The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office cop who stopped William McNeil Jr. in February — leading to a violent encounter that has reignited long-simmering questions about the agency’s treatment of Black residents — was prompted not by McNeil’s allegedly darkened headlights in the rain or his lack of a seatbelt, the reasons Officer Donald Bowers offered that winter day.
There was a third, undisclosed reason that Bowers stopped McNeil: The officer later told integrity investigators that he saw McNeil’s SUV leave what JSO believed to be a drug house.
This explanation, offered for the first time in State Attorney Melissa Nelson’s office’s legal analysis of the stop, released Wednesday, raises questions about whether Bowers was interested in searching the car regardless of McNeil’s compliance that day.
McNeil’s attorneys, Harry Daniels and Ben Crump, called the report “little more than an attempt to justify the actions of Officer Bowers and his fellow officers after the fact.”
“Frankly, we expected nothing less especially after Sheriff Waters announced their conclusions more than three weeks before the report was issued,” the attorneys wrote in a statement. “Since they are unwilling to seek justice, we will have to request that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate this incident and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.”
The report says the State Attorney’s Office interviewed Bowers and Officer D. Miller, who was called as backup, but also notes that investigators did not talk with McNeil.
McNeil’s refusal to comply with Bowers’ commands — instead, he asked the officer repeatedly to call a supervisor — has been highlighted by defenders of JSO, including Nelson’s office, as the reason the stop escalated. In multiple press appearances, Sheriff T.K. Waters has repeatedly defended the officer and his agency but said nothing about McNeil’s presence at an alleged drug house being a factor in the stop. Instead, he considered it a lawful stop based on traffic rules. Nelson agreed that the stop was lawful and that McNeil should have complied with the demands Bowers gave him.
Bowers did not disclose to McNeil that he was seen leaving a drug house.
After video of the traffic stop taken from McNeil’s phone went viral this summer, Waters announced that Nelson’s office had cleared his officers of any criminal violations. The Wednesday report explains that finding over 16 pages of legal analysis and a review of the evidence.
Nelson’s prosecutors said in their Wednesday report that the new information about McNeil leaving a suspected drug house “refutes the assertion that this traffic stop was based on race.” The report says officers have made three controlled buys from the house this year and that it was under surveillance when McNeil was spotted leaving.
JSO officers found marijuana in McNeil’s pocket.
Nelson said the “narrative surrounding this incident has stirred up misinformation and, frankly, dangerous advice on how to conduct oneself during a stop.”
“The criminal justice system provides many avenues for citizens to challenge the actions of police officers; however, physical resistance is not one of them,” she said in a statement.
The stop also carries the hallmarks of “pretextual” policing — a known tactic in which police use minor traffic violations to initiate stops with the true intentions of fishing for other crimes. The use of pretextual stops is controversial and police-reform advocates argue the tactic leads police to disproportionately target Black drivers, that such stops fuel community mistrust, and that they create unnecessarily dangerous interactions between cops and civilians.
More than three years of traffic data analyzed by the The Tributary show JSO rarely pulls drivers over for no headlights in the rain, the alleged offense Bowers initially cited when he stopped McNeil. Of the 78 such citations JSO has issued since 2021, Black drivers accounted for 63% of them — double the proportion of Jacksonville’s population that Black residents make up.
“It’s clear JSO used a pretextual stop to pull Mr. McNeil over and when he asked what he did wrong and for a supervisor, the cops got upset and aggressive because he dared to question them before doing what was asked,” said state Rep. Angie Nixon, a frequent JSO critic.
“Not complying does not justify the brutality Mr. McNeil faced and the trauma he has suffered by those sworn to protect and serve.”
Video of the February stop, filmed from McNeil’s cellphone, went viral earlier in July and prompted Waters to defend his agency’s handling of the arrest.
After he was stopped, McNeil opened his door to ask why he was pulled over, and explained that his window didn’t work. Bowers told McNeil that his headlights weren’t on during the rain. There is no rain in the video, but there are drops on McNeil’s vehicle.
The lack of active rain for the duration of Bowers’ body-worn video has been noted by McNeil’s attorneys: The law only requires headlights on in rain, fog or smoke. Nelson’s office doesn’t attempt to answer whether it had been raining at the time of the stop, observing only that there are rain drops visible on the SUV.
McNeil shut his door and asked multiple times if the officer could call his supervisor. Bowers called for backup and while Miller talked with McNeil through the passenger window, Bowers broke McNeil’s drive side window and hit him in the face — a move he later said he was trained to do.
“Bowers described the distraction strike as a tactic he was taught during his time as a narcotics officer when conducting the arrest of a vehicle’s occupant,” the report says, adding that Bowers said he needed to unlock the door and unbuckle McNeil, so “his intended purpose in using this tactic was not to injure McNeil, but to distract him so that they could take control of McNeil.”
Bowers did not write about the hit in the arrest report because he considered it a tactic, not use of force, according to prosecutors.
The SAO Investigation confirmed this technique is taught in the Defensive Tactics curriculum taught at the Northeast Florida Criminal Justice Training and Education Center.
In his interview with JSO, Bowers said he couldn’t see where McNeil’s hands were during the stop and that he didn’t know if he had a weapon. The video taken inside the car by McNeil’s phone shows that he remained still during the conversation and kept his hands on his lap. He raised them when he was asked, then crossed his arms for a moment before raising them again.
“The memo asks us to ignore our own eyes by accepting the officers’ excuse that Mr. McNeil was reaching for a knife in the floorboard when he is never seen reaching for anything in either the body camera video or the video posted on social media,” McNeil’s attorneys said in their statement.
Officers only noticed the knife on the floorboard after they’d pulled McNeil from the car and cuffed him.
Nichole Manna is The Tributary’s senior investigative reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org.
