When your domestic abuser is also the local police officer

And then Sam watched his mum get up, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. Stumbling, badly bruised, hands shaking, she staggered inside and fell asleep in her children’s room. After bashing Jay, senior constable Hanegraaf left to work a night shift. The next morning, none of them spoke of it. The family ate breakfast together.

As a police officer, Hanegraaf worked in a system that’s supposed to protect victims of family violence. But that’s not what shattered Jay’s faith in the system. Hanegraaf’s colleagues did that – police who repeatedly pressured Jay to not to report him. Make good, they told her. Cook him a nice dinner. Give him another chance.

Then one evening at the house, Hanegraaf’s superior officer warned Jay in front of her two children that reporting her violent partner might put her in even more danger. “A man with nothing to lose is a dangerous man,” the sergeant said. After that, Jay’s daughter asked her not to press charges.

When Jay finally found the courage to make a statement, another officer leaked Jay’s secret safety plan (to flee with the children to Sydney) to Hanegraaf. That’s when he became the man with nothing to lose. He was angrier than ever, more threatening, violent and controlling.

Jay’s story is part of what family violence specialist and co-ordinator of the Policing Family Violence Project Lauren Caulfield calls a hidden crisis. But while family violence itself might now be a frontline political issue, its police perpetrators – and the fact that they mostly get away with it – remains hidden behind layers of denial.

In February, Jay became the first Victorian in five years to secure a family violence-related criminal conviction against a serving police officer. Across Australia, the statistics suggest that police accused of family violence are treated vastly differently to non-police. It’s a disparity that has led some victims to tell their stories publicly, despite grave risks.

The violent anti-violence officer

In early 2018, Hazel* reported a crime. The community service professional was scared, but the police officer she spoke to reassured her he would look after her complaint. Soon after, he emailed her from his personal account and then invited her for coffee.

Hazel was wary about a new relationship, but Officer A, as we’ll call him, seemed different. He presented as a protector, a policeman who relished serving the public.

“It seemed to flow very naturally, very easily, very, very quickly,” she recalls. They started dating.

From early on, Hazel had niggling thoughts that Officer A wasn’t quite right, but she put them aside. She believes Officer A started unlawfully using the police database to snoop on her private life and look up her friends and family.

He would do “drive-bys” of her house in his police car and call her if she wasn’t home, demanding an explanation.His behaviour was shifting from odd to sinister, and she began feeling confused and suffocated by his erratic mood swings.

Then his behaviour escalated. He started becoming controlling and began asserting his physical dominance. At her house, he grabbed and flung her around and locked her in a bathroom.

He demanded sexual gratification in a way that left Hazel feeling degraded and sometimes terrified. Hazel tried to break free. He’d beg her to take him back. Then one night she came home from hospital after surgery groggy and weak. She says that during the night, she woke up disoriented and felt his hand around her neck.

“It’s when you’re most weak. It’s when they or he can get off the most, be the most masculine, be the most in charge, have the most power over you,” Hazel recalls, her eyes welling with tears.

“He raped me in the middle of the night.”

The “most devastating” aspect of that, she said, was the reminder “of just how small you are … and when you have hands around your throat, how easily you could be snuffed out”.

There would be other assaults and degradation, including an alleged sexual assault in public, before Hazel finally ended the relationship for good. But she too remained scared to report Officer A to police.

Caulfield says the fear was well-founded: recent data released by police forces around Australia shows a “culture of impunity” in which police perpetrators are far less likely to be charged than civilians. In Victoria, civilian domestic violence offenders are four times more likely to be arrested, charged or cautioned than perpetrators who are police officers.

It is “a crisis of community safety”, Caulfield says, and a scandal.

Most concerning to Hazel, though, was Officer A’s claim that he worked as a family violence officer for the police. Hazel believed this allowed Officer A “to be on the hunt for vulnerable women”.

Others in the police force suspected the same thing. In early 2019, a family violence intervention order was taken out by detectives to protect her safety.

It didn’t work and he breached the order. Under scrutiny, Officer A quietly resigned from the force.

Hazel believes he still has a network of policing contacts and she remains terrified.

She’s speaking out only because she wants a record of what happened to her and to help other victims. She also believes there needs to be a properly funded independent body to monitor and watch complaints against police. In Victoria and NSW independent police watchdogs exist, but both are poorly funded and in most cases lack the capacity to oversee complaints, including domestic violence allegations involving officers.

Victoria’s Independent Broad Based Anti-Corruption Commission chief, former judge Robert Redlich, has made repeated pleas to the Andrews government for more funding for this purpose, but they haven’t been heeded. It’s among the reasons why Jay had to fight for two years on her own to hold police to account.

Shoulder bling and silence

An early glimpse of the battle Jay would endure came at a police work function in late 2017. Her face was bruised from being punched by Hanegraaf. At the event she heard police members complaining about being required to deal with family violence cases and joking about it.

Jay, a Melbourne lawyer with an intense and determined demeanour, resolved to say nothing. Then, months later, something happened that meant she could no longer stay quiet. On that day in July 2018, after Jay got in the way again protecting Sam, Hanegraaf put his hands around her throat and squeezed until she lost consciousness.

Her son, Sam, by now 12, once again saw the violence. When Jay, who was pregnant at the time, finally regained consciousness, she was subject to more physical and verbal abuse.

