By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Civil rights advocates condemned the sheriff’s department in Jacksonville, Florida, after a video of officers punching a Black man and throwing him to the ground during a February traffic stop went viral online.
William McNeil Jr, 22, recorded the video as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car after deputies pulled him over. In the video, he asks to speak to supervisors and questions why he was stopped.
An officer then smashes the driver’s side window, orders McNeil to exit the car and hits him in his face. Another officer pulls him from the vehicle and throws him to the ground as other deputies surround him.
U.S. media outlets reported the video on Monday and Tuesday after McNeil posted it on social media.
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the public should not rush to judgment and that officers had asked McNeil several times to come out of his vehicle.
McNeil’s lawyers and civil rights group Black Lives Matter said the video showed police brutality.
“This should not have happened,” Black Lives Matter said on X. “But the police have never treated Black people like human beings.”
Waters told reporters that reviews of the incident were ongoing but the State Attorney’s Office determined that none of the officers violated criminal law.
Waters added that D. Bowers, the officer who broke the car window and punched McNeil, was stripped of his law enforcement authority pending the outcome of the reviews.
McNeil was arrested and charged with resisting arrest, marijuana possession, driving with a suspended license, not wearing a seatbelt and not having headlights in bad weather, court records cited by ABC News showed.
He was sentenced to and served two days in jail, the report added.
In a police report, Bowers said McNeil was reaching toward an area where there was a knife. McNeil’s attorneys – lawyers Ben Crump and Harry Daniels – said their client was never combative.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
