Even for someone used to doing hard things — staring into the mass graves of East Timor, building the criminal case against an African despot, hunting down all manner of home-grown murderers and sexual predators — Friday will be a hard day for Insp. Penny Hart.
On Friday, you see, she will stand before Halifax Regional Police’s west division for the very last time.
“It will be emotional,” says Hart, 50, who does not appear to say things like that lightly.
There’s one small saving grace: On Sunday she will be on a plane bound for Geneva. Though she’s bringing her racing bike, this is no pleasure trip.
Hart is headed to United Nations headquarters where she has a six-month contract as the chief investigator into sexual and gender-based crimes in Syria.
Only when she returns will the reality sink in; that her trailblazing 30-year career with the Halifax police force is over.
“When you see me next I’ll be driving around in one of those vehicles with little dog paws over it,” says the owner of a 12-year old sheepdog named Buster.
I don’t think that she’s ready to join the rest of us just yet.
This, after all, is a woman who decided at age 19 that she wanted to “change the world, particularly
or women” — and, who, after joining two other women on the Halifax police force, told her brother that she was going to become its first female police chief.
A police officer who, though the latter didn’t come true, climbed strategically through the ranks because she was drawn to “the sexiness of doing homicide investigations” and of helping the members of “vulnerable sectors.”
A person who, along the way, seems to have sought out challenges whether as an admitted “homebody” who volunteered to head to the steamy Indonesian jungle investigating crimes against humanity, or as an introvert, at various times running not just the force’s sexual assault unit and homicide investigations, but also its training arm.
A human being who, when the emotional toll of the work becomes too much, jumps on her bicycle or laces up her running shoes and lays down kilometre after kilometre until she “can process” what she has just seen close up.
“My own personality is pretty driven,” says Hart, who has completed several full iron man races and 20 or so marathons, and who has just returned from a biking trip with her husband in Spain. “I can usually keep my eye on the target.”
From the sounds of it she was that way from the beginning. As an athletic young woman growing up in the community of Williamswood, where she attended J.L. Ilsley High School. “I was sporty spice,” says the daughter of a DND welder and mechanic and a Sears employee.
And later on, as a 19-year-old student at Saint Mary’s University who one day walked over to police headquarters on Gottingen Street and asked about signing up.
Hart remembers her first shift — the Santa Claus Parade in Spryfield. She also recalls how the force then only had male-sized socks, ensuring that the heel of hers were halfway up her calf, and how the four female officers on the force had to wear “British metermaid” style headgear.
In fact the first memo Hart sent to the police brass was a request that female officers wear the same hats as their male counterparts.
“That, as you can imagine, made me very popular,” she recalls.
It didn’t seem to hurt her career any.
Hart walked the beat in Spryfield and up and down Spring Garden Road for five years, then in 1993 made it to criminal investigations, where she investigated sexual and gender-based crimes.
She had to return to patrol duty when the HRM’s police forces amalgamated, leaving her near the bottom in terms of seniority.
But Hart’s rise resumed in 1997 when she returned to the criminal investigations unit to work on the assisted-death case involving Halifax physician Nancy Morrison.
Hart worked cold cases for two years, then was back on the streets as the force’s first female patrol sergeant.
She was 33 and had never left North America when an opportunity arose to go to East Timor as part of the United Nations mission there.
The job was to investigate the country’s mass graves, some of which held up to 600 bodies.
With its 40-degree temperatures and roads so undeveloped that it would take four hours to go 10 kilometres, East Timor was a long way from Williamswod.
Hart is too discreet to say whether that made her assignment upon returning to the Halifax force — the financial crimes unit — a tad boring.
She didn’t have to wait long before something more interesting came along. Hart was seconded to Ottawa by the RCMP to manage a mission to train Iraqi police officers. Then, in 2005, she was asked to become an investigator attached to the United Nations special court for Sierra Leone.
Her focus: war crimes, some of them involving the procurement of child soldiers, by Charles Taylor, ex-president of Liberia, who was then in political exile.
One day she and her team were out in the Sierra Leone countryside, interviewing a man or woman whose arms, legs or ears had been cut off by rebels backed by Taylor; the next they were in Paris or Brussels talking to wellheeled arms dealers, paid in untraceable “blood diamonds” for their wares, whose bank accounts they had frozen.
If the whole thing sounds like a blur, it was.
“There were times,” she says, “when I would think ‘whose life is this? How does this happen?’ At the same time I was very appreciative and taking it all in.”
Back in Halifax she was chosen to lead the recently formed sexual assault investigative team. Later, as a sergeant in the homicide unit, Hart led a series of high-profile investigations including the deaths of Nadine Taylor, Stacey Adams and Katie Miller.
By 2015, she says, “it was time to do something else. I had had this amazing career in homicide but I needed to take that phone off of my night table.”
She got that chance as the staff sergeant in charge of the Halifax force’s training section, a role in which, according to a departmental press release, Hart “helped take our rapid deployment training to the next level.”
A year ago she became the fourth female inspector in the force’s history.
“I was always thinking 30 years,” she says of her career. “Thirty sounds like a good number and as much as I have loved my career with the Halifax police department there are other things that I want to do.”
When she returns to Halifax that will certainly mean the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldier’s Initiative, which is based at Dalhousie University, with which she has long been involved.
For now, that means Geneva.
“It’s a fresh start for me,” she says when I ask what she is bringing for the assignment. “What I have is in my brain and in my heart.”
Hart is also bringing her bike. When her bicycle-racer husband arrives they plan to hit the hills and trails in nearby France.
But it will be her job there to sort through that horror of a war in which thousands of of women, men and children have been raped, according to a recent United Nations report.
Hart knows the toll that work can take. And that there will be times when all she can do is hop on that bike and ride and ride, until she leaves the darkness behind.