The Last Cop

Stop and Search by Banksy

Wayne Kramer became a civilian again, a mere month shy of the twenty-five years the Force or the Service, as it came to be known, required to be eligible for the cop sized pension.

“Not that I need it, but still,” was his complaint mantra.

Police departments across the globe were swept out of existence by automation, education, social advancement, and what the last few thousand lawmen called the big layoff. It was the end of an outdated institution and the end of Wayne’s way of life.

He looked down at the pile of random office supplies in the last drawer of his cleaned out desk and saw nothing he needed nor wanted. The cardboard box on the empty desktop held his ten and twenty-year plaques, three medals of accommodation, and a mug his dead partner gave him after his first year on the urban assault squad. The ceramic cup boldly stated: “Up against the wall, motherfucker!”

Wayne’s therapist told him not to hold on to the violent and often racially charged slogans of his career and to focus instead on the new life of possibilities ahead of him.

“I know,” he said to himself, “don’t hold onto the bad stuff.”

He rubbed the dirty mug and snagged his finger on its chipped edge. It smelled like acidic coffee and shattered in a way that made him flinch when he dropped it into the trashcan. He picked up the box and chucked it in on top of his broken mug.

“I joined to make a difference,” he’d told his therapist.

“And you did,” she replied.

“It was my whole life. It’s who I am. I lost two wives and killed three people. The last was a teenager, just a kid that didn’t know any better. He didn’t deserve to die,” Wayne finally admitted.

“How could crime drop to zero in under a decade? Makes you wonder why they didn’t make changes to society earlier?” he repeatedly asked.

“Change comes slow,” his therapist would say.

For Wayne, the changes came fast, hard, and constant. One year he was warring with gangs in the streets, the next he was busting protester’s heads open and getting rewarded for it, the following year his team was disbanded, and he was reduced down to a beat cop monitoring spotlessly clean streets. He couldn’t even get traffic…