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By the time Dallas police Officer Christopher Hess responded to a call about a suspicious person one dark morning in 2017, he had faced 10 internal investigations for punching, kneeing, tackling and injuring people over his decade with the department.
Most portrayed the 6-foot-1-inch patrolman with the lineman build as swift with his blows.
Hess said they resisted his commands.
In all but two instances, his accusers were arrested for minor offenses such as public intoxication.
Twice Hess was investigated for potential crimes. At the center of one case was a video that captured him striking a Black man with his fists and knees, dragging him into the street by the handcuffs and slamming his head against a car.
Hess’ violence amounted to “torture” and should have been prosecuted, according to two experts who reviewed the dash-cam footage for The Dallas Morning News.
As with the other cases, the department cleared him of wrongdoing citing insufficient evidence and he remained on patrol.
Hess’ previously unreported complaint history reveals not only shocking patterns of violent behavior but systemic flaws in how the Dallas Police Department investigates its own officers, a three-year News investigation that included a review of thousands of department records found.
Detectives rarely conducted interviews with officers or people who filed complaints, failed to track down civilian witnesses and appeared to take Hess and other officers at their word for why they used force, our analysis shows.
Such practices, experts say, should raise alarms about whether the department has conducted meaningful investigations into allegations of excessive force, especially when public safety and trust in law enforcement hinge on accountability.
“These are the types of problems we see in the internal affairs investigations of police departments that have patterns of misconduct,” Christy Lopez, a former lead investigator for the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, said after reviewing The News’ findings. “When you don’t take these sorts of complaints seriously enough, that’s when a culture of impunity begins to develop, and you get patterns of violating people’s rights.”
On Jan. 18, 2017, two weeks after Hess was cleared in his 10th excessive force case, he arrived at the scene of the suspicious person call: an apartment complex in Old East Dallas.
He joined five officers in surrounding a parked Dodge Journey with their guns drawn. A license plate check showed the SUV was stolen.
Its windows were fogged, but one officer got close enough to see two people sleeping inside. The officers yelled at them to show their hands. When the SUV’s engine started, Hess moved a squad car closer.
The SUV backed up, bumped the squad car, and drove forward, hitting a fence. Then it slowly reversed again. Hess squeezed off 12 rounds, shattering the front passenger window. Another officer, Jason Kimpel, fired once.
Hess’ gunfire killed the driver, Genevive Dawes, a Latina mother of two toddlers. Dawes’ boyfriend Virgilio Rosales and her puppy escaped serious injury.
They could have stopped him. If they had just done their jobs…”
Mary Dawes, mother of Genevive Dawes
Hess violated four policies, including shooting at a moving vehicle, the department found.
Five months later, in June 2017, a grand jury indicted him for aggravated assault. He was the first Dallas police officer to be indicted in a fatal on-duty shooting in 43 years.
Police fired him two weeks later.
Hess was acquitted in a 2020 trial after his lawyers said he feared for his colleagues’ safety. The fact the SUV was stolen reinforced Hess’ concerns, his attorneys argued. Dawes’ family said Genevive did not know the car was stolen when she bought it.
The legal issues are not over. For the last six years, the city of Dallas has defended itself and Hess against a federal wrongful death lawsuit brought by Dawes’ family, seeking to avoid a trial.
Mary Dawes, Genevive’s mother, says the family deserves a chance at holding Hess and the city accountable for violating her daughter’s civil rights.
She didn’t know about Hess’ history of violence until The News shared it with her last year, she said.
“They could have stopped him,” Dawes said. “If they had just done their jobs …”
She could not finish her sentence.
Genevive Dawes’ mother photographed her with the Rosa Parks statue in downtown Dallas about a year before she was killed. (Mary Dawes)
Breaking with standards
For Hess’ story and our Black and Blue series, The News filed hundreds of open record requests to obtain policies, records and data tied to the department’s more than 3,000-member force, the ninth largest in the United States. Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of documents. Most were internal affairs cases.
The series focuses on forms of police violence that are far more common than fatal shootings but often stay hidden because cases are handled as personnel matters, through internal affairs, instead of criminal investigations.
Texas law generally keeps such cases confidential unless officers are suspended. But Dallas, unlike the state’s four other largest cities, allows public access to the files.
The News enlisted several law enforcement experts to help evaluate cases and policies.
Our analysis found that at least eight of the Dallas Police Department’s internal investigative practices fall short of guidelines recommended by the Department of Justice.
Dallas police, for example, do not require internal affairs investigators, who handle the vast majority of complaints, to have investigative experience.
The department has no written protocol for guiding detectives on when they should consult with prosecutors during criminal investigations of officers.
And although the Justice Department recommends internal affairs detectives check past complaints for patterns of conduct, The News found no indication they did so in Hess’ 10 excessive force cases.
“An idiom among cops is that criminals’ past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior,” said David Thomas, a Washington, D.C.-based national police trainer and expert witness in police misconduct cases, reacting to The News’ findings. “Police and all human beings need to apply that concept to themselves.”
Eight ways Dallas police fall short of federal standards when investigating their own
The News shared its findings with Hess, now 45, but he declined to comment. His lawyers did not respond to messages.
Dallas police Chief Eddie García, who joined the department in 2021, turned down repeated requests for interviews, citing the litigation involving Hess.