It’s been almost a year since three members of Cleveland City Council introduced a bill called Tanisha’s Law, which would expand the city’s options for responding to calls about people in mental health crises. The legislation has been stalled in council since then, but advocates have kept up the pressure on city officials and may be making progress.
Last week, Cleveland Public Safety Director Dornat “Wayne” Drummond and Michael Culp, a senior adviser to Mayor Justin Bibb, met with representatives from organizations that have pushed for adoption of the law. Michael Anderson, uncle of the late Tanisha Anderson, for whom the proposed law is named, also attended.
Tanisha Anderson died in 2014, at age 37, after a struggle with police officers who responded to an emergency call about her mental health crisis. Michael Anderson worked with Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones and Case Western Reserve University law students to write the legislation, which would dedicate a new city department to crisis response. It was introduced in November 2024, but council has not held any hearings to discuss it.
In July, Anderson’s family members and several organizations sent a letter to Bibb urging him to support the law.
At the recent meeting with some of those advocates, the city officials expressed interest in continuing the discussion and involving community members in the process of reforming crisis response in Cleveland, said Piet van Lier, senior researcher at Policy Matters Ohio.
“It was a positive meeting,” van Lier said.
“There was a lot of talk about what true partnership is,” said Josiah Quarles, director of organizing and advocacy for Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.
Bibb’s administration plans to propose changes to Tanisha’s law
A spokesperson for Bibb told Signal Cleveland that the mayor is committed to “a whole-of-government approach to providing emergency mental-health services” by unarmed responders and to “working in close collaboration with partners, when possible.” The spokesperson also said that the administration will propose changes to the bill but is not ready to share them publicly. The city recently got high marks for its progress in crisis response from the team monitoring Cleveland’s progress under the 2015 consent decree.
Cleveland’s consent decree
The consent decree is an agreement between Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice that requires police reforms. It came after a federal investigation that found a “pattern and practice” of police officers violating the rights of residents and using excessive force. The city and the federal government signed the agreement in 2015.
As currently written, Tanisha’s Law would establish a new city Department of Community Crisis Response. Crisis response generally takes two forms: co-response, in which mental health professionals accompany police officers on calls; and care response, which does not involve officers.
The director of the new department would also oversee the mental health professionals who work with police officers in the co-response program that the city launched in 2020.
In a letter to Bibb after the meeting, van Lier, Quarles, Anderson and other attendees asked the mayor to meet with them. They also asked him to “establish the community collaboration board” that was part of a proposal that won a $550,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice in 2023. Money from the grant also supported updating the 911 systems and embedding mental health clinicians in the dispatch center.
Tanisha Anderson’s death “seems to have generated more recognition nationally than locally,” the letter states. “Honoring her with Tanisha’s Law would lessen the sense that she died in vain.”
Council Member Rebecca Maurer, who co-sponsored the bill with Howse-Jones and Council Member Charles Slife, said that the Bibb administration asked to meet with them. No date has been set.
