Reinstated sacked cop loses job again

A sacked police officer who won a reinstatement bid after beating a slew of child abuse material charges has again lost his job.

Peter Hanna, a NSW Police senior sergeant with 21 years of experience, was charged in 2021 with possessing child abuse material that police alleged he had been sent by Father Joseph Kolodziej, at the time the parish priest at Five Dock’s All Hallows Catholic Parish.

Kolodziej was also charged over the videos, but the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped the charges nine months later.

Hanna was found not guilty of possessing two of the videos.

He was convicted in the Local Court in May 2022 over possessing a video that depicted a toddler walking in on a couple having sex who continue to do so as the child climbs on top of the woman.

Hanna successfully appealed his conviction in the District Court in October 2022.

In August of that year, he was removed from the NSW Police.

Last year, this masthead revealed he had won his bid for reinstatement.

However, that success was short-lived. Last week, an appeal of the decision instigated by then police commissioner Karen Webb was successful, meaning Hanna will not return to work as a police officer.

“You had child abuse material in your possession for a number of months. I am very concerned that you neglected your duty in failing to report them ... I am also very concerned that you then sought to show one of the videos to a colleague. Your conduct demonstrates an extreme lack of judgment,” Webb said in her submissions to the Industrial Relations Commission.

Hanna said he had not watched three of the videos and that they were automatically downloaded onto his phone from WhatsApp. He said his responses of “love them” and “very funny” pertained to other messages in the chat.

He denied showing a video – which depicted a couple having sex and a child walking in on them – to a fellow police officer, saying the colleague “could have seen it while scrolling unsupervised through his camera roll” and that she was motivated to lie about him “because he had confronted her about keeping inaccurate flex time sheets which did not reflect her actual working hours”.

He also told the commission that none of the videos – which variously depicted a teenage couple having sex, a toddler massaging an adult’s buttocks and a naked toddler boy – contained child abuse material, despite its classification as Category 1 Child Abuse Material by the specialist squad.

Rather, Hanna said one video was “not offensive for a person of reasonable firmness”, another was not distressing to the child and two were “home video style, funny video”.

The industrial relations umpire did not accept this, and Hanna will not return to his position as a senior sergeant in NSW Police.

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