KEY POINTS:
- ABC News reported that William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on cellphone camera mounted above his dashboard
- ABC News stated the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office launched an internal investigation after video went viral
- According to ABC News, McNeil’s attorneys accused the sheriff’s office of trying to cover up what happened
- Per CNN search results, McNeil was arrested February 19 and charged with resisting without violence, driving on suspended license, and marijuana possession
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles, according to ABC News on Saturday.
William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard, ABC News reported. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can’t clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, ABC News stated.
“We got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump told ABC News, as one of several lawyers advising McNeil.
“All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement,” Crump told ABC News. “Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don’t record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.”
McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers told ABC News. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong, ABC News reported. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver’s seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head, according to ABC News. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states, ABC News reported.
The incident reports don’t describe the officer punching McNeil in the head, ABC News stated. The officer who pulled McNeil over and then struck him described the force this way in his report: “Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground,” according to ABC News.
But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the sheriff’s office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing, ABC News reported. A sheriff’s office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest, ABC News stated.
McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stitches in his lip, according to ABC News. His attorneys accused the sheriff’s office of trying to cover up what really happened, ABC News reported.
“On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,” Harry Daniels told ABC News as another of McNeil’s lawyers. “We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.”
The traffic stop was not only racially motivated but “it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful,” Daniels told ABC News.
McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile’s girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis, ABC News reported. But McNeil’s arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers told ABC News.
Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil’s legal team’s suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver’s car could offer a unique point of view, ABC News reported.
“Use technology to your advantage,” Mercado told ABC News as an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “There’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s actually a smart thing in my opinion.”
Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it’s a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn’t make the situation worse, according to ABC News.
“I think that’s a form of protection — it’s safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,” Brunson told ABC News.
Although the sheriff’s office declined to speak to The Associated Press this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil’s arrest since video of the encounter went viral, ABC News reported. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil’s lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle, according to ABC News.
At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil’s car, ABC News stated. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife, according to ABC News.
Crump said McNeil’s video shows that he “never reaches for anything,” and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window, ABC News reported.
A camera inside a motorist’s vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado told ABC News.
However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police, ABC News reported. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian’s recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job, according to ABC News. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations, ABC News stated.
Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game last year between the universities of Georgia and Florida, according to ABC News.
The sheriff showed the officers’ bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium, ABC News reported. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage didn’t capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away, according to ABC News.
In McNeil’s case, the bodycam video didn’t clearly capture the punches thrown, ABC News stated. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said, according to ABC News.
For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement, ABC News reported. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn’t believe the men’s stories of being brutalized by officers, according to ABC News.
“People who live in a civil society don’t expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial,” Brunson told ABC News.
“So it’s hard for people who don’t have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,” he told ABC News. “And that’s where video does play a big part because people can’t deny what they see.”
According to CNN search results, McNeil was arrested following the incident on February 19 and charged with resisting a police officer without violence, driving on a suspended license and possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana. The next day, he pleaded guilty to the resisting and suspended license charges, per CNN search results.
CNN search results stated that D. Bowers, the arresting officer who pulled McNeil over, made no mention of McNeil being punched in his police report. He wrote that the suspect, McNeil, refused to comply, which led him to break the window to open the driver’s door, according to CNN search results. “Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground,” Bowers continued, per CNN search results. A second officer, however, described in a separate report six punches to McNeil’s leg before he stopped resisting, CNN cited the Associated Press as reporting.
Per Washington Post search results, prosecutors will not bring criminal charges against sheriff’s officers who wrestled McNeil out of a car during a traffic stop and punched him multiple times, the local sheriff said Monday.
According to Jacksonville Today search results, McNeil on Wednesday announced his intention to sue the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. McNeil and four generations of his family stood inside St. Paul Church of Jacksonville Wednesday as the college student recalled the encounter with police, per Jacksonville Today search results.
WOKV 104.5 reported that 904WARD is organizing a series of community conversations in Jacksonville this August and September to address systemic issues in policing, highlighted by the recent violent incident involving William McNeil Jr. and a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) officer.
