Officer Who Body-Slammed Sixth Grader Fired For ‘Unwarranted’ Assault

This past week, a video depicting a Texas school police officer body-slamming a 12-year-old girl went viral resulting in officer Joshua Kehm’s termination this morning, after an investigation concluded that his physical response was “absolutely unwarranted.”

As Inquisitr reported previously, the video went viral last week, and amid a firestorm of intense criticism, Officer Joshua Kehm was fired this morning as a result of his violent physical assault against a middle-school aged girl.

“We understand that situations can sometimes escalate to the point of requiring a physical response; however, in this situation, we believe that the extent of the response was absolutely unwarranted,” said Superintendent Pedro Martinez in a statement released this morning.

The video depicting officer Kehm lifting up a girl and slamming her face first on the ground made the rounds on social media this past week where the video and the officer’s response was met with widespread outrage. Janissa Valdez, the sixth grade girl who was allegedly body slammed by the Texas police officer in the video, told NBC News that she was just as shocked as everyone else by the physical response from the police officer.

“Mom, I wasn’t fighting, why would he do that?” Janissa reportedly asked her mother after the event, still dazed from being bodily thrown on to the concrete floor by a grown man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRw8pPFSUrA

After the video began to circulate, Officer Joshua Kehm was immediately placed on administrative leave, pending a full investigation. According to The Washington Post, Officer Kehm’s terminated was in large part the result of his own report being inconsistent with the events presented in the YouTube video. Kehm reportedly misrepresented events, and the video contracted his account.

“Additionally the officer’s report was inconsistent with the video and it was also delayed, which is not in accordance with the general operating procedures of the police department. We want to be clear that we will not tolerate this behavior,” said Pedro Martinez, Superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District.

The event itself was, reportedly, the result of a group of girls including Janissa Valdez meeting after class to discuss comments another student had allegedly made about Janissa. According to The Washington Post, other students began to congregate in the halls, waiting to see if the girls were going to fight. The congregation caught the attention of school police officer Joshua Kehm.

“I was walking toward her, telling her, ‘let’s go somewhere else,’ because there was a lot of people. Then that’s when other people came over and the officer thought we were going to fight,” said Janissa Valdez, the 12-year-old girl who was reportedly body-slammed by police officer Joshua Kehm.

Student safety must be a priority for administrator and officers. School police officer body-slam 12-year-old girl. https://t.co/lO0qB2fL2j

— MAEC (@MAEC4Ed) April 11, 2016

The video was released to YouTube last week, and while the school district declined to identify the girl in the video, Janissa’s mother came forward to speak to the media about her daughter’s treatment at the hands of officer Kehm. After Janissa was identified in the media, civil rights groups came forward to support Janissa and her family, expressing that the actions of officer Kehm – allegedly body-slamming an adolescent girl – served as proof that police officers should be removed from schools.

“It is unconscionable for a 12-year-old student involved in a verbal altercation to be brutalized and dehumanized in this manner. Once again a video captured by a student offers a sobering reminder that we cannot entrust school police officers to intervene in school disciplinary matters that are best suited for trained educators and counselors,” said Judith Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization.

Dianis cited the video of Janissa Valdez being body-slammed by police officer Joshua Kehm as an example of police overreach, and compared the incident to two other incidents where students were body-slammed or subjected to excessive force by school police officers.

[Photo by Shutterstock/Mike Focus]