Nov 2, 2023
Cop Who Killed Leornard Cure Involved In Another BRUTAL Traffic Stop
- 13 minutes
Revelations, the cop who
killed Leonard Cure.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is
investigating Sergeant Buck Aldridge,
the Camden County Sheriff's Office deputy
who killed the recently exonerated
Leonard Cure, who served 16 years in
prison for a crime he did not commit,
[00:00:18]
during a traffic stop on
Interstate 95 near the Georgia,
Florida state line on October the 16th.
Before we get to a video clip about this,
let me say,
Leonard went home to
Florida to visit his mom.
He was coming back from
visiting his mother.
After he did 16 years in prison,
he was murdered at the hands of a cop.
[00:00:38]
Here's the video of this tragic event.
Please be warned that this
is a very graphic video.
>> Speaker 2: Sir, tickets in the state
of Georgia are criminal offenses.
>> Speaker 1: I don't
have a ticket in Georgia.
>> Speaker 2: You do now.
[00:00:54]
>> Speaker 3: Why?
>> Speaker 2: You passed
me doing 100 miles an hour.
>> Speaker 2: And what am I going-
>> Hands behind your back.
Yes, you're going to jail.
Hands behind your back.
Put your hands behind your back.
[00:01:28]
>> Yeah, bitch.
Yeah, bitch.
>> Stay down.
Stay down.
Stay down.
[00:01:44]
Camden, shots fired.
>> It's too late.
>> Speaker 2: Shots fired, Camden.
Stay down.
Do not get up.
Stay down.
Stay down.
[00:02:02]
Stay down.
>> Speaker 1: This is a tragic situation,
and it requires a certain
amount of humanity to
understand what's going on.
The GBI is looking into another traffic
stop where Sergeant Aldridge repeatedly
[00:02:19]
used his Taser on a suspect who was
already on the ground in June 2022.
The bodycam footage also
showing a canine being on the,
excuse me, sicced,
on the suspect while he was on the ground.
According to News4JAX,
Aldridge chased two vehicles as
[00:02:37]
they sped on the highway after
trying to pull them over for
going 63 miles per hour in a 73 zone.
Pull over before you kill somebody,
Aldridge could be heard
saying over his megaphone.
[00:02:53]
The chase lasted for
16 minutes as speeds reached 120 miles
per hour until the vehicles crashed.
Listen to me.
First of all, police officers should
not be chasing people in high
speed chase because people are speeding.
[00:03:09]
If you're chasing someone because
they did something violent or
they have the capacity to do violence, or
they're trying to get away from a crime
that something violent happened in,
that's one thing.
But as you sit here and
try and chase people for
speeding, you just escalate a situation
that doesn't need to be escalated.
[00:03:25]
They said, for going 63 miles per
hour in a 70 mile per hour zone,
this officer chased him and said,
slow down before you kill someone.
You have to look into his
motives at that point,
because they're under the speed limit.
They're going less than what
the speed limit is, but
[00:03:40]
still being chased by a police officer.
He escalated that situation,
just like he did the one we just watched.
Aldridge is seen on the video approaching
the crashed vehicles with his gun drawn as
he yelled, show me your effing hands.
Get on your effing hands, or get your
effing hands up now and get them up.
[00:03:57]
As he opened the door,
a man was seen lying on his back and
falling out of the vehicle.
The man appeared to be hurt or disoriented
as Aldridge put his gun away and
instructed the man to get out.
The man tried to speak to Aldridge, but
the deputy punched him in the head
as he yelled, shut the eff up.
[00:04:13]
Aldridge pulled the man out of the car,
and as the man laid on the ground,
another deputy approached.
The deputies yelled,
hands behind your back, and
as it appears as though the driver was
trying to put his hands behind his back,
but the deputies used their Tasers on him.
However, the police report claimed
the driver continued to physically resist,
[00:04:33]
pulling his hands away from up and
trying to get back on his feet.
This is what we hear so often.
This resisting arrest thing is
unbelievably disgusting, Yasmin, and
we see police officers using it so
many times as it pertains to what they're
[00:04:49]
gonna use as a reason
to escalate situations.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's the fact
that these cops have so much authority,
not just the authority, but they have
deadly force behind that authority, right?
And a lot of people, myself included,
have issues with authority,
[00:05:05]
and for succumbing to authority and
things like that.
Just because he told me to do something
doesn't necessarily mean that I wanna do
it or that I think that I should.
And in this guy's case,
he already served 16 years in prison for
a crime that he did not commit.
He clearly didn't wanna go back,
and I think that's very, very,
[00:05:22]
very understandable.
But then on top of that,
he's going under the speed limit.
Why was he being targeted?
If a cop was behind me chasing me and
I'm going under the speed limit,
I would be very, very concerned, I would
be threatened, and I would not wanna stop.
I would probably call 911 from my car if
that was happening to me on the road.
[00:05:41]
That's an unusual thing to be happening.
That was an unusual thing for
the cop to be doing.
He shouldn't have been doing that.
And then overall, if your job
is to serve and protect, right,
was he actually making these streets any
safer or did he just create a situation
where there wasn't one and then escalate
it to the point that a man died?
[00:06:01]
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that is
a wonderful statement, and at that point,
then that should be enough grounds to
charge police officer with murder or
some type of something that's responsible
for this loss of this man life.
When we consider what Mr. Cure Leonard has
been through, 16 years for something he
[00:06:18]
didn't do, claiming he was innocent the
entire time, watching the system place and
use false evidence to convict him,
and then to see him complying.
Brown also noted, we should acknowledge
this, Brown also noted that Aldridge made
similar mistakes when he
pulled over 53-year-old Cure.
[00:06:35]
So we saw the same mistakes he made in
the first incident with the other people,
the crash, in this incident,
where the officer used his Taser on
Cure despite him following
the deputy's instructions.
