For 12 years, you`ve sat at the superintendent`s right hand during daily command meetings, watching your colleagues lob and duck, thinking how much better you could run the show-if.
Twice before, you have tried to make the ”if” a reality. Twice, you`ve been shot down, watched two other men get the coveted police chief`s job, pin on the four gold stars, get all the attention.
You persevere. You apply a third time. And then-kabam! One Monday morning in April, a flood of gargantuan proportions inundates Loop basements. It is, coincidentally, the same day Mayor Richard Daley has decided to announce your long-awaited appointment as the new superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, the second-largest police force in the country.
Any other day, your appointment would have been front-page news, but municipal disasters take precedence. You take the job. You put your granddaughter in the high-backed superintendent`s chair for a photo and go off, not to a celebratory luncheon, but to a makeshift command center in the middle of the flood.
It is a baptism by water, and it doesn`t stop with the flood.
Weeks later, there is the Rodney King verdict and the subsequent rioting in Los Angeles. There is a series of controversial shootings by police in Chicago, including the killing by a gang crimes officer of 12-year-old Joey Chlopek on June 6.
Then there is the looting and burning during celebrations after the Chicago Bulls` victory in the NBA Finals. Police are seen standing by as mobs trash taxis and loot stores; merchants complain that police respond too slowly, or not at all.
Matt Rodriguez, 56, is at the eye of this storm, exactly where he wanted so much to be. He is still at the morning command meetings, only now he has moved over one seat-to the head of the table.
These days, Rodriguez said, he scrutinizes the command staff with the eye of someone who knows that, in six months, he will have replaced half of them. ”I think we have a fine Police Department, but I think we can be the most progressive department in the country,” he said.
What does he most want to accomplish?
”People have looked at us as a parochial department; we have looked at ourselves the same way. We have to come out of our shell.”
Rodriguez, the son of a Mexican father and a Polish mother, grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, one of four children (two boys and two girls). He speaks some Spanish and Polish, having spoken both languages as a child.
He has been with the department 33 years, spending one year as a patrolman, a few more as an officer assigned to various districts, and the bulk of his career investigating organized crime, vice and gambling.
A careful, steady man
He is a careful man, a steady man, married for 37 years to his wife, Ruth, whom he met in high school. He was 19 when they married; she was 17. They have one grown daughter.
Living in two distinct ethnic worlds was culturally rich, Rodriguez said. He was often sent, with his brother, Richard, from the Polish parochial school and church they attended to fill in as altar boys at the smaller Mexican church down the street.
This former altar boy at two churches does not tend to buck conventional wisdom.
He is unlikely to be as outspoken as his predecessor, LeRoy Martin, who returned from a trip to China suggesting that that country`s concept of constitutional rights might be applied to good effect in the U.S.
”He is the opposite of me,” acknowledges Martin, whose retirement opened up the chief`s post. ”There are times I get rather upset and rather vocal, but he would never say anything confrontational. He would wait an hour or two and come back to the office, tell me where he thought I had gone a little too far, all of it in a gentlemanly manner.
”He has the strength and ability to get people working together. People can`t help but like him.”
Immaculately groomed, every steel-gray hair in place, Rodriguez projects a thoughtful authority. He looks better, handsomer, in his suit and tie than in his uniform, in which he tends to appear dwarfed. He plays golf, is a baseball fan and worries about exercising more.
Rodriguez is funny, in a low-key way. He looks for humor in a situation, and he likes to laugh. ”I just hate this comparison,” the 5-foot-7-inch police chief said as he handed an award to 6-foot-7-inch U.S. Atty. Fred Foreman.
Having agreed to an interview on the unbelievably busy day after his appointment, he chatted amiably and in a remarkably relaxed manner for 20 minutes before saying something so softly he had to be asked to repeat it.
”Could you get out of here now?” he wanted to know.
Rodriguez thinks before he talks. When he does speak, it isn`t always packaged in neat sound bites. But it does sound sincere, though politically proper, befitting the son of a man who was a successful precinct captain. He puts people at ease.
Pressed to say what major changes he anticipates making, Rodriguez said he wants to move away from the quasi-military model the department is now based on to a system in which each officer will be given more discretion to act on his own.
Longtime community activist Mary Volpe of the Northeast Austin Organization said she has always found Rodriguez to have common sense and a genuine interest in the community.
”He`s sensitive to the people out here,” Volpe says. ”He knows the issues. He`s progressive. How he reacts later depends on political pressures, and pressures from within the department. A lot depends on how much independence he has from City Hall. I just hope he retains some of the ties with the community he used to have. You were always able to get hold of him.” Accomplishments questioned
The day the City Council confirmed his nomination, Rodriguez met with members of the gay community, going out of his way to say he was amenable to recruiting and welcoming gay officers.
But after the meeting, gay activist Jon-Henri Damski, a columnist with the gay newspaper Windy City Times, characterized Rodriguez as the consummate bureaucrat, ”a desk cop, a diplomatic paper shuffler, his heart more with the administration of the system than with the cops in the street.”
