A Chicago police officer was about an hour and a half into a deposition Friday morning over one of dozens of misconduct allegations against him as a member of an embattled North Side tactical team when the officer’s attorney requested a break.
The officer, Richard Rodriquez Jr., left the room and did not come back. A few moments later, per a motion filed Saturday, Rodriquez’s attorney told the other lawyers that the deposition would need to continue another time, because a CPD sergeant had taken the officer to police headquarters so that Rodriquez could be relieved of his police powers.
“This was — to put it mildly — an unusual development,” the motion states.
The information sent the long-delayed deposition grinding to a halt and makes Rodriquez the latest member of the 1863 tactical team to be stripped of his police powers or reassigned as complaints and lawsuits about the officers have stacked up.
Attorney Jordan Marsh, who is representing the plaintiffs in the case that brought Rodriquez into court that day, described the interruption in a motion as “unprecedented in the collective experience of Plaintiffs’ counsel, and likely the experience of all counsel in this matter.”
He later said he hadn’t seen anything like it occur in 30 years of practicing law.
“He was gone before we had a chance to even know what was going on,” Marsh said. “No one brought us in until after everything had been decided.”
The motion questions why the department needed to interrupt proceedings to strip Rodriquez of his police powers and asks Judge Mary M. Rowland to require that Rodriquez complete his deposition within the next two weeks.
It also asks that she order the city to turn over all its written communication that led to the deposition being cut short and order a CPD representative into court to discuss why Rodriquez was stripped of his powers in the middle of the deposition.
“The city needs to understand that it cannot interfere with, and unilaterally terminate, a judicially ordered deposition,” the motion reads. “This is sanctionable conduct and needs to be addressed as such.”
More Top Picks Transitioning From Iep To College Accommodations
Rodriquez’s attorneys didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. CPD does not publicly address the reasons why an officer has been relieved of police powers, but police representatives said in an email that Rodriquez was detailed to the Alternate Response Section, where he joins four other members of the tactical team who had been previously relieved of their police powers. That section is the typical landing spot for officers who are awaiting disciplinary action.
The team’s sergeant has been reassigned to the department’s Gang Investigation Division, police said, while two members of the tactical team remain assigned to the Near North District, covering the River North, the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park neighborhoods.
Rodriquez is named as a defendant on a slew of lawsuits against him and other members of his team regarding their alleged conduct during traffic stops, arrests and searches of civilians and their property.
Records from the city’s Office of Inspector General show Rodriquez was the subject of at least 43 complaints of misconduct between 2018 and 2025. Allegations were sustained in six of those investigations, including neglect of duty, abuse of authority, profanity, and improper search and seizure, records show.
Those sustained allegations netted Rodqriquez four different suspensions that ranged from three to 10 days. He has also received a reprimand and a violation noted in his city employee work history.
On Friday, Rodriquez was being deposed for a civil rights lawsuit filed in May 2024, which alleged that he had banged plaintiff Jovan Streeter’s head and face into the side of his car while accusing him of displaying a false license plate outside Shaw’s Crab House in River North. The complaint alleges that Rodriquez and two other officers then arrested Streeter even though his license plate turned out to be valid, kept him in custody overnight and charged him with displaying false registration.
The suit also alleges that in a separate incident, a few months later, Rodriquez and others pulled over Streeter and his co-plaintiff Marquita Beecham while they were driving the same car. The officers allegedly handcuffed Streeter and threatened to shoot them with Beecham’s own gun, according to the complaint.
CPD’s internal affairs bureau gave Rodriquez a three-day suspension over that incident, the complaint states.
According to a new database run by the Chicago Office of Inspector General, Rodriquez has racked up the second-highest number of misconduct complaints against any officer in the city between February 2023 and the present. The top complaint recipient is another member of Rodriquez’s tactical team who is listed as a defendant alongside Rodriquez in several other lawsuits.
Per a December 2024 letter from COPA to now-retired Cmdr. Michael Barz, the team overall had racked up more than 50 complaints against them over “traffic stops, street stops, searches and unprofessional conduct.”
In a second letter sent about nine months later, in October 2025, COPA administrators recommended that Rodriquez be placed in CPD’s behavioral intervention system and receive “extensive retraining regarding procedural justice, professionalism and constitutional policing.” At that point, COPA’s Interim Chief Administrator LaKenya White wrote, Rodriquez was the subject of 26 open investigations and had accumulated a total of 67 complaints over about eight years with the department.
Tribune reporter Sam Charles contributed to this report