A Florida cop who sped through a red traffic light, only to get t-boned by another car who had the right-of-way, was arrested Monday for blaming the other driver for the crash.
Sweetwater police officer Alejandro Ramos was off-duty but in a marked car when he claimed he first “cleared the intersection” and then “proceeded with caution” on his way to help another officer on a call.
But then a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck “came out of nowhere” and struck him that day on February 17, 2015.
Ramos is a former internal affairs detective for the Sweetwater Police Department, a police agency in Miami-Dade County that has a long history of police corruption.
Nevertheless, Florida state troopers who responded to the accident took Ramos’ word and cited the other driver, even though he did have the right of way.
But a red light traffic camera proved Ramos had lied on his report, blazing through the intersection without slowing down.
On Monday, he was jailed for official misconduct and has since bonded out.
Sweetwater Police Chief Placido Diaz, who was sworn in last October as 15 cops resigned after a string of scandals and corrupt police chiefs, tried to give the impression that he was cleaning up the department, according to WSVN.
“This is behavior that cannot be accepted,” said Sweetwater Police Chief Placido Diaz
“It felt really horrible seeing one of our own being taken to jail,” said Diaz. “But, then again, the norm here and in the past with prior police administrations were, in some cases, that cover ups were the norm. But that’s not the norm here anymore.”
It was less than a year ago when it was revealed that property, weapons and money had gone missing from the department’s evidence room.
And it would be great to believe Chief Diaz in how he plans to keep the department clean, but he also has a scandalous and bullying history, according to Miami investigative reporter Al Crespo.
So the decision to charge Ramos might only be a way of ridding the department of a political enemy in order to bring in his own cohorts. That’s how it usually works down here.
But Ramos also has a history of bad driving, having been involved in four accidents during a five-month span while working as a South Miami police officer, which led to him having to resign from that police agency in Miami-Dade County.
The only reason this latest incident came to light was because CBS Miami published an investigative report last year after obtaining the traffic video.
The news report determined that Ramos was driving 50 mph in a 40 mph zone and that the driver of the other car was left with $1,000 in damage. It was only after that report that the Florida Highway Patrol chose to withdraw the citation against him and cite Ramos instead.
