A Decade After Tanisha Anderson's Death, Cleveland City Council Proposes New Law to Bolster Crisis Intervention

Family members of Tanisha Anderson, Michael Anderson and Jacob Johnson, spoke at Case Western Reserve on Thursday. Credit: Mark Oprea

Ten years after the death of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson during an incident with two Cleveland police officers, Cleveland City Council is eyeing new legislation that would aim to prevent similar deaths during crisis intervention calls.

It’s aptly called Tanisha’s Law, legislation that would create a new Department of Community Crisis Response, while sending behavior health specialists and first responders out to those suffering mental health episodes. That instead of relying first on police response.

“Very often those co-response teams, they’re well-trained, exceptional, doing good work, they end up often days later, not even hours later or minutes later, but days later responding” to a call, Councilwoman Rebecca Maurer said at Case Western Reserve’s School of Law on Thursday.

“So when we’re talking about Tanisha’s law,” she added, “we’re talking about opening the world up to expanding co-response into real co-response and true care response.”

Tanisha Anderson, who died in 2014, in an undated photo. Credit: Joell Anderson

Maurer joined Councilwoman Stephanie Howse-Jones and members of the Anderson family to speak about the proposed law, both the tenets of what a Department of Community Crisis Response might look like in Cleveland along with how, in theory, another tragedy like Tanisha Anderson’s death could be prevented with a migration away from the habit of using 911 when 988 will do.

The press event Thursday, which included members from CWRU’s Student Legislative Initiative Center, who helped write drafts of the law itself, was also a kind of memorial service for Anderson. Family eulogizing brought up an even more trying time in police politics in 2014, when the deaths of Tamir Rice, John Crawford III and Michael Brown led to investigations into law enforcement’s treatment of Black people and an eventual consent decree with the Department of Justice, which found Cleveland police engaged in a pattern and practice of excessive force.

Jacob Johnson, Anderson’s nephew, framed his aunt’s death at the hands of Cleveland cops as gaining meaning through her namesake law, while questioning why Cleveland didn’t have one already written in the first place.

“There should be a protocol set forth when dealing with someone who is mentally ill,” he said.

“This will mean that no other family will have to endure what we’ve endured,” he added. “Not just based on what happened that night, but having to go through life without her.”

On November 13, 2014, Anderson’s family called 911 twice claiming that Tanisha was disturbing the peace. She had been discharged a month earlier for bipolar disorder, and was trying to hastily leave their home on Ansel Road, near Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.

Officers Scott Aldrige and Brian Myers arrived. They took Anderson to the back of a squad car, where, according to CPD’s account of the events, Anderson kicked Aldrige and Myers. She went limp. An ambulance was called.

The family paints a different narrative: Anderson was claustrophobic, so she leapt out of the squad car and fought with Aldridge and Myers. Alridge slammed her to the ground. He kneed her back in a prone position, they say. Shortly after, she passed out.

Councilwomen Stephanie Howse-Jones and Rebecca Maurer worked with Case Western third-year students, including Yaninna Sharpley-Travis, to draft and fine-tune the legal language for Tanisha’s Law. Credit: Mark Oprea

Anderson was rushed to the Cleveland Clinic, but it was too late. She died, the Medical Examiner’s office later reported, due to “physical restraint in a prone position.” Her death, the coroner said, “was homicidal in nature.”

The years after were a mixed bag. Gov. Mike DeWine formed a task force to investigate mental health prep measures across Ohio police departments. CPD went under a federal consent decree. Two co-responder teams—made up of a social worker, a mental health expert and police officer—were situated on the East and West sides.

While the Andersons agreed to a $2.3 million settlement with the city in a civil suit, a county grand jury opted not to charge Aldridge and Myers with any crimes.

Maurer and Howse-Jones painted Tanisha’s Law as being very much in its infant stages. Both want to gauge community input in the next few months, as a way to see how a Community Crisis department should be deployed. And without any misteps.

Howse-Jones told press she doesn’t expect any actual specialists being hired until 2026. Council just introduced the law at Monday night’s session, so it will take time, both councilmembers said, to both finetune legislation and figure out sure ways to pay for new workers.

And also, she told Scene, figure out a longer-term plan—an ad campaign, say—to retrain Clevelanders on when to call behavior health workers and when to call the cops.

“[That people] are going to call 911 that has been engraved in many of us for generations,” Howse-Jones said. “And so if we’re trying to incorporate new practices, new systems it’s going to take some time.”

“But we don’t have seven to 10 years to be prepared to respond to crises,” she added, “that we know are happening today.”