Given that we now live in what is effectively a racist police state in which people of color can be targeted for arrest, beatings, and deportation by agents of the government, some masked, without even the semblance of due process, this recent experience of a young Black student serves as a telling symbol of how low we have sunk.
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.
William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can’t clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
…McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver’s seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states.
McNeil happened to have his phone camera running in his car which is why this video is available showing how the police lied. You can see the video in the above link.
Note also that the pretext for the stop was that “his headlights should have been on due to bad weather.” As pretexts go, this was about as flimsy as it gets since people routinely ignore that policy. I have seen people not turning on their lights while driving in a blinding snowstorm. Do you imagine that any person who is white would be stopped for such a reason?
It is thanks to the existence of this video that the police lies and brutality have been exposed.
The pretext as given forgot the “while not white” part.
As this happened in Florida, I’m sure the responsible officer will be held accountable and swiftly prosecuted.
Cameras under our control and/or cameras that only wirelessly communicate through an encrypted tunnel to a device we control, sure.
I’m not putting a camera in my car that just uploads everything to the publically-accessible internet. That sounds like an invitation to mass-surveyers to track where I’m at at all times.
ive been considering a dashcam.
ive seen youtube shorts where semis or regular drivers have people cut them off and force them to rear end them, for some insurance scam or something. they catch the scammer on dashcam. lol.
i know the likely hood is very small that it will happen to me. but it also catches other crazy drivers too, which seem to be increasing in numbers. people speeding and weaving in and out of lanes etc.
anyone know how cutting someone off so they rear end you for insurance scam works? it doesn’t make sense to me. their car is damaged, needs work, insurance will pay for work. but how does the scammer make money? what? they don’t fix their trashed car? tail lights broken, bumpers smashed. they’d get pulled over by the next cop that drives up behind them.
Robbo @3
I remembered a newspaper article about the so-called “Swoop-and-Squat” insurance fraud. A quick search led me
here.
Basically a car stuffed with people merge closely in front of a victim’s (likely expensive) car. A co-conspirator’s car swoops in front of the first, to justify hard braking and causing the victim to be judged at fault for rear-ending the car in front of them. The occupants then present to various medical fraudsters to generate as much billing as possible for payouts from the victim’s insurance company.