Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca is a favorite of ours on the Denver City Council. It is not that we agree with all of the positions or actions of the self-identified Marxist, but she actually tries at times to make a difference in improving the lives of everyday Denverites. Over half of the City Council is owned and operated by high-density developers who, of course, also control Mayor Hancock.
CdeBaca is leading the fight to save Park Hill Golf Course as open space against Council members like Kendra Black, Chris Herndon and Stacie Gilmore who can’t wait to turn Denver into a fully paved urban jungle for the fun and profit of high-density developers.
Thanks to CdeBaca’s unwavering support, Councilwoman Amanda Sawyer’s proposal that the City Council must approve mayoral appointments will go to ballot this fall, a badly needed reform we strongly endorse.
CdeBaca has many other ideas and reforms and she is the exact opposite of the do-nothing City Council members during the first eight years of Hancock’s maladministration. One idea of CdeBaca is to replace the Denver Police Department with an unarmed “Peace Force” without the power to arrest. That idea went down by an 11 to 1 vote, most Council members giving their usual excuse that they had not had enough time to consider the same.
For decades the Denver City Council has approved paying out tens of millions to settle police excessive force lawsuits without ever considering what could be done to remedy the problem. As reporter Robert Davis points out in this issue [Deep Roots: Why It’s So Hard To Fire A Police Officer For Misconduct In Denver, starting on page 5], the problem goes way back in Denver’s history.
Getting rid of the police may sound nice to some, but the actual results would not be pretty. In Seattle’s so-called “Chop Zone” this summer there were no Seattle police, but that did not result in a “Summer of Love” as predicted by Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, but rather a melee with plenty of violence. We doubt that CdeBaca’s “Peace Force” will bring peace, but rather privatized violence which will drive the average citizen out of Denver.
But that does not mean we should do nothing. The reforms instituted by the State legislature this past summer are a good start, but are not enough to solve Denver’s police brutality problems. Some huge percentage of the brutality cases come from an amazingly small number of police officers in Denver. Everyone knows who they are, but no one can drive them out of the police force.
The solution is surprisingly simple. Change the City Charter and abolish the “Civil Service” system which only apples to the Denver police and fire departments. All other city employees come under the regular “Career Service” system. The Civil Service system was put into the City Charter in 1904 by then Mayor Robert Speer to protect all of the brutal and corrupt police and fire employees that he once was in charge of as police commissioner and fire commissioner. He depended upon them to become mayor. So he wanted to make sure they could not be fired.
Get rid of the 116-year old Civil Service system and put it under the Career Service system and abracadabra the entire extremely expensive Rube Goldberg contraption to protect corrupt and brutal cops goes away. Of course, firing a bad average Denver employee is not easy, but is comparatively simple compared to getting rid of a bad cop under the Civil Service system. The reform will save millions in lawsuit settlement costs.
Will any Council member dare to take on the relatively simple solution. Well certainly not the Mayor’s cronies on the City Council, but Council members like Candi CdeBaca and Amanda Sawyer just might have the guts to do so. Here’s hoping.
— Editorial Board