Cleveland proposes “Tanisha’s Law” to send clinicians, not police, to some mental health emergencies

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Three members of Cleveland City Council are proposing "Tanisha's Law," which would send unarmed behavioral health clinicians to some emergency calls, instead of armed police officers.

The law, introduced to City Council on Monday, is named for Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old woman with mental illness who died in 2014 while in the custody of Cleveland police.

After her death, her uncle, Michael Anderson, sought a way to prevent Tanisha's fate from befalling other Clevelanders. He teamed up with Case Western Reserve University law students, including Yaninna Sharpley-Travis and Robert Read, who eventually wrote the proposed law that is now being championed for passage by council members Stephanie Howse-Jones, Rebecca Maurer and Charles Slife.

Tanisha's Law is intended to transform how Cleveland emergency responders deal with those who are experiencing mental health crises, said Howse-Jones at a Thursday news conference on Case's campus, where she was joined by Tanisha Anderson's family, including her uncle, sister, nephew and grandmother.

Tanisha Anderson's nephew, Jacob Johnson, who was there the night she died, heralded the law on Thursday as something that can spare other families the tragedy that his loved ones are still living through.

"This will mean that no other family will have to endure what we've endured, not just based on what happened that night, but having to go through life without her - having to go through life without that beautiful mother, that beautiful aunt, that beautiful daughter, that beautiful sister. We just don't want for any other family to endure what we've had to," Johnson said.

If passed by City Council and signed into law by Mayor Justin Bibb, "Tanisha's Law" could remake policing in Cleveland by removing police from the equation altogether on some calls involving mental health crises and substance use.

It would require Cleveland to use two types of non-police, or limited-police, response, Howse-Jones said.

One is known as the "co-responder" model, which is somewhat employed by Cleveland today as part of a small, grant-funded pilot project. The co-responder model relies on a behavioral health specialist who is teamed up with a specially-trained police officer. After regular police officers initially respond to a call, this team may get called in to provide follow-up, and connect the person in crisis with treatment or other resources.

Maurer on Thursday explained how Cleveland's current "co-responder" model, while helpful, doesn't offer the ability for such teams to be dispatched directly to emergency calls. With limited police staffing, sometimes it can take days for the teams to be called in, which is usually long after the crisis has already happened.

The other model is known as "care response." Cleveland does not currently employ this method with its own staff, though City Hall did team up with the county's Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board to run a limited pilot program in a few Cleveland neighborhoods.

Under the care response model, no police are dispatched to certain mental health calls. Instead, clinicians are sent in their place. The law, as proposed, states this would only occur in cases where calls "do not pose a substantial threat of harm to self or the public," such as those involving behavioral health crises, wellness checks, substance-use-related crises, and other appropriate circumstances.

Though Bibb has signaled his interest in the care response model, and Cleveland has employed a form of the co-responder model, Howse-Jones on Thursday said it's important to get these options formally codified into city law.

"When you have it in the law, we can ensure that it gets funded," she said. "If it's not on paper, it is not real."

Along with mandating these two types of responses for specific calls that would otherwise go to police, "Tanisha's Law" would also create a new city department to oversee their rollout, called the Department of Community Crisis Response. Though the department would collaborate with police officers and other city staff, it would be distinct from the police and safety departments.

"Tanisha's Law" would also require a base level of crisis intervention training for all police officers, and additional training for officers who specialize in crisis intervention and work on the co-responder teams.

City Councilwoman Maurer sees the law as a way to not only provide better care for Clevelanders in crisis, but to also lessen the burden on a resource-strapped police department.

The council members aren't looking to rush the law through City Council's approval process. They said they intend to spend the next several months courting support from their colleagues, conducting research on the best ways to enact the law, and talking to police, 911 dispatchers, health workers and other experts about how best to make it work.

During that process, Howse-Jones and Maurer said they hope to arrive at some key answers about how to implement it, including how to dispatch calls, how large the co-responder and care response teams need to be, and how much money might be needed.

Untangling those kinds of tricky questions is "exactly why we need a champion for this," in the form of a new department and director focused explicitly on police alternatives, Howse-Jones said.

Whether Bibb will support the law remains to be seen. His spokeswoman, Sarah Johnson, told cleveland.com that the consent decree - Cleveland police's 2015 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that addresses excessive force – could be a deciding factor for the mayor

"We will need more clarification from the DOJ before being able to share an opinion," Johnson said.

Tanisha Anderson's death sparked changes in the way Cleveland police handle mental health crises. And the consent decree explicitly required Cleveland to greatly improve its response in those cases. But at some point, the agreement will end and Cleveland police will be left to their own devices, absent federal oversight, to continue on.

If Tanisha Anderson's family, the Case law students, and City Council members are successful in their push, "Tanisha's Law" will cement the co-responder and care response models into City Hall's emergency protocols far into the future.

Sharpley-Travis, one of the Case students who helped write the law, thanked Michael Anderson on Thursday for his advocacy.

Said Sharpley-Travis: "The city's commitment to adopting these measures would go a long way in reducing and preventing the harm that our community members in crisis face when intervention is needed."