Staff file photo by Tim Barber Still wet with paint, this piece of mosaic tile art for the Unity Mosaic Project is held by Assistant Police Chief David Roddy on Tuesday at the Ridgedale Outreach Center. Roddy's design appears to have a skyline of downtown Chattanooga.Last month, Chattanooga lost an important asset when Police Chief Fred Fletcher retired. Fletcher had come here three years before from Austin, Texas, to preach - and exemplify - community policing.
This month, Chattanooga promoted another important asset when Mayor Andy Berke named David Roddy - a 23-year Chattanooga police veteran and Fletcher's Chief of Staff - as our new police chief.
Over two decades, Roddy worked his way up from a position as patrol officer and served as a captain over several divisions, including uniformed services and internal affairs. He possesses organizational know-how and understands the need for community and victim services.
Perhaps more importantly, Roddy, like Fletcher, leads by example, according to Berke, and as chief of staff, Roddy helped Fletcher guide the department through three of the most tumultuous years for local law enforcement in recent history.
Locally, Chattanooga weathered a domestic terrorist attack in July 2015 that left five military servicemen dead, a sixth injured, and a police officer injured before the perpetrator died in a shootout with officers.
Our police also had to handle two horrible and traumatic vehicle crashes - an Interstate 75 truck accident that claimed six lives in 2015 and the crash of a school bus that killed six Woodmore Elementary School students in 2016.
Along the way, Roddy helped lead the remaking of our police department and navigated it through the city's controversial anti-gang violence effort called the Violence Reduction Initiative. Certainly that program hit roadblocks - some of Chattanooga's making and some not. But it has morphed gradually into something that has at least contained some gang violence, if not slowed it. Many cities cannot say that.
Meanwhile, nationally, racial and cultural violence spilled out onto streets in New York, Baltimore, Chicago and other less fortunate locales. But here, community policing made the difference between Black Lives Matter marches and our summer Fridays with Nightfall music wafting through the streets.
Berke had good choices, all around, but he chose Roddy over Assistant Chief Edwin McPherson, another member of the Chattanooga Police Department's senior administration, as well as Capt. Todd Chamberlain of the Los Angeles Police Department, for all the right reasons.
McPherson brought 25 years of experience in the department to the table and has held several command positions, including assistant chief of criminal investigations bureau where he was commander of all criminal investigations.
Chamberlain was the only external candidate recommended to Berke by a five-person search committee he picked to vet the candidates. Chamberlain offered more than 30 years of experience with one of the nation's largest metropolitan police departments, where he has served as a police commander since 2010.
Berke's choice will need to be ratified by the Chattanooga City Council before the decision is made final.
Certainly there's plenty to do still to make Chattanooga safer. Much more.
But we believe that on Friday, Mayor Berke made the best choice and moved the ball forward.