”He`s wrong, because I was sincere about everything I said,” Rodriguez said. ”You can be awfully tough without talking tough. You don`t get here, with the competition, to the second-largest police department in the country, to get the brass ring, without being tough.”
Police Board President Albert Maule has known Rodriguez for several years.
”He is very kind, he`s sensitive, he has a very good personal touch with people,” Maule said.
”His career, in a lot of ways, is an example of someone who pays his dues, touches the right bases, and eventually emerges in the No. 1 position.” A frequent criticism is that Rodriguez cannot make decisions.
Former Supt. Fred Rice said Rodriguez was accustomed, as were several other administrators, to coming up with several suggestions about a problem rather than recommending a specific solution.
”I had to tell him, `You make the decision,` ” Rice said. ”And he changed. . . . My only reservation is, can he be tough enough, could he lower the boom, which you have to do as superintendent. He`s going to have to develop that presence.”
At the bureau of technical services, which he headed for 12 years, Rodriguez did little, critics say, to improve departments such as the records division, property management, motor maintenance or communications.
There were problems with a backlog in the analysis of narcotics in the crime lab, which led to some cases being dismissed because the lab results of suspected narcotics were not ready in time for preliminary hearings in the drug cases.
There were also problems with the transmission of fingerprints from police stations to the identification section.
Rodriguez blames most of those difficulties on the outdated machinery on hand at the time and said it was his idea to come up with the right technology that solved the problems.
Still, when he applied twice to Rice and Martin to be deputy superintendent in charge of investigative services, he was turned down. Unlike many up-and-coming Police Department administrators who are moved frequently to different departments to gain experience, Rodriguez was kept in his position at technical services for 12 years.
”Now, I`m on top of all that-plus,” he said, allowing himself to gloat for just a minute. Then, more characteristically, Rodriguez added: ”But if I were superintendent then, I would have kept Matt Rodriguez right where he was. I wouldn`t have taken the chance, either, if I didn`t have to.”
Keeping a low profile
People who have known Rodriguez for many years call him honest, dedicated, professional and intelligent. But even they said they couldn`t think of an anecdote that would give insight into his personality.
One window into Rodriguez`s psyche, however, may be the death of his brother at age 16. Richard Rodriguez died of asphyxiation while washing a car in a closed garage. It was January, and he had turned on the heater briefly to warm up. When he started to choke, instead of moving toward the garage door for air, he moved the other way.
”It still hurts to tell you the story,” Rodriguez said.
Despite all his years in the department, Rodriguez invited only five fellow officers to his celebratory dinner at Orso`s, an informal Italian restaurant on the North Side where he is friends with the owner and where the waitresses know him as Matt.
Four of the colleagues who attended the celebration worked with Rodriguez at technical services. ”They made me superintendent,” Rodriguez said.
Since his appointment April 13, Rodriguez has kept a low profile, not making any sweeping policy statements or appearing at the scene of any high-profile cases. After the looting during the Bulls celebration last week, Rodriguez defended the department`s response and did not appear defensive after the criticism.
”We had an excellent plan,” he said. ”I am never satisfied if one person is hurt or loses his property. But we just can`t send a thousand troops to overcome a thousand citizens.”
He also defended the shooting by Officer David Jarmusz of Joey Chlopek, managing to issue statements without attracting a great deal of attention to himself.
Rodriguez intends to experiment with community policing, which puts more officers on foot instead of in squad cars, but wants to make sure ample planning is done so that it works.
He likes to call himself eclectic, and said he wants to look outside the department for solutions tried in other cities.
Rodriguez is intellectually interested in tough issues.
When Bill Geller of the Police Executive Research Forum, a respected Washington organization that consults with police departments and does independent research, asked Rodriguez to investigate the problem of police inadequately searching suspects for concealed weapons after making an arrest, Rodriguez wrote a strong report detailing the reasons for the inadequate searches: laziness, squeamishness about touching other men, fear of getting stuck with a hypodermic needle.
”It`s not the kind of thing people like to bring up,” Geller said. ”It was gutsy.”
Rodriguez is unlikely to make any fast moves. So far, he has made only one staff change, naming Capt. Anthony Chieza, who worked with him in technical services, to be his administrative aide.
Other personnel changes will wait until he has seen the second part of a management report, due in the next few weeks, done by the consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton on the Police Department.
His supporters say his low-key style is misinterpreted, that he simply prefers to reach decisions by consensus, rather than imposing top-down orders. But Rodriguez was quick to say he wouldn`t tolerate the type of police brutality made public in the Rodney King videotape.
”There had to be something wrong with the training of the supervisors,” said. ”Something totally failed. They thought they could get away with it.” Roriguez said he always wanted to be a police officer. He wanted to be superintendent for many years. On his third try, he said, he had a feeling he would get it.
”I just felt very positive, that it was within my grasp, that I was going to succeed.”
