Jason Hess Identified Trying to Comfort Child Whose Mom was Assaulted

Blast Zone No. 34455 - 1 Comment
Set Up On:
Category: Police - City
Last Known Crime Scene Address:
535 Portland Ave.

The Rochester Police Department recently released footage taken form the body camera of Officer Dakota Jason Hess. That footage is embedded in the video below and begins at 53:45. In the bottom right hand corner you can see a unique identifier ending in JH1774. 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 Hess' case the second unique identifier was used and we were able to match the badge number and initials with publicly available information about Hess. Open Oversight hosts an extensive database of RPD officers. When we searched for badge number 1774 we found a single record for an officer named Jason J. Hess (https://openoversight.com/officer/32954). That name was also found on the RPD Open Data Portal website where it is one of nine officers with the initials JH (https://data-rpdny.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/rpd-police-personnel/data?geometry=-78.869%2C43.003%2C-76.356%2C43.353&page=28). From that we are certain that the video in question was taken from the body camera of Jason Hess.


Officer Hess did not arrive on the scene until after the mother had been body slammed and pepper sprayed. His video is not long and he spends most of it trying to comfort the child. At one point he started reading her a children's book, but that may have done more harm than good. We could see that kid having a PTSD attack the next time some guy trying to act like a fatherly figure tried to read her a story, but depending on that guy's proclivities that might be a good thing and she will scream like a kid is supposed to when a stranger tries to establish a relationship with them like that. Other than that we can't find anything that he may have done wrong because he was not present in time to do anything about the woman being assaulted.

He might as well have said "sorry we just body slammed your mom, pepper sprayed her, and took her to jail, here let me read you a story"

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