On Wednesday, Cleveland City Council moved forward legislation that would put into place the demands of Tanisha’s Law two years after first talks with the city started.
Those demands were clearer than ever during this week’s hearing of the Public Safety Committee: find a way to create a new Bureau of Community Crisis Response, under the city’s Division of EMS, that would dispatch unarmed clinicians to handle, and potentially save, Clevelanders in states of distress.
That bureau, which would cost the city $792,000 to fund, could prevent tragedies like Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old woman who was killed by police while having a mental health episode in front of her home in 2014.
A bureau able to dispatch mental health professionals, and bypass cops entirely, would also, other cities have shown, cut down on needless arrests and criminal charges—and do so drastically.
“We’ve received hundreds of letters and phone calls from incarcerated individuals,” Faten Odeh, head of the Cleveland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Council on Wednesday. “I can’t help but wonder how different their lives would’ve been if Tanisha’s Law was available at the time they were incarcerated.”
“What this does,” she said, is give “the city the opportunity to treat mental health as it deserves.”
Although Mayor Bibb gloated earlier this month about the successes of his RISE program—namely the hiring of 251 new recruits in the past two years thanks to pay increases—Cleveland’s patrol is still short of its recommended and budgeted officer base, by about 80.
In other words, Cleveland’s cops are overworked.
What other cities that have implemented co-response have shown is that diversion equals less police work. If clinicians deal with schizophrenic episodes or a shouting homeless person, that means fewer potential arrests—for disturbing the peace, for public intoxication, for loitering or, if the call escalated, perhaps, for assaulting an officer. Outcomes that put less stress on the system overall: on court magistrates, public defenders, intake officers and jail wardens.
And other U.S. cities, from Houston to San Francisco and Albuquerque, are showing that this isn’t just theory.
In New Jersey’s pilot program of its care response team, a whopping 98 percent of crisis-related cases that went to clinicians did not end up needing police dispatched. Same goes in Colorado, over a one-year span: out of 25,900 incidents, little more than 500 of those calls required cops.
Cleveland’s bureau could operate similarly, a presentation on Wednesday showed. Non-violent mental health 911 calls would be immediately triaged and sent over to EMS, which would dispatch a Crisis Intervention Team officer. Only after the fact would a CPD officer be sent out.
Although Public Safety’s eight committee members present went over yet another draft of Tanisha’s Law with a fine-toothed comb, no one really touched on the fact that crisis-trained clinicians would take the load off CPD.
That is, if the model works as intended.
Cleveland already trains its officers in mental health episodes, as required by the federal Consent Decree, but that training is just 40 hours and isn’t mandatory. And the county is running a pilot co-response program—sending clinicians out to the West Side and Southeast Side—but that program depends heavily on calls to 988, the suicide hotline.
As Ward 15 Councilman Charles Slife said on Wednesday, a bureau is the only recourse, primarily because it is standalone.
“Our goal through all of this has been to divert calls from dispatch to the unarmed crisis response team,” Slife said. “Not that they’ll be available under every circumstance, but we want that to be the primary goal.”
City Council’s Finance Committee will revisit Tanisha’s Law at the end of January.
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