A Black North Carolina police officer who defended George Floyd in a viral TikTok video has been fired from the Greensboro Police Department after an accusation he violated the department’s social media policy by wearing his uniform in the video. Former officer Ja’Quay Williams said in a TikTok video posted to YouTube Thursday that he’s been on administrative leave for two months while the department investigated his TikTok account. When the investigation was completed, he was relieved of duty.
“Upset, confused, I mean I felt all the emotion,” Williams said in the video.
He earlier said Floyd’s death “disgusted” him. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father, died in Minneapolis police custody May 25 after a white cop was shown kneeling on his neck for more than eight minutes while three other cops on the scene helped. Floyd told officers repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe.
"I am disgusted with the things that happened in Minneapolis. Period, point blank, things could have went way different," Williams said. "At the end of the day, let's talk facts. Guy's on the ground. He's laying on his stomach. He has handcuffs on. It’s four of y’all one of him. Four of y’all, one of him. Who has control of the situation?”
Williams added that as an officer, “you are a first-responder […] So if in the midst of you trying to gain compliance, someone is hurt, you have to render aid,” he said. “So somebody’s saying, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,’ you don’t think to yourself ‘oh my God, this guy can’t breathe, he might die, let me render aid?’” Williams said his desire to step up and do what’s right is why he became a cop. “If I see wrong happening, wrong is not happening in my presence, right. I’m going to check it,” he said.
He told journalist Tamron Hall in a Good Housekeeping interview in June that soon after releasing the viral video, he was called and told to go to Internal Affairs. When he arrived to a meeting with a captain and another department employee, Williams said he was asked to take the video down and told that it violated the department’s social media policy. Williams said after the meeting, he tried to put the video, then posted to numerous social media platforms, on private, but by then blogs had already started to pick up the story.
“The video got out there and the video took off, and I’m glad because it moved officers to start to talk about it,” Williams said. “That was the whole point of it, was raising that 1) I’m a Black man, always gon’ be a Black man, no matter the color the uniform, no matter the uniform that I’m in. I’m always gon’ be a Black man. So for you to feel like you can try and silence me because I have a certain position, it won’t happen.”
Williams said he remembers hearing the verdict in the murder case against George Zimmerman, the Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who was ultimately found not guilty after fatally shooting Black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin Feb. 26, 2012 on Martin’s trip back from a convenience store to purchase candy and juice. Williams said he was at his father-in-law’s 50th birthday celebration when the verdict was announced and he remembers hugging his wife and her three sisters, thinking: “How do we get in front of this? This is happening over and over and over.” His solution was to become a cop to “interrupt” things.
His family has started a GoFundMe account to support him. “He will be seeking legal representation, so i am attempting to raise funds to cover any costs that the future may bring,” organizer Diamond Williams said on the page.
The Greensboro Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
