Bodycam video appears to show Florida officer aiming a gun at Black student during brutal arrest

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

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.'
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.
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Martin reported from Atlanta.