The Rochester Police Department recently released footage taken form the body camera of Officer Dakota Vanbrederode. That footage is embedded in the video below and begins at 13:31. In the bottom right hand corner you can see a unique identifier ending in DV2585. The RPD has two ways of formatting the unique identifiers in body camera videos released to the public. The first is with a random number in which case it is useless for the public when it comes to identifying the officer wearing it. The second is with the officer's initials and badge number following the _ character. In Vanbrederode's case the second unique identifier was used and we were able to match the badge number and initials with publicly available information about Vanbrederode. Open Oversight hosts an extensive database of RPD officers. When we searched for badge number 2585 we found a single record for an officer named Dakota J. Vanbrederode (https://openoversight.com/officer/33516). That name was also found on the RPD Open Data Portal website where it is the only name with the initials DV (https://data-rpdny.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/rpd-police-personnel/data?geometry=-78.869%2C43.003%2C-76.356%2C43.353&page=68). We are also certain that Vanbrederode was on the scene because as the screenshot taken from another officer's camera at 57:40 clearly shows the name D. J. Vanbrederode on an officer's uniform at the scene. From that we are certain that the video in question was taken from the body camera of Dakota Vanbrederode.
In this next section we will critique Vanbrederode's conduct once we are finished identifying as many other officers as we can. So far we can tell you that he was not the officer that body slammed the mother because she was already on the ground when he arrived at the scene. He was however there when she was pepper sprayed by another officer and can be heard at about 38:50 complaining to her about being pepper sprayed as well after taking her to jail.
UPDATE: After identifying Officer Ethan Paszko as the body slammer (https://copblaster.com/blast/34456/rpd-officer-ethan-paszko-idd-as-body-slammer-of-mom-with-3-year-old) it might surprise you that we are going to start off this next part with a little bit of praise for Officer Vanbrederode. At 1:23:35 you can watch surveillance footage from the convenience store. That footage shows that when Vanbrederode arrived on the scene he instantly moved for the child and tried to separate her from her mother. Her mother then managed to break free of Paszko and grab her daughter's hand. This results in a tug of war over the girl between Vanbrederode and the mother as Paszko took her to the ground again. We think that had Vanbrederode not held onto the girl that she would have ended up getting slammed to the pavement with her mother. For that we think that Vanbrederode did the right thing by keeping the child from ending up on the pavement. Where we fault him is that he did not do enough to separate the girl from her mother before she was grabbed. He should have picked her up and gotten her far enough away so that her mom wouldn't have the opportunity to grab her should she free herself of Paszko.
The other issue when it comes to Vanbrederode is that he did not stop Paszko from body slamming the mother a second time, but we see little in the form of opportunities for him to stop Paszko. When he arrives on the scene the woman is already on the ground and most reasonable officers would not have had reason to think that Paszko was so incompetent that he couldn't keep a woman from breaking away from him at that point. When she did break away, Vanbrederode made protecting the child his top priority which we think was the right choice. If the officer is forced to choose between protecting a kid and stopping his partner from using excessive force on a suspect, he should choose to protect the kid. We also noticed that he was tapping Paszko on the side like he was trying to draw his attention to the kid. So, we think that he actively chose to stay with the kid rather than intervene in the the slamming of the mother.
This was not a case like last month when Vanbrederode was caught on camera failing to intervene when fellow Officer Alexander Lombard pepper sprayed a 9 year old girl (https://copblaster.com/blast/34418/rochester-officer-alexander-lombard-idd-pepper-spraying-little-girl) at the direction of Officer Hannah Schneeberger (https://copblaster.com/blast/34415/hannah-schneeberger-idd-as-rochester-officer-pepper-spraying-child). In that case Vanbrederode stood directly behind Schneeberger as she threatened the child with pepper spray. Had Vanbrederode intervened and stopped Schneeberger that probably would have prevented Lombard's attack. His indifference in that matter is enough to convince us that had the child not been present in the case at hand that he probably would not have done anything to stop Paszko from body slamming the woman. We would have blasted Vanbrederode for that by name last month, but we were unable to identify him until we noticed his name tag and badge number in the video below.
According to public records, Dakota J. Vanbrederode is a 24 year old resident of Rochester, New York. He is a registered Republican with no criminal record.