"We were real damn good at our job. I was real damn good at my job. There weren't a whole lot of actually harmful criminals in the city limits. I had good officers and good immediate superiors.

"But you know how people fuckin' are." He chuckles hard at that, bitter, before his expression deflates. "Took me a while to figure this out, but our government didn't want people to feel safe. They wanted them scared. All the time. If they couldn't be scared of strangers anymore then they had to be scared of their neighbors and if they couldn't be scared of their neighbors anymore then they needed to be scared of their families. It didn't matter how good I was. People were never gonna feel safe. Things weren't gonna get better. Losing the fear meant people might start being autonomous and god forbid they act like independent Americans and not like fuckin' old world communists."

The disappointment absolutely seeps from him. He wanted to represent something good. He didn't want to think that the best years of his life had been for nothing. He did his job to get rid of threats, to serve and protect. Pervasive, invasive threats like dealers or smugglers, or he made people answer for crimes with all the resources and talents a victim lacked to find peace.

(Depending on the victim. Some 'victims' ended up having their reputations mutilated for trying to use his people to strongarm anyone.)

"That's part of why I need to find my partner. If he's not safe, and he's still alive, I gotta do something about that."