Bodycam video appears to show Florida officer aiming a gun at Black
student during brutal arrest
[July 30, 2025]
By SOPHIA TAREEN and JEFF MARTIN
CHICAGO (AP) — A Florida police officer had his gun aimed at a Black
college student shortly before the driver was pulled from his car and
beaten in a recorded encounter that recently sparked widespread outrage,
civil rights lawyers said Tuesday.
The officer standing in front of William McNeil Jr.'s car appeared to
have the 22-year-old at gunpoint as another officer who had just
shattered his windshield began to drag him from the vehicle, according
to one of the other officers' body cameras. Civil rights attorney Ben
Crump and other lawyers presented a still photo taken from the footage
during a news conference in Chicago.
They called it one of many discrepancies from initial police accounts as
they called for the officers involved to be fired and said a federal
lawsuit was in the works.
“Read the police report. Watch the video. And see if they are telling
the truth," Crump said. “They don't add up.”
McNeil says he was traumatized and suffered a brain injury
McNeil's video — from a camera mounted inside his car — shows that glass
shards flew into McNeil’s chin as he sat still in the car. An officer
then struck him in the face and then punched him in the head seconds
after he was pulled outside. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil
was punched six more times in the hamstring of his right thigh, a police
report states.
Crump and other members of McNeil's legal team say they believe there’s
more video that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has not made public.
McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized. It also left him with a
brain injury, and he required several stiches after his tooth broke and
pierced his lip, his attorneys said. He and his lawyers spoke at the
annual convention of the National Bar Association, the nation's largest
association of Black attorneys and judges.
Ahead of the news conference, Crump led a prayer with McNeil and his
mother.
“That day I was telling the truth,” McNeil told reporters. “I was being
held at gunpoint and I didn’t feel safe.”
A Jacksonville Sheriff's Office spokesperson said Tuesday that “due to
pending litigation, we would be unable to speak further on the
incident.”
The sheriff has defended the officers, saying the videos lack full
context
After McNeil's video of the Feb. 19 traffic stop drew millions of views
on the Internet earlier this month, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters
pushed back on some of the claims made by the lawyers.
The sheriff, who is Black, said McNeil had been repeatedly told to exit
the vehicle. And, though he earlier had his car door open while talking
with an officer, he later closed it and appeared to keep it locked for
about three minutes before the officers forcibly removed him, the video
shows.
Waters said the cellphone camera footage from inside the car “does not
comprehensively capture the circumstances surrounding the incident."
Cameras “can only capture what can be seen and heard,” the sheriff said
at a news conference in Florida last week. “So much context and depth
are absent from recorded footage because a camera simply cannot capture
what is known to the people depicted in it.”
[to top of second column]
|
William McNeil Jr., left, along with his mother Latoya Solomon,
center, and attorney Sue-Ann Robinson, right, look on during a press
conference Tuesday, July 29, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)
McNeil had been pulled over and accused of not having his headlights
on in inclement weather, even though it was daytime, his lawyers
said. Crump said he believes the sheriff's office uses headlights as
a pretext for stopping vehicles driven by Black people. He said his
team has learned that Jacksonville officers cited 78 motorists for
driving without headlights during the past three years, and 63 of
them were Black.
A point of contention in the police report is a claim that McNeil
reached toward an area of the car where deputies later found a knife
during a search of the vehicle after his arrest.
“The suspect was reaching for the floorboard of the vehicle where a
large knife was sitting,” Officer D. Bowers wrote in his report.
Crump said the video shows that McNeil “never reaches for anything.”
A second officer observed in his report that McNeil kept his hands
up as Bowers smashed the window.
Civil rights lawyers accuse police of withholding footage
Last week, the sheriff released video of the violence from a couple
of the officers' body-worn cameras. But Crump on Tuesday accused the
sheriff of selectively releasing some bodycam video from only some
of the officers at the scene with a goal of trying “to explain away
what happened.”
“We know there are other videos that exist that we do not have,” he
said. “We don’t think this is the only officer who drew his gun.”
The footage released by the sheriff showing the actual arrest is
from two of the officers, but those videos show at least five
officers within a few feet of McNeil as he’s dragged from the car
and handcuffed on the ground. The sheriff also released some bodycam
footage from a third officer, but that video only shows officers
searching McNeil’s car after he was taken into custody.
In the bodycam videos released by the sheriff, it's difficult to see
the punches and strikes and what happened to McNeil when he was on
the ground, partly because the events occurred so close to the
body-worn devices. Some of the police actions were also outside the
frame of those cameras, so they were not clearly captured in the
videos released so far.
“Even when he was handcuffed, they repeatedly slammed his head to
the concrete," Crump said.
Shortly after his arrest, McNeil pleaded guilty to charges of
resisting an officer without violence and driving with a suspended
license, Waters said. The State Attorney’s Office determined that
the officers did not violate any criminal laws, the sheriff said. An
internal sheriff's investigation is ongoing.
McNeil is a biology major who played in the marching band at
Livingstone College, a historically Black Christian college in
Salisbury, North Carolina, Livingstone President Anthony Davis has
said. The arrest occurred in February but didn’t capture much
attention until the video from McNeil’s car-mounted camera went
viral this month.
___
Martin reported from Atlanta.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
