Sheriff’s New Chief Deputy Is the Dept.’s Top Minority : Law enforcement: Richard Rodriguez’s promotion is seen as an important step in making the agency better reflect the ethnic balance of the community.

When Richard Rodriguez won a promotion to the lofty rank of chief deputy in the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, no one was surprised but Rodriguez himself.

His colleagues say Rodriguez’s steady competence had already propelled the longtime Oxnard resident from the police academy more than 26 years ago through a patrol car, the jail and the homicide division to the rank of lieutenant in 1986.

With twin blue lieutenant’s stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez rounded out his experience with a mix of work on the street and behind a desk, as watch commander, budget manager, acting Moorpark police chief and head of internal affairs investigations.

And he had won the respect of his comrades, who universally cite Rodriguez’s diligence and thoroughness as keys to his success.

But when Sheriff Larry Carpenter put him through two quick promotions--to commander last January and then chief deputy last month--making him the top-ranking minority officer in the department, “it came absolutely out of the blue,” said Rodriguez’s wife, Topi.

“We were both absolutely speechless for two weeks, because it was not something we had had in our discussions,” she said. “He was thrilled with it, absolutely thrilled.

“He planned his career this way,” she added. “He decided that he was going to have experience and education that nobody could overlook, that they would have to consider him. He was going to be a contender, and a strong contender.”

Rodriguez, son of a dairy worker and a fruit packer, remains modest about his achievements, about how he rose from summer jobs picking fruit to be one of the sheriff’s top-ranking officers.

“It’s humbling. It’s beyond anything I ever might have imagined or dared to imagine,” he said recently of his promotion. “My first goal was always to try to make sergeant. Once I got there I looked around, so to speak, and I realized I could make lieutenant, and it just kind of flowed from there.”

Rodriguez said he realizes the significance of being the first Latino in 20 years to hold his rank, and the responsibility he bears to other minority officers who hope for promotion.

But the job comes first.

“The job’s going to get done,” he said, sitting in the office from which he oversees personnel, training, affirmative action, records, crime analysis and administrative support as chief deputy in charge of the Support Services Division.

“I don’t look for accolades in any job I’ve accomplished. As long as it’s done right and there’s appreciation for what’s done,” he said.

But minority colleagues said Rodriguez’s promotion is important at a time when the department is striving to make its number of women and minority employees more closely match Ventura County’s population. For instance, the department wants to raise its Latino staffing--about 11%--closer to the county’s 26% Latino population.

“His appointment to deputy chief should not be taken as insignificant,” said Cmdr. Dante Honorico, in charge of the department’s Minority Relations Committee. “I think it’s very important symbolically.

“More than that, as a practical matter, his appointment and what he’s done over the years shows that we really do not look at what your color is,” said Honorico, a Filipino native who was promoted at the same time as Rodriguez to become the department’s first Asian-American commander. “If you can do the job, you can reach anything you aspire to.”

The department’s affirmative action policy requires it to choose women and minorities first for the sheriff’s training academy if they are equal to or better qualified than their competitors, Rodriguez said. But with no new openings for deputies last year and only 24 vacancies this year, the department has a limited ability to even the mix, he said.

“I think all that can be done is being done, given our current financial situation,” Rodriguez said.

The department has been criticized by some minority employees as insensitive, and 11 of the department’s 15 African-American deputies have sued the department for discrimination.

Saying he could not comment on personnel matters, Rodriguez declined to discuss the lawsuit, which alleges racist and sexist behavior among peers and supervisors that ranged from derogatory jokes to a death threat.

But he said he has never experienced prejudice in the department or even in his personal life. “I’ve been real fortunate,” he said. “This department’s provided a lot of opportunities, and it’s just a matter of being able to take advantage of it.”

Rodriguez’s law enforcement career began one night in 1966, when he returned home from a tiring night shift in a food processing plant in Oxnard where he worked while attending college classes during the day.

Six months out of boot camp as a Marine Corps reservist, he was restless and ready for a more challenging job. An opportunity jumped out of a newspaper he picked up from his front stoop.

Rodriguez had considered trying to join the Oxnard Police Department, and once even submitted his name to indicate he was interested.

But there in the paper was a sheriff’s recruitment ad, one that pushed him to go through the application process.

Within a few weeks he was undergoing training in an academy class that, after boot camp, “was a cakewalk,” he recalled.

After working in the sheriff’s custody division for a little more than a year, as many cadets on probation did, he took his first street assignment--patrolling Thousand Oaks from the East Valley Division for about three years.

