By Nichole Manna | Jaleel Everson says he was heading to the bowling alley to meet with friends when he was pulled over for not using his headlights after nightfall. He soon found himself swarmed by a posse of Jacksonville police officers in multiple cruisers. Cops demanded to know what he had in his car. There were two guns, both legal: one in the glove box, one in the trunk.
Everson says he watched helplessly as officers rummaged through his car without his consent. The officers arrested Everson – who was not a felon – for being a felon in possession of firearms. As he loudly protested and called out for help, he says he was handcuffed, grabbed by the scruff of the neck and flung headlong into a police car, whose door was then slammed into his head, leaving him dizzy and bruised.
Local prosecutors eventually dropped the charges, but only after he’d spent two days in jail and racked up $5,000 in personal medical bills. Everson has a pending complaint against the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
Everson’s case wasn’t captured on cellphone and didn’t go viral like several other such incidents that have put JSO in the news in recent years, but less-publicized complaints of police brutality like his are often settled in small sums that have accumulated to nearly to $2 million in payouts since 2022.
An examination by The Tributary of dozens of previously unpublicized cases of alleged JSO brutality – including a review of arrest reports, hundreds of pages of court records, settlements, depositions of officers, agency policies and interviews with attorneys and their clients – revealed striking patterns in the agency’s conduct:
– JSO officers inconsistently document when they use force against civilians in the streets and in the county jail, a phenomenon driven in part by a vague policy that gives officers broad discretion to decide when to report. In one high-profile case this year, for example, an officer considered his open-handed strike to a man’s face a “tactical” tool and thus not a use of force that needed to be disclosed, even though no policies JSO provided to The Tributary describe such a distinction.
– What JSO policy considers “active physical resistance” – which opens the door to officers using force against civilians – is also vague and often falls short of actual violence. “Resistance” includes behaviors like rolling up sleeves, clenching a fist or jaw, becoming “animated” or tense. Those actions not only invite force but also form the basis for resistance charges that frequently get tacked onto these cases.
– Months later, those charges of resisting police are regularly downgraded or dropped entirely, though not before suspects are taken to jail and have their bond set based in part on those allegations. That – plus whatever welts or bruises are sustained in the encounter with officers – serves as both punishment and deterrent.
– Findings of wrongdoing by JSO’s internal affairs investigations are incredibly rare and findings that officers broke the law even more so.
This past summer, the beating of a Jacksonville man named William McNeil Jr. after he refused a police order to exit his car stirred outrage, both locally and nationally. McNeil was stopped for failing to use his headlights during a daytime rain shower, a seldom-cited law that is disproportionately enforced against drivers like McNeil who are Black, an investigation by The Tributary previously found. He posted video of the violent encounter captured by his dash-mounted camera, and it went viral, renewing long-standing concerns about the way Jacksonville officers employ force, which they call “response to resistance.”
Indeed, after the McNeil video went viral, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters held a press conference defending the officers and releasing body-cam footage portraying the minutes leading up to McNeil’s arrest. That footage showed McNeil refusing to exit the car and asking police to “call your supervisor.” Over time, the officers became increasingly insistent until they smashed his side window, whacked him in the face, and yanked him out of his car, wrestling him to the ground, face-down, while calling him an “idiot.” McNeil had a small amount of marijuana in his pocket, and there was a knife on the floor of the car, but McNeil made no move to reach for it, according to the footage.
The sheriff criticized McNeil for posting the video on social media months after the traffic stop, accusing him of trying to promote an “anti-police agenda,” rather than immediately bringing a complaint directly to the department.
JSO’s own records show that’s usually futile. According to the data on JSO’s website, 135 use-of-force complaints were brought to the department last year. Two complaints were sustained.
After the video was posted, the officer who punched McNeil was stripped of his law enforcement authority “out of an abundance of caution,” Waters said at the news conference. He also said the state attorney had already determined that the officer didn’t break the law.
The Tributary sent a series of questions to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s media relations office about the department’s “response-to-resistance” policy but did not receive an answer or an acknowledgment.
Under the radar
All police departments are the subject of citizen complaints – and such complaints can be wrongheaded or frivolous.
“This is not an easy job,” Waters said at a recent news conference to discuss a use-of-force gone viral. “And it is not getting any easier.”
Those news conferences have become more frequent as the department has repeatedly drawn unwanted attention resulting from complaints by the public, particularly in cases where viral videos of violent encounters, posted on social media, have prompted the sheriff to respond.
These include footage of a wild brawl between deputies and drunk fans at a raucous Florida-Georgia football game, a man who was attacked by a police dog as he appeared to obey an officer’s command to “crawl backward toward me,” a motorist shot in the leg with his own firearm as an officer was pulling it from the man’s holster, and a fleeing suspect punched and kneed repeatedly after he had been dropped by a stun gun.
For every viral video, there are many more use-of-force complaints like Everson’s that stay below the radar because they weren’t caught on a cellphone. They are reflected in claims letters to the department that are part of the process of filing a lawsuit. Since 2022, the department has doled out $1.9 million in these cases – a significant sum considering most individual awards are limited by statute to $200,000.
