The misdemeanor battery case against Packers running back Josh Jacobs includes surveillance video from a camera in his garage. The police report strongly suggests that the video includes images of the alleged assault.
On Tuesday, Packers G.M. Brian Gutekunst was asked at a press conference whether the team has seen it.
“We have not seen the video,” Gutekunst said, via Rob Demovsky of ESPN. “Again, those are legal things going on right now, so we’ll let those play out. That’s really not for us, but in the appropriate times, if those things become available, we’ll figure that stuff out when that time comes.”
Gutekunst also was asked whether the team needs to see the video before making a decision about Jacobs’s future with the team.
“Again, we’re going to lean on the legal process and let that happen, but we’ll take things as they come,” Gutekunst said.
The situation brings back memories of the weeks preceding the release of the notorious Ray Rice elevator video. The league, as of August 2014, had not seen the video. We argued that it would be easy for the league to get it. It was part of his case file, and Rice ultimately controlled his case file. If the league told Rice he couldn’t play until his lawyer made the video available for review, the league would have quickly gotten it.
It sparked a somewhat spirited debate by phone with a league official. The conversation ended with this prediction: “If you don’t get that video, TMZ eventually will.” (By early September, TMZ had gotten it — and then all hell broke loose.)
In this case, it would be even easier for the league or the team to inspect the video. It came from Jacobs’s house. He owns the footage.
Why wouldn’t the Packers want to see it? Coach Matt LaFleur recently said regarding Jacobs, “[W]hat he tells me, I believe him and I trust him. I’m going to do that until proven otherwise.”
One way to be proven otherwise, or to have LaFleur’s current belief confirmed, would be to tell him to produce the video.
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