “kin defender” with their own experience with police violence. They joined Policy Matters around the time that the organization partnered with NEOCH and its Homeless Congress on a survey of unsheltered people about their experiences with first responders. Centering ”people that are closer to the issue than us” is a priority in their work and activism.
After planning the panel with Anderson and the students, Easterling said, there was no question that the coalition would support the legislation. Anderson’s involvement grounded all the policy discussion and bureaucratic details in the stark reality that many people and families live with every day.
“There was no way that, from an ethical or equitable standpoint, that I could have continued in the work separate from Mr. Anderson,” Easterling said. “That wouldn’t have sat right on my spirit.”
Quarles marveled at Anderson’s tenacity.
“The sheer perseverance and persistence of that man is incredible,” Quarles said. “I can’t explain how important that is. There’s no policy expert, there’s no organizer with a strategic plan, there’s nothing that compares to that type of persistence.”
Hurry up and wait
Going into 2024, the students’ work on the legislation intensified — and, with Anderson’s encouragement, they swung for the fences. The bill would establish a whole new department within Cleveland government, one focused entirely on crisis response.
After Hardaway made the connection, Anderson took the finished draft to City Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones. She and Council Members Rebecca Maurer and Charles Slife worked on the wording, then introduced Tanisha’s Law in November 2024, just under 10 years after Anderson had first spoken the words at the family’s press conference.
New bills are reviewed by relevant city departments and then assigned to a council committee for a hearing. But Tanisha’s Law sat. And sat. Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration opposed it but wasn’t saying why.
In July of 2024, Anderson, Tanisha’s daughter Mauvion Green and more than two dozen other supporters signed a letter to Bibb, urging him to “confirm your unwavering commitment” to expanding the city’s crisis response options.
Two Bibb administration officials later met with supporters and assured them that the mayor shared their goals but still had concerns about the bill as written.
In the fall, supporters started speaking at city council meetings during the public comment period. One of them was a newcomer to the cause, Stephanie Ash, a medical social worker and local representative to the National Association of Social Workers Ohio chapter board. Ash had met van Lier and Quarles a few months prior at a meeting of the care response pilot advisory committee.
Ash had previously worked as an attorney. But then about 10 years ago, her younger brother died due to lack of access to insulin for his Type 1 diabetes. He was 23.
“The grief of losing him created this, just this rage,” she said. “It is unacceptable that anyone should die because they can’t access the health care that they need. And the Anderson family, I saw a little bit of myself reflected in what they were doing because they didn’t let their grief and their rage consume them.”
[Clarification: A previous version of this story stated that Stephanie Ash had worked as a criminal defense attorney. She studied criminal law and contributed to a defense team as a student.]
‘Our obligation is to center our people’
In November, a year and a week after the bill had been introduced, the administration finally put its concerns in writing. A memo from the Public Safety Department, which oversees the city’s first responders, said that it needed more time to analyze 911 calls “to determine the scope of need.” It also argued that establishing a new department was “structurally unnecessary and creates duplicative bureaucracy.”
“We support the intent,” the memo concluded. “We do not support creating a new department, nor advancing the legislation before the call analysis is complete.”
Howse-Jones had had enough.
At council’s next meeting, she took the floor to call out the administration’s “disheartening” and “disrespectful” delays.
“You can tell me it’s a priority, but your actions speak louder than words,” she said.
Federal funding for a call analysis had been secured almost two years before but still wasn’t being spent, she said, because the city had twice asked for permission to change the terms of how it could use the money.
Her voice rose and cadence quickened as she vented her frustration with more than a year of shifting explanations.
“I want to be a team player, and people [in government] want you to go along and get along,” she said sharply. “But [citizens] really need to know how disturbing these behaviors are in City Hall. It is disturbing. It is despicable. … Our obligation is to center our people!”
‘The train is leaving the station’
It worked.
Tanisha’s Law was assigned to council’s Safety Committee, and its chair, Council Member Mike Polensek, put it on the agenda for an early December meeting. Anderson and the other supporters showed up assuming it was just another step in the process.
Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond presented the administration’s case against the bill as written. Howse-Jones and Council Member Maurer pushed back. After almost three hours of discussion, Polensek changed everything with a line that he said was a favorite of former Council President George Forbes.
“The train is leaving the station,” he told the administration officials across the table. “We’re going to take action.” He suggested that they send their proposed amendments to the sponsors. But either way, he vowed, the bill would get a council vote early in the new year.
“The train is leaving the station,” Polensek repeated. “So, you can either get on board or you get run over.”
The supporters in attendance were stunned.
“Oh, this is actually possible!” Easterling recalled thinking.
As soon as the meeting ended, the other supporters rushed to Anderson. He accepted the handshakes and shoulder pats and hugs with a tight-lipped smile and nods but few words. A few tears of joy leaked out from behind his dark-tinted glasses.
“I thought it was just going to be discussion and [scheduling] more meetings,” Anderson told Signal Cleveland that day. But now, he said smiling, “It’s gonna happen.”
‘I’m not satisfied with ending here’
Before the vote, there was a compromise. No one was happy about it.
After much deliberation, the supporters and bill sponsors decided to relent on one of the administration’s requests. Instead of a new city department, they settled for a Bureau of Crisis Response within the city’s Division of Emergency Medical Services (EMS).
A department head would be an equal to the director of Public Safety within city government, not a subordinate. But establishing a new department could take years. A bureau could be up and running much faster.
“I think this is a good way to get started, but I’m not satisfied with ending here,” Ash said. “We’re going to continue to hold the administration accountable, continue to demand transparency, input, access, all of the things that Clevelanders deserve.”
Quarles said he too will be watching.
“Public Safety has a lot of trust to rebuild,” he said, referring to the delays. “But each step gets you closer, and we keep walking together in community until we get there.”
In June, the city hired Maureen C. Malavé to lead the bureau. Malavé is a Cleveland native who has worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She is already “working on establishing operations” within the new bureau, according to a city spokesperson.
Howse-Jones, who was involved in the hiring process, called Malavé “outstanding.”
Tanisha’s Law means ‘those days are no more’
In February, members of the Anderson family and supporters of Tanisha’s Law gathered at Case’s School of Law to celebrate its passage. Mayor Bibb joined them and signed the bill into law there, the first time he’d done that outside city hall.
He also apologized to the Andersons, something that Michael Anderson said they’d wanted from former Mayor Frank Jackson but never got.
Anderson gave the mayor a purple pen with the words “Tanisha’s Law” printed on the side. Purple was her favorite color.
When he spoke, Anderson thanked everyone. He also alluded to the story of that night, the avoidable tragedy that drove him for more than a decade and galvanized supporters. But this time he didn’t tell it. In his mind and heart, Tanisha is no longer subdued and screaming. Now when he thinks of her, it’s her hearty, infectious laugh that first comes to mind.
“I just want to let Tanisha know right now,” he said at the event, “that the idea of a Black woman just being thrown to the sidewalk and dying that way? Those days are no more.”
