Accountability will help restore police credibility.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Tonya Valadez and Maria Paladino For The Register-Guard

Sexual Assault Support Services' staff, board and volunteers recommend that Eugene residents take a stand to enhance our community's safety by voting yes on Measure 20-106.

Measure 20-106 will provide Eugene with an external police complaint review system, similar to what is already in place and working efficiently in other communities.

Sexual Assault Support Services, a nonprofit sexual assault intervention and prevention program serving Lane County since 1991, has been advocating for the rights of residents affected by sexual assault for many years.

As an organization, we believe that Measure 20-106 would benefit our community greatly and that sexual assault survivors and other survivors of violence and injustice desperately need a system of accountability that supports safe and equitable community policing.

In a democratic society, all of us deserve, and have a right to, recourse should we fall victim to inequities in our communities' legal and policing systems.

However, when a system isn't in place, when policies aren't written and protocol isn't implemented, fair recourse doesn't always come. Justice is withheld.

Adequate community policing, along with systems of accountability, are necessary and offer assurance that our concerns will be taken seriously and treated with respect, competence, sensitivity and integrity. This right is essential to democratic functioning, and its effect is financially immeasurable.

The effect on the community when injustice, including sexual assault, goes ignored, or when survivors are treated disrespectfully or insensitively, also can't be measured. In recent years, all of Eugene watched in horror as the news broke that uniformed officers of the Eugene Police Department had been raping and terrorizing women on the streets of Eugene for years.

The women who came forward about these assaults reported the abuse over and over for years before the department chose to investigate their claims. The city of Eugene is now facing 14 lawsuits stemming from sexual assaults by police officers on our residents - lawsuits that will cost the community millions of dollars.

In recent years, we as a community have also been witness to the shameful sight of peaceful protesters violently treated by police in riot gear, and to the chilling scene of the Whiteaker neighborhood being invaded by a tanklike vehicle and its residents hauled from their beds in their underwear, with bags on their heads like abused prisoners of war. We have witnessed the `Southtowne beatdown,' the Cortez Jordan incident, and the targeting of our hardworking immigrant community and of our communities of color.

Then, with the surfacing of the cases of Juan Lara and Roger Magana, we learned that members of the Eugene Police Department had preyed on women for years with impunity.

Police officers with integrity will tell you privately that they, too, are anxious for a change.

They are tired of the stain that tarnishes their good work when unprincipled co-workers run amok, violating moral, ethical and legal boundaries and leaving our community's most vulnerable members unprotected, revictimized and afraid.

Adequate systems of accountability could have prevented these alarming events from ever happening. We have waited patiently for years for our police department to police itself, and as a result, many residents of our community have suffered injustices and harm that can never be measured or repaired. For the sake of public safety, it's time for a change.

No more women in our community should have to endure insensitive treatment after a rape - or actually be raped by the officers we employ to keep our community safe - before we demand a change.

Voters have rejected eight public safety funding measures in the past eight years because we don't want to continue to throw good money after bad. Only through becoming more accountable to the community can our police department begin to re-establish credibility and trust among the residents it is sworn to protect and serve. Many communities have successfully implemented systems to ensure external police review, and it is time for Eugene to take that step forward as well.

In the interest of beginning to restore our community's confidence, to initiate the process of community healing, and to enhance public safety, Sexual Assault Support Services strongly endorses Measure 20-106.

Tonya Valadez is president of the board of directors of Sexual Assault Support Services. Maria Paladino is the organization's director of programs and services.