The Tributary requested and examined three years’ worth of claims letters. They include complaints of people being punched and kicked by officers or bitten by police dogs – sometimes while simply walking in their neighborhood – a man who said he sustained a traumatic brain injury after a stun gun dropped him head-first onto a road, two motorists who claimed they were dragged from their vehicles at gunpoint on bogus hit-and-run charges, and two others who said they were violently slammed to the ground despite complying with police orders.
One woman said she was mauled by a police dog while walking from her vehicle in a Walmart parking lot to the store. The K9 belonged to nearby officers investigating a stolen car complaint unrelated to the bite victim.
In October, a new viral video depicted a fist-throwing melee between an officer and a woman escorting her 9-year-old daughter from the IDEA Bassett school to her vehicle. The woman was an alleged traffic scofflaw with a revoked license who had left her unattended car running – “in the roadway,” according to Waters – while picking up her child from the northside school.
At a news conference, Waters said the woman bit and punched the officer as he tried to detain her. The video showed the woman yelling and appearing to resist and the officer throwing two roundhouse rights while taking the woman to the pavement. Not only was she charged with three felonies, but two others were charged under the state’s newly passed “Halo Law,” which requires bystanders to stay 25 feet clear of a confrontation if commanded to back away.
One of the “Halo Law” arrestees had stooped down to retrieve the woman’s fallen cell phone. It was the first time JSO had enforced the statute.
Ben Crump, attorney for the 9-year-old’s mother, denounced the bystanders’ arrests as a form of police intimidation, saying the 25-foot buffer may prevent future “viral videos” from being recorded.
“If you expose the police brutality, then they want to criminalize you,” Crump said.
The officer was “simply doing his job,” Sheriff Waters said at his news conference, absolving him of wrongdoing. He said the department has no objection to bystanders recording arrests as long as they don’t interfere or stand too close.
Data shows patterns
In 2019, three years before Waters became sheriff, a federal judge riffled through more than a decade’s worth of cases of alleged brutality by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and declared that JSO had, since 2004, “engaged in the practice of using excessive force on Jacksonville residents,” adding that the city “took no corrective steps to remedy the officers’ actions.”
Six years after that condemnation, the words of Senior District Judge Harvey Schlesinger still resonate with many residents.
“I haven’t seen much change,” said Matt Kachergus, a criminal and civil rights attorney in Jacksonville. “If anything, it seems to have gotten worse.”
In the past 16 months, the public has witnessed at least eight use-of-force cases that either went viral through social media posts or surfaced only because of independent reporting by local news outlets. In other instances, JSO selectively disclosed information about critical cases.
Among them is the April death of Charles Faggart, a 31-year-old chef who was booked into the county jail, run by JSO, only to wind up hospitalized five days later, battered, bloodied, and dying, the result of a clash with corrections officers. A stun gun barb was still embedded in his back.
In Faggart’s case, Waters only initially announced that a man had been seriously injured at the jail and that he’d suspended eight corrections officers and one sergeant. The Tributary later discovered Faggart’s identity, the extent of his injuries – some of which contradicted JSO’s account – and the misdemeanor charges that had landed him at the jail in the first place.
The FBI has taken the lead in the criminal investigation over Faggart’s death and this summer issued nearly a dozen grand jury subpoenas to first responders who took Faggart to UF Health from the jail.
According to Kachergus, hideous incidents can happen because Jacksonville officers are trained not to de-escalate disputes but to do the opposite.
“Their training under the use of force, defensive tactics, is to always display one level of force above what the subject is,” he said. “I think it’s problematic because you have a lot of situations where you wouldn’t need to use force if cooler heads prevail.”
When use-of-force cases do go viral, the sheriff promptly holds press conferences where he utters one line like a mantra: “The use of force is always ugly. But that doesn’t mean it was unlawful or contrary to policy.” He then often counters the cellphone footage with what was captured by officers’ body-worn cameras. When the race of the subject is brought up, as is sometimes the case, Waters points out that he is Black and has no interest in singling out Black residents for abuse.
But the majority of complaints are never addressed publicly, because they aren’t captured by cellphones.
Michael Sampson, the executive director of the Jacksonville Community Action Committee, which was founded as an activist group in 2017, has watched how Jacksonville sheriff’s officers react to force for years. He said JSO operates in a silo. While Waters releases body camera footage soon after an officer kills someone, there are other aspects of policing and how his department operates that are kept quiet, he said.
“When you’re closed off to public scrutiny, why would you be proactive in investigating yourself?” he said. “I think the sheriff has hired media professionals to help him create the image he wants. Obviously, force is ugly, but when he says that, he’s also already basically saying, ‘It’s justified’ before any investigation is finished.”
In press conferences, Waters often encourages the public to file complaints against officers directly with the department for investigation. He said the McNeil incident, which happened months before the video became public, would have been investigated promptly had he come forward right away.
But the lack of sustained complaints in 2024 was no fluke. On its website, JSO reported no sustained cases in 2021 and 2022, but noted that some complaints were still under investigation at the time the report was published. The Tributary asked for updated data from those years, but the agency did not respond.