As he left their home that day, Hanegraaf warned her he would use his police revolver against them. “He left the property, just going, ‘One dead c-word, two dead c-word, three dead c-word’,” Jay recalls. “Myself and the kids.”

Hanegraaf, who Jay met through friends in 2014, had abused and assaulted her many times before. This time, though, she lost the baby she was carrying. She believed her other children were at risk.

She contacted Hanegraaf’s station and spoke to one of his colleagues. What should have triggered an immediate investigation and support instead led to months of pressure, stalling and mishaps. On multiple occasions, Jay says Hanegraaf’s police colleagues urged her not to formalise her complaints.

“You get a whole lot of people showing up with a whole lot of shoulder bling telling you not to make a statement,” she recalls.

One of Hanegraaf’s superiors told her “not to throw Hanegraaf under the bus if I cared about him”, she claims. It was also suggested she try to repair their relationship.

“He made several references to offering an olive branch and having Hanegraaf over for a ‘nice dinner’ and patching things up,” Jay recalls of the higher-ranked officer’s advice.

But she refused to back down. Her complaint was referred to the internal affairs department, Professional Standards Command.

For Jay, this provided fresh insight into a system she says is failing victims. Because her abuser was a policeman, Professional Standards Command rather than family violence detectives were given carriage of the case, and because it was not high-level corruption, a suburban uniformed officer with no experience of investigating domestic violence was handed the case. He was on leave for two months and had to work the file on top of his day job. Jay was told her case would have to wait.

Hopping between shelters

Initially “Sergeant Holidays”, as Jay’s friends nicknamed him, failed to recognise the seriousness of the ongoing risk to Jay and her children. Eventually the officer did thoroughly investigate, earning Jay’s respect, but not before another police officer had leaked Jay’s plan to flee interstate with her children to Hanegraaf’s mates.

Senior police later defended this disclosure by arguing that Hanegraaf’s colleagues should know about Jay’s safety plan so they could support Hanegraaf. For Jay, that’s when she lost all faith in a system that was meant to protect her. Facing continuing violence, she considered ending her own life.

It was mostly the thought of the kids, she says, that “kept me going”.

“That’s probably 90 per cent of it,” she recalls. “And then 10 per cent of it is saying, ‘This is not right. And I’m fighting this. This is crap’.”

So fight she did.

“I kind of figured that, I have to fight myself but I’ve also got to fight for others too, because how many other women have police forces done this to?”

Drawing on her experience as a lawyer, Jay formally complained about the leaking of her safety plan and when police failed to admit any error, she complained again. Jay lodged freedom of information requests into the handling of her case and into hard data about police perpetrators of domestic violence. Much of it Jay did while she hopped between women’s shelters as Hanegraaf continued to breach intervention orders.

In late 2019, after many months of “paper warfare”, police finally issued an apology for leaking her safety plan. By then Jay had contacted Victorian Police Minister Lisa Neville and the anti-corruption commission.

The still-serving senior constable Hanegraaf was charged with 70 criminal offences, but these were reduced when he agreed to plead guilty in February 2020. Jay took a day off work and drove to the courthouse. But when she saw two officers who she knew backed Hanegraaf, she turned around and went home.

Even though he had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months’ jail, Hanegraaf appealed. It still took weeks for him to be suspended after his conviction. And he still got the chance to cash out: rather than sack him the force allowed Hanegraaf to resign, keeping his entitlements. On appeal, Hanegraaf was sentenced in June to a two-year community correction order.

‘We can do better’

For Jay and her son Sam, now 14, the conviction was a hollow victory. Judge Paul Lacava described Hanegraaf’s offending as “very serious persistent violent offending” but said he should avoid jail, noting the stressors he’d experienced as a policeman and the difficulties he’d face in jail.

Sam still feels stung that the court made no reference to his victim impact statement and feels an acute sense of injustice.

“I think police need to be treated like normal people,” he says. “I’m gonna keep fighting until that change happens. I feel like I have to do this. I have to do this for all the children that don’t have a voice, for all the children who are broken by fear, for all the children who are traumatised like me.”

Victoria Police’s senior family violence officer, Assistant Commissioner Lauren Callaway, declined to speak about individual cases but acknowledges the force must improve the way it handles cases such as Jay’s.

The force has established Taskforce Salus to investigate allegations of predatory sexual behaviour by police staff, but most family violence cases are referred out to local officers, some having minimal family violence experience.

“We can do better. I appreciate all the reasons why people may not trust police, they’ve had bad experiences. But my commitment is that going forward, we will do better on this,” Callaway says.

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Jay is reserving judgment. She asked to meet Callaway and hasn’t heard back. Let down too many times, she sees her fight as only beginning. There are other victims of police-perpetrated domestic violence across Australia. Police forces need expert detectives to handle cases involving police, she says, as well as oversight from well-resourced independent watchdogs. Police who cover up their colleagues’ violence or mishandle cases also need to be held accountable.

“The best revenge for any sort of injustice like this is living your best life, and that’s what I want us to do,” says Jay. “But we’ll try and change the system in the meantime.”

* Not their real names

Watch Jay, Hazel and Sam tell their stories on 60 Minutes at 7pm on December 6.

If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.