by Daniel Johnson
August 4, 2025
McNeil’s lawyer Benjamin Crump said his client’s video offered the public a crucial alternate angle.
William McNeil’s decision to place his cell phone in a holder above his dashboard just before Florida police broke his driver’s side window during a traffic stop added a new perspective that challenges the officers’ body cam footage, prompting the police department to investigate their conduct.
McNeil is a young Black man whose video of his violent arrest by Jacksonville, Florida, police officers in February went viral. The video, recorded by McNeil himself from his dashboard camera, showed officers repeatedly punching and slamming him to the ground during a traffic stop. While some traffic-related charges were dropped, McNeil pleaded guilty the day after his arrest to driving with a suspended license and resisting an officer without violence.
McNeil is now planning to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police. Attorneys Ben Crump and Harry Daniels have been retained to represent him in this case.
According to The Associated Press, McNeil’s decision to record the incident highlights the challenges of relying on a single source of video evidence. When only police bodycam footage is available, it may give a limited perspective. While videos of incidents like those involving George Floyd and Rodney King have raised awareness, they do not always guarantee legal justice. However, such recordings do provide victims or their families with an opportunity to share their own account of events.
Crump recently made clear in comments to the media that the fact that his client recorded from another angle gave the public another point of reference.
“We got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context, what driving while Black is in America. All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement. 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,” Crump said.
As Crump noted, there are some notable discrepancies between the police report and the video taken by McNeil.
According to McNeil’s lawyers, the officers pulled him over because his headlights should have been on due to bad weather. Moments after his video camera captured him asking what he did, an officer smashed his window, struck him as he sat in the seat, pulled him to the ground, and struck him six more times in his right thigh while he was on the ground.
The police report, however, did not document the punches to McNeil’s head, and McNeil’s arresting officer clinically described what happened to McNeil in his report: “Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.”
McNeil went on to release his version of the arrest video in July, which went viral, prompting the sheriff’s office to open an investigation that is currently ongoing.
Another of McNeil’s lawyers, Harry Daniels, condemned the actions of the officers, offering up his assessment of what led to the situation as he praised his client’s poise in a stressful situation.
“On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is. 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,” Daniels said.
He continued, saying that the traffic stop was not only racially motivated, but “it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful.”
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