Denver City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca’s new bill that would let voters decide whether to abolish the Denver Police Department and replace it with a “peace force” will never fly under Mayor Michael Hancock’s watch, he said decidedly Monday.

“Let’s be clear: So long as I’m mayor, we will not abolish the Denver Police Department,” he declared in a press conference. “We will not erode the capacity of our law enforcement and first responders to keep our communities, neighborhoods, schools and homes in Denver safe.”

Hancock does not have legal authority to veto a ballot initiative that requires a charter change, such as CdeBaca’s, his spokesman Mike Strott said. Rather, he was making a “position statement,” one packed with punches, including calling the bill “reckless and hypocritical,” pushed forward “without transparency” and for “purely political reasons.”

Backing the mayor were the heads of the city’s safety, police and sheriff departments (all of whom were appointed by Hancock).

They underscored the importance of the police department, especially in current times, as the city withers under a spike in deadly crime. On Sunday, for example, two separate shootings occurred on South Federal Boulevard that left three people dead and several more injured.

Murphy Robinson, the executive director of the Department of Public Safety, said he was listening to officers responding to the “shots fired” calls on Federal as he was reading letters from proponents and opponents on CdeBaca’s proposed bill.

He found it “ironic,” he said, that a measure is being pushed forward to “abolish the very people that were running into harm’s way for our community, every day.”

CdeBaca’s bill, which was direct-filed Thursday and will be up for an initial vote by the full council Monday evening, does not have enough support on the dais to gain real traction.

A handful of councilors told Colorado Politics on Friday that they were blindsided by her move. Several said they only learned about her measure from the Monday meeting’s agenda and can’t get behind it because there has been  “no process, no committee, no opportunity for public input, no opportunity for our constituents to look at it, digest it … it’s just very outside of our process,” said Councilman Jolon Clark, who served as City Council president for two years.

CdeBaca says the proposal, which was not formalized into a bill until Sunday, is a direct response to community outcries to defund the police, following the May 25 death of George Floyd, who died in the custody of Minneapolis officers. She points to the high volume of emails council members have received around police reform, as well as in public comment before meetings and protests in the streets as evidence this is what constituents want.

“It’s a privilege to not feel the sense of urgency that I feel watching people that I know and in my community get brutalized and murdered for simply being Black, for simply being brown, for simply being an immigrant,” she said in a phone interview. “These are things that I don’t feel we should be acting slowly on.”

Hancock listed off numerous steps his administration has worked to position the city as a “national leader” in public safety, including launching the co-responder program that pairs social workers with police officers, as well as the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, which diverts low-level 911 calls to mental health professionals.

“We’ve recognized that we’ve done a lot, but we also acknowledge the fact that we are not done and we have much work to do,” he said. “But it does not call for the abolishment of our police department.”

CdeBaca’s bill will heard for a first reading by the Denver City Council on Monday evening. It will be up for a final vote on Aug. 24 and, if approved, referred to the Nov. 3 ballot for voters to decide.