William McNeil Jr. became the talk of the internet last year when a viral video captured by his cell phone showed him being attacked by a Jacksonville, Fla., police officer during a traffic stop. The overly aggressive cop, now identified as Officer D.J. Bowers, broke McNeil’s car window and punched him in the face even though he was under no threat whatsoever. BOSSIP covered the story and the subsequent outrage, and today, we have an update on what, if any, disciplinary action D.J. Bowers faced.
According to News4JAX, Officer Bowers was cleared of accusations of unlawful use of force following an internal investigation by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (no shock there, the call was coming from inside the house). However, Bowers was given a “written reprimand level 1” for not including the fact that he used physical force, a strike to the face, against McNeil in the form of a punch in his official police report. That level 1 citation is essentially a slap on the wrist that holds no true punitive value. Bowers has been restored to regular police duty after being reassigned to working the telephones in the JSO Tele-Serv Unit since the July incident. No suspension, no loss of pay, no criminal charges will be sought.
Ubiquitous civil rights attorney Ben Crump and his legal partner, Harry Daniels have filed a federal lawsuit against Bowers and the other officers on the scene, in addition to Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters and the city of Jacksonville itself. McNeil suffered numerous injuries after he was punched in the face; officers slammed him on the concrete, fracturing his tooth, lacerating his lip, and he reportedly suffered a clinical brain injury from the blunt force trauma.
The Internal Affairs (IA) investigation, Bowers tried to excuse the absence of the punch as a “distraction strike” that he didn’t feel measured up to an *actual* use of force. IA simply cited the glaring omission as a “policy/work-standards violation.”
We hope McNeil gets every red cent out of this janky a** sheriff’s officer.