After that, Cure became non compliant.
[00:06:50]
And I know I don't know Cure personally,
but
I know what was going through his
mind at that moment for sure.
I'm doing everything this
officer told me to do, and
he's still gonna try to kill me.
So it wasn't till that point
did he become non compliant.
I'm doing what you said,
you still tase me.
[00:07:07]
And so I'm only doing only what I can do,
and that is to protect myself,
because I see you at this point, not as an
officer of the law or an authority figure,
I see you as someone trying to kill me.
Aldridge is currently on administrative
leave due to the shooting and
death of Cure, and the deputy was
fired before using excessive force.
[00:07:25]
He was fired before for
using excessive force.
How are you a police officer?
And this is according to First Coast News.
Aldridge was fired from the Kingsland
Police Department back in 2017 for
violating department use of necessary and
appropriate force and on and
off duty conduct policies.
[00:07:42]
The deputy worked for KPD for five years
and received his first disciplinary
action in February 2014 after using
unnecessary force on an individual during
the course of a traffic stop to take the
person into custody based on the belief
that probable cause existed for
a crime that was occurring.
[00:08:00]
We know this because of Atlanta Star
covering, Atlanta Black Star.
Aldridge was ordered to attend mandatory
training on communication skills building
and to be retrained and counseled on
how to properly conduct a traffic stop.
He was also ordered to get retrained
on probable cause for resisting arrest.
[00:08:18]
Aldridge was placed on administrative
leave in April of 2017 for
his alleged misconduct.
Alleged misconduct,
what's alleged about this?
We saw it on the tape.
This time we read about it and
saw the incident from the before time.
[00:08:34]
This person should not have
been a police officer.
If you're fired from stealing from a bank,
no bank's gonna hire you again.
The idea that a police officer
can be fired for using or
misusing the trust that's
embedded in his badge and
given to him, entrusted with him, and
watching him get rehired again and
[00:08:52]
commit crime, 2014, 2017,
2023 is absolutely ridiculous.
And the end result is just
what it is right now.
The complacency in state agencies
to rehire these officers or
keep them on the force will lead to
the death of someone, just as it has.
[00:09:08]
Yasmin, your point.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, I wish that I was
just more surprised about this, right?
I wish I was more surprised about
the fact that he had been fired from his
previous job as a cop for
demonstrating similar behavior,
and I wish I was more surprised
that he was rehired somewhere else.
[00:09:26]
We see this happen all over the place.
It's textbook, almost, whenever you see an
incident like this with some kind of cop
who's acting in a way that he shouldn't be
acting, and then he just gets fired and
rehired.
And you wait for
all the press to calm down, you wait for
all the media to stop talking about it,
and then you quietly rehire them,
[00:09:44]
give them the job back, whatever.
It's like what we were talking
about in the previous story or
one of the previous stories, that the
punishments for these actions have to be
severe enough that they deter the same
thing from happening again in the future,
and we're never seeing that, right?
These cops continue to act this way
because they know on some level that
[00:10:03]
they'll either get away with it or
they won't have to pay a price that
they normally would have to pay.
The price that anyone else would
have to pay, I should say,
if they had killed somebody
this way on the street.
So the cops know that they're protected,
and there are reasons for that protection.
But I think at this point, we need to
rethink some of those rules because
[00:10:21]
obviously, these reasons
are being exploited, and instead,
what we have are cops who are killing
people and just getting away with it.
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, if we go
back to the history of qualified immunity
on this protection you're talking about,
the only reason for it is to prevent white
[00:10:37]
cops from being tried and convicted for
kidnapping and also abusing black people
and killing them in some cases,
as is the case in this time.
We also need to remind people what
you said about the Alabama situation,
where when people aren't tried or
held accountable in proper manners,
[00:10:53]
it doesn't stop bad behavior.
And this seems to be the case here because
the city manager who suspended Aldridge
suspended him without pay for
only three days and
recommended a 12-month probationary period
following an internal investigation.
The exact actions that caused
the investigation are unclear, and
[00:11:10]
he was terminated four months later,
before eventually being hired by
the Camden County Sheriff's Office.
So we see his actions only got
him three days without work.
He was fired from a police department
because of bad behavior, and
then four months later, I mean, he said,
I'll join another police department.
[00:11:28]
There is no downtime for
bad police officers.
When you act with this much force,
unnecessary force,
when you escalate situations,
when you put the public safety at harm, or
you take away the trust in public safety
in this manner, it does not matter,
you'll get a job somewhere else, is what
his resume can say and has shown us.
[00:11:48]
And I think until we're ready
to be serious about this and
address what policing is and
acknowledge that policing in
this country is not working,
policing in this country is not working.
We do not have nowhere near
the population of China yet, and still we
[00:12:03]
represent a larger prison population
of the world's prison population.
We are overpolicing minority communities.
We're overincarcerating people.
We need to rethink what it means
to police American citizens.
And we can't say that it's successful when
we see so many black people are dying.
[00:12:21]
People, in general, but
black people specifically, black men,
even more specifically,
are dying at the hands of police officer.
And in this case, someone who had
already gave 17 years of their lives,
16 years of their lives,
that they did not owe the state for
a crime that they did not commit.
[00:12:36]
And now we are at this point.
Yasmin, I would love to hear your response
real quick before we go to break.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that there's a
much bigger conversation that can be had.
We don't have time to have it right now,
but
there is a much bigger conversation
around, what is the point?
[00:12:52]
What is the actual purpose of
having these police departments?
What is the point of giving them more
money and giving them bigger weapons and
bigger so-called protections
against the citizens, right?
That's a whole other thing, what is the
reason that they're giving the public, and
what is the actual reason?
[00:13:08]
That's what we need to think about.
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