MIAMI, Fla. – Alfredo “Freddy” Ramirez II, 52, became the director of the Miami-Dade Police Department on Jan. 13, 2020. Appointed by then Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez, Ramirez succeeded retired director Juan J. Perez, who served 30 years with the agency.
Ramirez has spent more than 27 years with the department. In 2022, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced an expanded role for Ramirez as Chief of Safety and Emergency Response, responsible for oversight of both MDPD and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, along with his MDPD director duties.
The police director is in critical, but stable condition after an incident Sunday night on Interstate 75 near Tampa.
Ramirez graduated from the University of Miami, where he received a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1995, and became a police officer trainee with Miami-Dade Police that same year and in 1996, started his law enforcement career in the then Cutler Ridge district.
During his investiture ceremony where he took the oath of office as director a month after he assumed the leadership role, he spoke about his grandfather who “always preached the importance of hard work as a means to improve one’s life.”
Ramirez, originally from Elizabeth, N.J., according to a Miami-Dade Police Department story, which reported on his appointment, went to Miami Sunset Senior High School after residing in Hialeah. On freddy.vote, the campaign web page for his bid for sheriff, his bio states that he was raised by his grandparents who fled the Castro regime and his working-class parents in Hialeah.
Ramirez announced his bid to be Miami-Dade’s first elected sheriff in May of 2023 after a change to the state constitution required the partisan office to be re-instated. The Miami-Dade Police Department will be a new entity, a Sheriff’s Department, similar to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.
Miami-Dade County is the only county in Florida that does not have an elected sheriff.
In 2018, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment that mandated every county has an elected independent sheriff. The job, currently nonpartisan, will be on the 2024 ballot. Ramirez is running as a Democrat.
Ramirez worked his way through almost every rank in the Miami-Dade Police Department from the start. After his first job in 1996 where he spent four years as a uniformed patrol officer with the Cutler Ridge and Hammocks districts, he became a detective in the Agriculture Patrol Unit for two years, where he investigated agricultural-related crimes and conducted proactive patrol of various groves.
He then became a sergeant in the Hammocks district in 2002, where he spent one year supervising squads assigned to the midnight shift, and in 2003 became a sergeant in the narcotics bureau for the TNT search warrant squad, executing search warrants and supervising street-level narcotics operations and investigations that included prostitution stings. In 2006, he became a lieutenant in the Hammocks district, first supervising uniformed patrol officers, then managing the general investigations unit.
Continuing his rise in the ranks, he became captain of the narcotics bureau where he oversaw the major investigations squads to include money laundering, kidnapping and domestic interception of controlled substances. He oversaw organized crime, human trafficking, murder for hire, and gang investigations.
Ramirez then became a major in the homicide bureau in 2012. After a year in that role, he became chief of the criminal investigations division. All of this was in the span of 19 years.
For the next five years, he would work at the side of Perez, then the Miami-Dade Police Director, first serving as the assistant director of investigative services in 2014, then as assistant director of police services in 2016 and as deputy director in 2018. When Perez retired, Ramirez would take over the reins as director in 2020.
Upon taking his oath of office at his investiture ceremony in February of 2020, Ramirez made known that his top priorities as director were to keep the community and his officers safe — emphasizing officer wellness — and continue to “arduously” address gun violence and enhance community relations.
Ramirez states on his campaign for sheriff page that he married his high school sweetheart in 1995. He and his wife, Jody, have four children. Their son, Brandon Ramirez, is a sergeant with the Miami-Dade Police Department.