Mom of Teen Assaulted By SAPD Officer Speaks Out

Reading about police officers using excessive force, especially on people of color, is almost a daily occurrence these days. It’s the kind of nightmare you hope to never experience yourself as a parent. It’s also the kind of nightmare that seems to be happening with more frequency (or at the very least, that is now being caught on camera). In one of the most recent incidents, police were dispatched to a birthday party in San Antonio, Texas. Instead, a video shows an SAPD officer punching a young teenage girl. Now, the mother of that teen is speaking out about the incident.

April Johnson is the mother of the 14-year-old who was seen being punched in the face and then manhandled by multiple officers in a video that has since gone viral. The incident occurred just after a quinceañera (a special birthday party for 15 year old girls), when police were called for an unrelated incident. According to Johnson, her daughter was trying to calm down the situation between other attendees when police arrived. In the video, you see the girl (in a purple dress) walking among the group when an officer appears to come right up to her and punches her multiple times, just before more officers close in to grab the girl and take her out of the camera’s field of vision.

”If you can’t handle your job, don’t do it,” Johnson told KENS5 News of the police officers in question. “If you have that much aggression, maybe you should have called in that day because there’s no point, the way you hit a 14-year-old child…You hit this child in front of everyone and you exposed this child in front of everyone. You need to be taken off the streets.”

Here’s the full video of the incident:

[youtube_iframe id=”_yxN3WZ_z80”]

Police brutality is nothing new to experience for minorities. SATX4, a Black Lives Matter-aligned group in San Antonio, also recently released a statement about the incident:

”As a mother, to sit there and be helpless and you can’t help your child, that’s the worst feeling in the world,” Johnson added. ”I don’t want this to happen to anybody else’s child, [for] anybody else to feel what I’m feeling right now. Nobody should have to go through that.”

Here’s hoping for some justice for Johnson’s daughter.

(Image: YouTube / sanantohomie)

Similar Posts