Predators leave large bill.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Roger Magana was sentenced to 94 years in prison for crimes he committed as a Eugene police officer, crimes that included first-degree rape and kidnapping. Juan Lara, a former colleague of Magana's on the Eugene police force, received a five-year sentence in February for stalking, coercion and harassment. The nature of the crimes justifies long sentences. That these men held positions of authority and trust ensures that the consequences of their actions will be long-lasting and widely borne.

The men's victims, of course, were at ground zero - their vulnerability was cruelly and cynically exploited by Magana and Lara. Such abuse leaves deep wounds that can take years to heal, if indeed healing ever occurs.

The Eugene Police Department is also a victim. Magana and Lara's crimes leave a legacy of suspicion and fear that will affect every police officer in his or her daily work. Effective policing demands community support, which can only arise from expectations of fair dealing and humane treatment.Those expectations have been undermined. Cooperation will be harder to find, and trust will have to be slowly rebuilt. Meanwhile, the names of Magana and Lara will be thrown in the faces of Eugene police officers for years.

And the people of Eugene are victims. Magana's and Lara's betrayals will sap the Eugene Police Department's morale and credibility in ways that cannot contribute to effective policing. In this way, Magana and Lara made Eugene less safe.

The people of Eugene may pay for these cases financially as well. Civil lawsuits against the city of Eugene by Magana's and Lara's victims might exhaust the city's insurance, requiring the city to cut programs or raise taxes to pay claims.

It's far too early to gauge the extent of the city's potential liability, but the upper limit of the range of possibilities is high. Magana and Lara were convicted of crimes against 23 women and one man, creating a large pool of potential plaintiffs. Victims could sue the city in federal court, where state limits on municipal liability do not apply. Eugene's insurance policy provides protection for claims in a single year of up to $5 million, but the claims could exceed that amount and the insurer might argue that it's not obliged to pay claims arising from criminal conduct.

If successful claims against the city exceed the insured amount, Eugene could find that the costs of Magana's and Lara's conduct will come out of the budgets for parks, public works and, yes, police. Another option would be to seek voter approval of a tax levy to pay the claims.

Persuading voters to pay higher taxes for any purpose is never easy, but promoting a levy to compensate victims of police officers' criminal conduct would present special difficulties. Some voters could be expected to insist that the city pay all legal judgments with its existing resources, regardless of the budgetary effects. Others would insist that the city provide evidence that it has corrected the deficiencies in oversight that allowed Magana and Lara to create such a large liability. The cost of the claims would be measured in terms of what the money could otherwise have bought, ranging from filling potholes to staffing the library.

The possibility that substantial claims could eventually affect the city's budget, its tax rate or both is one more facet of the far-reaching nature of Magana's and Lara's crimes. The presence of predators in a city's police force is enormously costly - to their targets, to the police, to the city and, perhaps, to the taxpayers.