How a stubborn cop changed the rules

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Visit the Police Academy these days and it strikes you as a little like a tertiary campus blended with the carefully curated regalia of old school police culture.

The new breed walk past the framed photos of stern looking former chief commissioners (one was known as Sheep’s Head because, well, he had a head like a sheep) – without the slightest interest in the past. It is their police force now.

Cynical older coppers should return to watch a graduation – to see the new breed march in, with beaming smiles, so proud of what they have achieved and bursting to get on the streets.

What you also notice is that the old days are gone, when each squad was dominated by white, tall males. Once they had to be a certain height, of Australian, British or Irish descent, and female police officers were expected to carry force-issued handbags.

Peter Hart (front row left) with his Police Academy class.

For decades, senior cops have tried to make the police force a place that welcomes people based on talent, not background.

But it was not that long ago that a white, smart and at times difficult teenage recruit challenged a long-held practice, sending his bosses into such a spin they wanted him to resign. It was as if he was too clever to be a copper.

His crime? He hadn’t questioned their authority, the law or even the menu at the cafeteria. He had questioned the existence of God.

No one saw the irony in terms of an agnostic living in the academy that was built as a seminary to train Catholic priests.

This was not a theological debate but an administrative one. To be sworn in as a police officer you needed to swear an allegiance to God, and recruit Peter Hart decided he would prefer to take an affirmation.

Truth is, Hart wasn’t that keen on being a policeman, he was more keen on not getting kicked out of his digs.

Hart arrived in Australia in July 1970 as a 10-year-old with his family as “Ten-Pound Poms” on the Fairsky, to be housed in the Nissen huts at the Northland Camp in Preston.

It was not the promised land. His family was already fracturing and, as a teenager, he was bullied at school probably because he was smart, skinny, buck-toothed and foreign. In year 10 he failed to attend class for 97 days and his dream of becoming an architect was exactly that – a dream.

Over the school holidays, he saw an advertisement for the police cadets – a scheme whereby the underage could continue their schooling before becoming police recruits at the age of 18.

The usual applicant was the type who had always wanted to be a police officer. Hart was attracted for another reason. It was a live-in course. He was not looking for a way into the police force but a way out of his unhappy life.

The Oath that was changed to an Affirmation,

“It gave me a roof over my head and three meals a day. I walked out of home and joined the police cadets.”

One of his first lessons learnt was how to sneak out of the cadet barracks, housed in the old Savoy Hotel in Spencer Street, with other students, jump on the Bourke Street tram to the Croxton Park Hotel to drink beers while still underage, then sneak back in without being detected.

In a time when conformity was sometimes valued more than competency, Hart admits he was “smart but particularly not wise”.

When he lost confidence in the Australian history teacher at cadets, the teacher allowed him to continue learning unsupervised, offering to review his work if required.

“He could have had me sacked if he wanted, but he must have seen something in me [that] I didn’t know was there myself. Looking back, he was a brilliant teacher,” Hart said.

When, in 1979, his cadet intake was sent to the academy they were split into two squads, with Hart sent to a group of older recruits who were immediately sworn in on the Bible.

Peter Hart (back row second from the right) at his Police Academy graduation.

While learning the Evidence Act, they were taught the difference between swearing an oath before God to tell the truth and, for non-believers, the chance to swear an oath of affirmation.

The lecturing sergeant asked how many would have wanted to take the affirmation when they were sworn in. Hart says, “A few put their hands up and the sergeant joked that it was too late.

“I put my hand up and said I hadn’t been sworn in yet.” The implication was Hart would rock the boat.

Soon he was fronting a panel of the chief superintendent, superintendent and chief inspector. They were not there to complement his inquisitive mind.

Peter Hart with then chief commissioner Mick Miller.

“They said they had received a report questioning my suitability to be a policeman as I had no religious beliefs.”

How much of this was about his views on religion and how much was due to being identified as a troublemaker will never be known but several times senior officers pressured him to resign.

He refused, not so much on principle but practicality. If he quit he would lose his job and accommodation, then have to return to his fractured home.

(Like many, he remains estranged from his family.)

He didn’t really have a strong view on Christianity, later moving to work for more than a dozen years in religious faith schools, but having made a point he felt to back down would have damaged his integrity.

“I was locked in and couldn’t get out. They would say they were in no position to do an affirmation and declare I would have to resign. Then I would refuse.”

For six weeks he was taken from class and sent to police headquarters to meet a police chaplain.

“We would have great discussions. Then he said, ‘This is our last session Peter. I was supposed to recommend you be sacked, but I think you are as Christian as I am’.”

Hart says: “Back then I believed Jesus walked the earth helping people. I was just not sure of the God thing.

“I was on track to be dux of the squad. Then I was back squadded [sent to repeat part of the course with a junior squad] because they said I was too surly.”

Due to his stubbornness, Hart was finally allowed to take an oath of affirmation. His certificate shows they just scrawled out the words “Almighty God” and replaced them with “declare and affirm”. It is dated February 15, 1979 – the first of its type.

Hart says that later, when he would take the affirmation in court, it was taken as a sign that he was a person of principle. “Juries loved it.”

He worked at Hawthorn, which he found too quiet, City West and then clicked at Broadmeadows. The boy from Preston says: “I connected with the community. I can speak working class.”

But not all the police were so connected. He and his trainee partner thought they had dealt with a nasty family dispute when the male wandered out the front to abuse the police. “We had a zero-tolerance policy. If you jack us up, you will be locked up.”

When Hart went to grab the offender, the man grabbed the policeman’s gun and then pointed it at the cop’s chest. “I yelled to my partner to shoot him, and he (his partner) turned around and ran into the blue yonder.”

After the offender was arrested by mutual agreement the trainee sought alternative employment.

Hart, the once ambivalent police cadet, became a committed investigator (duxing detective training school), often specialising in sexual assault cases when victims were often prejudged.

Raymond Edmunds, double murderer and serial rapist.

He says he was the first police officer to successfully prosecute a rapist for attacking a sex worker. “He got seven years.”

The cases that stick are those he believes should have been solved, but the investigations were prematurely closed by short-sighted bosses.

It became a recurring theme. He completed his PhD on police stress, concluding the greatest problem was not on-the-road conflict but bureaucratic bloody mindedness.

Doctor Hart trained as a psychologist and left policing after 13 years to work with organisations on stress management. Ironically, he is now adjunct professor in the Christian research centre at Avondale University.

When stationed as a detective at Heidelberg, he had the case of a mentally disabled woman who was raped by three offenders. “The Director of Public Prosecutions refused to go to court because they thought it would be too difficult. She would have been a fantastic witness.”

There was the schoolgirl abducted on her way to the shops to buy ingredients for a cake. Hart says a neighbour saw the abduction and provided details of the offender’s station wagon. The keen detective wanted to chase down each car of that colour, make and model.

“It was a totally solvable crime, but I was told to drop it as it was a waste of time.”

Hart believes he knows the person responsible. “He had the same car and lived down the road at the time.” It was Raymond Edmonds, known as Mr Stinky, who would later be convicted of the 1966 Shepparton murders of Garry Heywood, 18, and Abina Madill, 16.

He was also convicted of five rapes, and police believe he was responsible up to 30 more.

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