“It was fun,” Rodriguez said. “You do nothing but work traffic, but each stop is different. The people are different.”

Over the next 16 years his assignments varied from overseeing cocaine busts as the sergeant in charge of the East Valley narcotics unit to working on homicide cases.

“He was my burglary partner when I worked property crimes back in ’77 and ‘78,” said retired Detective Tom Odle.

“I enjoyed working with him. He’s extremely thorough and conscientious and also compassionate,” Odle said. “He just had a very easy way of dealing with the public, and he made them feel at ease and let them know somebody was there to help them.”

During his 18 months as a homicide detective, Rodriguez helped investigate the notorious rape and murder of 2 1/2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz.

The case eventually was solved after detectives re-interviewed witnesses who had not helped much the first time and learned that Theodore Frank, now on Death Row for the crime, had been seen near the place where the young girl disappeared, Rodriguez said.

“It taught me that luck plays a major role in successful investigations,” he said. “It was really satisfying to get that man off the streets.”

Rodriguez loved detective work; he had hoped to keep doing it.

But he was anxious to move up in the ranks, and he transferred to an administrative job in the custody division to get desk experience that could help him pass the lieutenant’s exam.

That assignment “taught me a real appreciation of how an organization runs, and what it’s capable of doing,” he said. “Any person or company can have all the best intentions in the world, but without resources, its ability to move is limited.”

He also learned the frustrations of working within a bureaucracy, when it took weeks--not just days--to get the $15,000 from the Ventura County Board of Supervisors that was needed to replace antiquated communications equipment in the jail.

In 1988, then-Lt. Rodriguez was transferred to the East Valley division, where he oversaw a small force of deputies protecting the city of Moorpark.

“I was very happy when Richard came to the city of Moorpark, and pleased throughout his tenure there,” said Councilman Bernardo Perez. “He’s Latino, he has the cultural awareness and the sensitivity and the ability to communicate.”

When Latino parents in Moorpark complained that sheriff’s deputies were being too aggressive and indiscriminate in questioning their kids while trying to quell a rising gang problem, Rodriguez was able to moderate the officers’ approach, Perez said.

As a result, tensions eased and the gang suppression work got done without offending the Latino community, Perez said.

Teresa Cortes, a Latino community leader in Moorpark, said that Rodriguez greatly improved communication between the deputies and the city’s Latino residents, many of whom had emigrated from countries where often-corrupt police were feared and loathed.

“As a child, he knew what Latino families went through as immigrants,” said Cortes, head of the Villa Campesina housing development.

“Richard has a natural wisdom, to deal with very different situations,” Cortes said. “We do better because of the work of this lieutenant.”

Rodriguez said he gave his officers no special instruction on how to treat Moorpark’s Latino residents, he merely began talking with Latino community leaders and getting to know them.

“I took an active interest in what was going on,” Rodriguez said. “I think that has a trickle-down effect on the people that work with you. Anytime you have direct communication with anybody, it’s a lot easier to pick up the phone or make a call and find out something about issues and avoid problems.”

In February, after working for two years in the sheriff’s personnel bureau on recruitment, internal affairs investigations and lawsuits filed against police officers, Rodriguez was promoted to the rank of commander.

Just six months later, Sheriff Carpenter made him one of only four chief deputies in the department, who are ranked third in command beneath the sheriff.

“He was always a very bright street cop,” said Carpenter, who was a narcotics detective in the 1970s when Rodriguez was working homicides.

“(Rodriguez) has always been a very quiet kind of guy,” he said. “He’s deceptively quiet in that you don’t realize the quality of the guy until you’ve been around him for awhile. It’s not just something that walks up and hits you right off the bat. Once you’ve been working with him awhile, you realize he’s got it together.”

Carpenter said he looks forward to Rodriguez’s supervision of personnel matters to help the department’s racial mix move closer to that of the county’s.

“I like him very much,” he said. “If there was much I wanted to change about him, he wouldn’t have gotten the job.”

In his off hours, Rodriguez goes to movies, golfs and was an avid softball player on the department’s team when he was younger.

Rodriguez lives in Oxnard with his wife, whom he met about 10 years ago while earning a master’s degree in public administration. He has grown children from a previous marriage that ended in divorce, although he said he remains on good terms with his former wife.

Topi Rodriguez said that while her husband is proud to have reached the chief deputy’s rank, he is modest about his accomplishments.

“He feels he is a competitor and got to the point where he could not be overlooked, because he has experience and education,” she said.