There is little reliable national data to determine whether Jacksonville’s lack of sustained use-of-force complaints is normal. A compilation of national statistics in 2002 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that roughly 8% of use-of-force complaints were sustained. But questions were raised about the accuracy and consistency of the numbers, coming from various departments with different methodologies.
Matt Hickman, a Seattle University professor and a former Bureau of Justice Statistics statistician, said it’s not unusual for a department to have very low sustained complaints of force by the public.
“Complaints from the public are more complicated because a person may feel that the force an officer uses is excessive – there are certainly people who think if a police officer touches them, it’s excessive,” he said. “Our understanding of what is and isn’t force is different based on who you are. There’s the agency and their policy, the courts, and the view of the public, and those are not in alignment at all.”
Asked if he would advise his clients to file complaints, Kachergus said, generally, yes – the department should still have an opportunity to investigate and perhaps remediate the situation.
However, he added, “It’s been my experience over the years, particularly under the current administration, that that’s not what happens. They try to whitewash, for lack of a better term, the problematic behavior of its officers.”
Kachergus represents Allison Fierro, a 55-year-old woman whose face cracked when a detention officer used a “straight-arm-bar” takedown to slam her into the ground after she threw her bedroll down a jail hallway.
Fierro went to Mayo Hospital for treatment after she was released from jail. An internal affairs investigation was begun when hospital officials called 911.
Despite officers failing to fill out a response-to-resistance form, no one was disciplined, according to records and Kachergus.
Fierro did receive a short note from Waters expressing his “regret” that her experience at his jail was “unfavorably perceived.”
Two stops in two days
Under JSO policy, only force that results in injuries or that involves a weapon such as a firearm or stun gun must be documented, making it possible to employ force without writing a response-to-resistance report and having it reviewed by superiors.
“This policy creates a setting that promotes its officers to engage in illegal or excessive use of force without the fear of encountering any repercussions or consequences, nor the obligation to report such actions,” attorneys for McNeil, who pleaded guilty to resisting arrest without violence and driving with a suspended license, wrote in their lawsuit against the city.
In 14 cases that The Tributary most closely examined, officers didn’t document force four times, including the incident involving 28-year-old Jaleel Everson, despite his reporting that he had been left dizzy and hurt after a police car door was slammed into his head during the traffic stop that led to his arrest.
For Everson, it was actually the second stop in a two-day period. The first, on Feb. 18, 2023, was also for a “malfunction” of his headlights on the rental car he was driving. Several officers were involved in the stop, including one who asked Everson if he had any firearms. He said yes.
He was let go without any kind of citation.
The next day, less than two miles from where he had been stopped the first time, Everson was pulled over again for the same infraction just before 8 p.m. During his initial conversation with the officer who pulled him over, at least four more cruisers pulled up, Everson said. He went through the same conversation with a different officer: yes, he had firearms, yes, they were legal.
This time, when he was removed from the vehicle, he was handcuffed and told that he was a convicted felon and unable to possess a firearm. He was under arrest.
“I immediately was like, ‘No, I’m not, I’m not a felon. You need to check again’,” Everson said. “They were adamant I was a felon, and I got scared. The fear of death came into my heart because I knew I wasn’t a felon, so I started screaming for help and yelling at the top of my lungs.”
The more he screamed, the rougher he said the officers got. He felt someone forcefully grab the back of his neck and shove him into the patrol car headfirst. His head slammed onto the plastic backseat, and eventually his body was stretched across the bench. Both back doors were open while he lay there, he said. An officer at one of the passenger doors slammed it, knocking into Everson’s head. He said he started to feel dizzy, and his neck intensely hurt.
Once at the jail, Everson said his continued requests to go to the ER were denied. He was incarcerated for two days on charges of resisting without violence, open carrying of weapons, and two counts of possession of a firearm by a felon.
At his first appearance, during which he said a prosecutor argued for the judge to set a $150,000 bond, Everson protested again that he was falsely arrested. The attorneys and judge double-checked the records and finally confirmed that he was right – although Everson had felony arrests when he was 15, according to court records, including for assault with a deadly weapon, adjudication was withheld, meaning he was not a convicted felon.
The Tributary asked for a copy of any response-to-resistance form filled out after Everson’s arrest and was told there were no responsive records.
The arrest report says that Everson continually resisted by “bracing himself against [the] vehicle and also tensing his muscles, while screaming for help and stating he was lawfully allowed to resist an illegal arrest.”
No action has been taken against the officers who arrested him, Everson said.
One of the same officers was just named as a defendant in an excessive-force lawsuit filed by a 62-year-old man who said he was punched and slammed to the ground by police during a dispute over his car being towed. As with Everson, the man was arrested, but the charges were dropped by the state attorney’s office.
None of JSO’s internal affairs databases show an investigation stemming from Everson’s arrest – though it’s unclear if JSO would start its own investigation without receiving a complaint first from Everson or his attorney.
Everson was released without having to post bail, but the charges against him weren’t dropped for another three months. Everson, a truck driver, says he lost his job as a result of the ordeal.
Nichole Manna is The Tributary’s senior investigative reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org.
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‘Force is ugly, but’: JSO seldom punishes cops accused of abuse