A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.

The footage shows that William McNeil Jr., 22, was sitting in the driver’s seat, asking to speak to the Jacksonville deputies’ supervisor, when authorities broke his window, punched him in the face, pulled him from the vehicle, punched him again and threw him to the ground.

  • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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    14 hours ago

    Because if I fucking recall, George Floyd was not fighting back.

    Yeah, and that’s why the cop is in prison right now alongside everyone who was with him that day. That was my point.

    Pre-2014, charges for the cops were very rare even when they straight-up just shot somebody for more or less no reason. After that, it was intermittent, until 2020 was the inflection point where charges became practically universal, and also, those big walls of names of people who hadn’t done a damn thing who the cops had killed started drying up, because stuff had actually changed.

    There’s a lot that still needs to change, a lot of bad things baked into the system still. But of course some dickheads can only hold one fairly simple type of world model in their head at one time, and so whenever any type of police interaction goes sideways in any manner, even one like this where it is objectively about 90% the guy in the driver’s seat who causes the whole issue in the first place, they start screaming BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER like that’s going to help everything get better.

    This guy isn’t solving police brutality. He is helping to justify it, by diluting the examples of people who actually didn’t do anything, and providing a good example for people who want to say Breonna Taylor deserved it or whatever. Stop making him out as making some bold anti-racist stand because of what some other people did, successfully.

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      14 hours ago

      He didnt do anything wrong - he was entirely within his rights to ask for a supervisor.

      Holy shit.

      I dont think I have any capacity to put up with someone so painfully and wilfully fucking ignorant.

      • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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        14 hours ago

        He didnt do anything wrong - he was entirely within his rights to ask for a supervisor.

        Absolutely (although they’re not obligated to fulfill the request… a lot of departments will, partly because when the stop is getting complicated they may want a supervisor to show up there anyway.) But anyway, that doesn’t absolve him of the requirement to provide an ID. He was arrested for failing to provide the ID, not for asking for a supervisor. Asking for the supervisor was a-OK, and if he’d done that while handing over his ID, he would have been fine.