CLEVELAND — After advocating for years, Tanisha Anderson’s family is celebrating the official signing of law named in her honor that aims to establish a more compassionate and dignified response to calls for mental health crises in Cleveland.
“I just want to let Tanisha know right now that the theory of a Black woman just being thrown out to the sidewalk and dying that way, those days are no more,” Tanisha’s Uncle, Michael Anderson, said.
It’s been 11 years since Tanisha died after being restrained by Cleveland police during a mental health crisis. Her family has been fighting for a more humane response to those dealing with mental illness since her death.
“I’ve always said until Tanisha’s law is passed, to me, she’s still out there on the sidewalk,” Anderson said. “Well, today she got up.”
Mayor Justin Bibb officially signed what’s known as “Tanisha’s Law” at a celebration of her legacy at Case Western Reserve University’s Law School on Saturday. It will establish a bureau of unarmed clinicians and social workers to respond to calls for mental health crises, rather than police.
“The guy I serve, he makes no mistakes,” Tanisha’s sister, Jennifer Johnson, said. “All this was for a purpose in his divine plan to save someone else’s life. If this is what it took to come to forth, so be it. Someone else like will be saved because of this Tanisha’s law.”
It’s the first piece of legislation Bibb has signed outside of city hall, choosing to do it where the original draft was written five years ago by former CWRU law students Michael O’Donnell and Alexandra Mendez-Diez.
Ayesha Bell Hardaway, a law professor at Case, helped spearhead those efforts.
“They did this work without course credit,” she said. “They did this work without payment, and they did it in addition to everything else that they had to do while being students in school, which is a lot in law school.”
Anderson said he couldn’t have gotten here without their support, but not every member of his family was able to make it to this point. His sister, Tanisha’s mother Cassandra Johnson, died in 2021.
“Now, nothing was wrong with her,” Anderson said. “She didn’t have any kind of diagnosis or anything like that. She just pretty much willed herself away.”
Johnson was there the night Tanisha died. In a video of an old press conference shown at the celebration, she said officers prevented her from going to Tanisha as she lie restrained, calling for her mother’s help and praying on the ground.
“I was having a really hard time,” Johnson said. “I think when any mother hears the cry of their child asking you to help me mommy. ‘Mommy help me. Help me.’ I can talk about it now without crying. When you hear that ringing in your head day in and day out, all through the night, you can’t sleep. You can’t eat. It’s something I can’t explain to anybody, what’s really happening in my mind about that day.”
Anderson said Johnson fought for justice for years before the trauma became too much to bear.
“I heard her last heartbeat, and that’s the beat that kept me going,” he said. “That’s the beat that pushed me, was her last heartbeat.”
Tanisha’s daughter, Mauvion Green, was also there the night her mother died. She was 16 years old. Now 27, she said she has since focused on carrying herself with love, kindness and compassion.
“No matter what’s going on, even if it’s the enemy, I pray for you,” Green said. “I really do. I don’t have no bad blood in my heart. It’s nothing there for hatred. What she left with me was love, and that’s how I always go through life.”
While they are taking time to celebrate how far they’ve come, Anderson said there’s still work to be done.
“It’s not over,” he said. “You come to things like this where, it’s like, ’Yeah, we got Tanisha’s law!’ Okay, but now do you understand there’s a lot of things that need to come together to bring this to fruition, to make sure that it’s done right.”
Nora McKeown
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