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A dashboard video recorded by a Black college student during a violent traffic stop in Florida has reignited calls for motorists, particularly Black drivers, to install interior cameras as a safeguard during police encounters.
William McNeil Jr. was pulled over in February for allegedly failing to turn on his headlights during bad weather. His mounted dashboard cellphone camera captured the brutal moments that followed, footage that has since gone viral and launched an internal investigation by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
The video clearly shows McNeil calmly asking what he had done wrong, just seconds before an officer shattered his window and began punching him. He was then dragged from the car and beaten repeatedly. The violence, which included head punches, was not reflected in the official police report, which merely stated, “Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.”
However, McNeil’s own recording told a more complete story. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of McNeil’s legal advisors, praised the young man’s foresight in capturing the incident.
“Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 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.
The fallout from the incident has been significant. McNeil’s lawyers allege the sheriff’s office attempted a cover-up, pointing out discrepancies between the bodycam footage and the police reports. The bodycams failed to show critical moments, including the head punches, which only McNeil’s video revealed.
Harry Daniels, another attorney representing McNeil, did not hold back during a press briefing. “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.”
McNeil was left with a brain injury, a broken tooth, and several stitches in his lip.
Experts in law enforcement and criminal justice agree that using dashboard or interior cameras is a necessary and practical step in today’s climate.
“Use technology to your advantage. There’s nothing nefarious about it. It’s actually a smart thing in my opinion,” said Christopher Mercado, a retired New York Police Department lieutenant and now adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, shared similar sentiments.
“I think that’s a form of protection, it’s safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,” Brunson said.
While he acknowledged that such recordings must not escalate tensions, he stressed their protective power.
Brunson has spent the past two decades interviewing young Black men about their police interactions, and noted how video has become a vital form of validation in a society where many still struggle to believe such brutality occurs.
“People who live in a civil society don’t expect to be treated this way by the police. So it’s hard for people who don’t have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens. And that’s where video does play a big part because people can’t deny what they see,” he said.
Despite national conversations and policy changes after the murder of George Floyd, laws regarding recording police encounters remain controversial in some states.
In Louisiana, for example, it is now a crime to approach within 25 feet of an officer under certain conditions.
Sheriff T.K. Waters of Jacksonville, who has publicly commented since the video’s release, claimed that McNeil was told multiple times to exit the vehicle and emphasized the discovery of a knife in the car. Yet, McNeil’s video and the second officer’s report conflict with those claims, showing McNeil with his hands up as the window was broken.
Mercado explained that police body cameras, though useful, often miss vital context due to their limited angles, especially in close-range encounters.
In McNeil’s case, that limitation allowed the violence to go unreported until his personal video surfaced.
“Had it [the head punches] been caught on bodycam, the case would have been investigated right away,” Sheriff Waters admitted in a previous press conference,
McNeil’s arrest now joins a growing archive of violent encounters during routine traffic stops, echoing the trauma captured during the livestream of Philando Castile’s fatal 2016 stop. What’s different now, advocates say, is that personal dashboard and interior cameras offer a critical, independent lens, and increasingly, a necessary one.
By: Joshua Narh