Before I landed at Northstone, I came out of Coliseum Division. The name sounded like an arena for warriors, but the reality was closer to a sideshow. Coliseum had its own cast of performers—Red Shoes, Bro, and at the center of it all, Fred Rodriguez, better known as Stumpy. He wasn’t just a supervisor. He was the headline act, rolling into the squad room in sweats and baseball gear, tree-stump legs carrying him toward a day’s work defined by television, gossip, and long lunches as if the bullpen he was managing had anything to do with detectives, crime scenes, or the filing of reports.
Fred’s presence was a uniform in itself, but not the kind they issue you at the academy. This was a uniform of leisure—shorts at the knees, a T-shirt damp with yesterday’s ambition, and legs thick, hairy, and rooted like tree stumps that had long since given up on reaching for the sky. And then there was his head. His head shone with deliberate care—not accidental baldness, but a maintained glare, the kind that wanted to be noticed before anything else was said. The kind of shine that takes commitment. Watching him cross the squad room floor was like watching a lumbering oak drag itself from one corner of the forest to the other. A man’s body should speak of his work. Fred’s spoke only of long innings at the bar with C.C. and hours of half-reps under fluorescent lights.
Fred’s detective work began not with case files or strategy, but with the TV. The squad room television, once a tool for breaking news, became Fred’s personal shrine. Baseball, talk shows, politics—if it aired between ESPN and Fox, it was case-relevant in Fred’s mind. While others combed through financial statements, surveillance footage, or witness interviews, Fred was busy offering commentary on batting averages and political pundits as though it were the stuff of evidence.
A typical Fred’s day ran on rails. He arrived late, dropped into his chair with the grace of a collapsed lawn chair, and switched on the TV. Three hours of “working out” followed by two hours for lunch. He’d return just in time to catch the late-afternoon news cycle before heading home. It was, to him, the art of being seen without being useful. And yet somehow, he earned a reputation as one of the unit’s biggest “ass kickers.” The magic of appearances.
It wasn’t Fred’s legs or leisure schedule that carved him into memory, though. It was his loyalty—not to his detectives, not to justice, but to his drinking partners. C.C. could fumble through a case with both hands tied behind her back, and Fred would still shield her like she was the franchise player. When she botched an assignment. A big one. C.C. had a vehicle to process—the car itself was the crime scene of a kidnapping and rape. Instead of logging it immediately into the system with an evidence hold, she let it sit in the tow yard for three days. In that window, a repo man came by, checked the system, saw nothing on it, and the vehicle was released. For a sex crimes detective, that’s a cardinal sin. Detective Benson would’ve thrown the book at her. However, Fred not only looked the other way but turned to write me up instead, and said, “Take it as a learning experience.”
Learn what, exactly?
Imagine it: a detective doing her job, holding the line, only to be ambushed by her supervisor—a man who should’ve had her back—simply because his happy-hour buddy needed covering. To add insult, the rebuke was delivered in front of peers, a performance designed to humiliate rather than correct. That’s how Fred defined “leadership”: not by integrity, but by optics.
Fred thought baseball was a metaphor for detective work. To him, every case was an inning, every suspect a pitcher, every report a home run. He spun long monologues about teamwork and discipline, his words sliding across the squad room while the TV behind him blared the very game he was quoting. But his baseball wasn’t the noble poetry of the sport; it was the laziness of men who confuse watching with doing.
Fred didn’t just watch baseball—he lived it. Which is to say, he lived the talk of it. And when politics made its way into the broadcast, he leaned forward like a statesman, offering commentary about national leaders while his own unit floundered under his absent supervision. He fancied himself a thinker. The rest of us saw only a man hiding behind a sport and a screen.
When Fred wrote me up for something I didn’t do, it wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about showing C.C. that loyalty meant never letting her look bad. It was about flexing supervisory muscle, not to keep the squad disciplined but to show he could embarrass one detective to entertain another. The write-up didn’t sting because of what it said—it stung because of the hypocrisy. Fred, the man of three-hour workouts, two-hour lunches, and endless TV commentary, choosing to lecture me about responsibility? It was theater, but a bad production.
In the end, Fred Rodriguez deserves a chapter not because he inspired greatness, but because he embodied mediocrity with such commitment that it became art in itself. He was the living, breathing satire of a supervisor—rolling into work like he was late for a Little League game, legs like tree stumps planted under a desk that rarely bore the weight of real labor, television flickering with the only cases he ever really solved: box scores and pundit debates.
So yes, Fred, this one’s for you. May history remember you not for what you built, but for what you exposed: the emptiness of authority when it clings to the wrong loyalties, and the comedy of leadership when it’s mistaken for laziness with a badge.
If Fred’s workday wasn’t already a parody of supervision, his after-hours routine sealed the deal. He and Detective Bro would hang out together like teenagers freshly released from homeroom, bragging about the concert they just went to as if it were a badge of honor. They’d replay the night with the giddy enthusiasm of high school boys, clinking glasses and laughing too loud, as though it all meant something profound.
To them, it was camaraderie. To the rest of us, it was spectacle—two grown men reliving their youth in the corner booth of a bar, posting snapshots for Instagram, mistaking nostalgia for relevance. It wasn’t mentorship or leadership. It was a friendship stuck in adolescence, projected onto the squad room the next morning with stories no one asked to hear. This was their version of detective work: keeping the good times rolling, even if the cases sat untouched back at the office.
That was Coliseum Division—a circus disguised as a station, with Stumpy, Rogers, Bro, and Red Shoes running the show. Leaving it behind felt less like a transfer and more like walking out of a sideshow tent into daylight. Whatever chaos awaited at Northstone, at least I knew I’d already survived the Coliseum.
I heard through the grapevine that Rogers finally made Captain after nearly forty years on the job. Sometimes outlasting is the only way to get those two bars—not merit, not courage. Just time. Stay long enough, and the department forgets what you were—only that you’re still here. In the end, those two bars aren’t earned; they’re handed over out of pity, not because you led.
