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University of Oregon Police Chief Carolyn McDermed, who has led the department for four years, was given $46,000 to leave the job with four months left on her yearly contract. Her retaliation against an officer who spoke out against department bias and mismanagement helped cost UO at least $1.5 million in damages and legal bills. (The University of Oregon)

The University of Oregon paid its police chief, Carolyn McDermed, $46,000 to leave the position, officials said Friday.

She left the job abruptly just days before a federal judge reconfirmed a $755,000 jury award against McDermed and her department in a whistleblower case. The jury's decision indicated they believed she retaliated unlawfully against an employee who complained about her leadership, then lied about it repeatedly on the stand.

The case is expected to cost UO more than $1.5 million in damages and attorney fees.

McDermed, who made $139,000 a year, had four months left on her yearly contract when she agreed to step down a week ago.

University spokesman Tobin Klinger declined to say why McDermed's bosses at UO wanted her gone so badly that they asked her to depart and agreed to pay the remaining four months of her contract in exchange for no work. Her total payout, $53,000, included two weeks of accrued vacation, he said.

Klinger disclosed the payment in response to a public records request from The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Both McDermed, 57, and Klinger characterized her departure as a retirement.

The payment to McDermed pales in comparison to the $940,000 settlement that the UO Board of Trustees paid Michael Gottfredson to step down as university president in 2014.

McDermed was hired as UO's assistant chief in 2008 after serving in supervisory roles in the City of Eugene Police Department. She was promoted to acting UO chief in 2012 when then-Chief Doug Tripp was pushed out but kept on payroll for a period as "adviser" to a university vice president.

That made her one of very few women police chiefs in Oregon.

McDermed headed the department as it transitioned from an unarmed public safety department to a police department with a combination of armed and unarmed officers.

By her own testimony in the whistleblower case, she could be clueless about goings on in her own department. She presided over roughly eight supervisors, seven sworn police officers and nine public safety officers. Petty and vindictive management were rampant in the department, many employees testified.

In court, McDermed indicated she never looked into some misbehavior by her officers, confessed to ignorance about some department policies, said she knew little about the actions of her top deputies, and gave answers diametrically opposed to her earlier testimony.

She raised questions about her own judgment, testifying she lacked familiarity with a longstanding federal law regarding police officer honesty and saying it did not occur to her that fraud was a form of dishonesty.

This week, UO officials hired Pete Deshpande, the department's former No. 2 leader, to return from retirement to act as interim chief until a permanent replacement can be found. Deshpande never met the officer who blew the whistle on department misdoings, but played a role in retaliating against him.

The university identified a promising successor to McDermed last fall and offered the bilingual, community-oriented policing specialist the job of assistant chief. But after University of California Merced Police Captain Chou Her visited Eugene to gain familiarity with his future employer, he backed out of taking the job, citing difficulties with relocating his family to Oregon, according to student journalists at the Daily Emerald.

-- Betsy Hammond