INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – The Indianapolis City-County Council’s safety and criminal justice committee shot down a proposal Wednesday to create a new commission to study crime.

In a more than three-hour-long meeting, the committee voted 8-3 against the proposal that would have aimed to review the status of the city’s long and short term response to crime, recommend new council proposals and gather information from crime experts and the community on how better to reduce violent crime in Indy.

Opponents of the proposal say adding a new committee would be “redundant” and the current committee can handle the issue themselves.

But co-sponsors of the proposal say the current setup isn’t doing the job and called this a long-overdue conversation, and begged the committee to pass the proposal.

“It’s time we start this conversation. I’m hopeful that now we got this conversation started, that we can turn this around as a positive thing,” said Brian Mowery, co-sponsor of the proposal.

“We do have entities in place. We have the authority, the constitutional authority of the oversight to address these issues of violent crime with two bipartisan parties already in place,” said Leroy Robinson, chair of the Safety and Criminal Justice Committee

Dozens of community members also weighed in.

Representatives from Mayor Joe Hogsett’s office, the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office all spoke against the proposal saying what was already in place was enough to fight crime in the city.