Tied to the mast
Mark has some anger issues. In his daily life he deals with unfairness and injustice and stupidity, and it aggravates him, and he has no healthy outlet. In the old days, he would turn bright red, stomp off to a private area, and destroy inanimate objects with a blunt metal instrument.
After pursuing this course of action for quite some time, Mark tried out some new hobbies. Most of them ended up frustrating him more than helping. One might have broken even: he joined a volunteer reserve police force.
Mark saw that the volunteers had various motives for joining. Some used it as a tool for womanizing, and would generally “stretch the truth” and claim to be real police officers even though their uniforms (paid for by the volunteers) actually reflected that they were not. Some used it as a tool for facilitating the crimial pursuits of their relatives. Mark did it for three main reasons: it gave him plenty of opportunities to talk about laws, it let him feel power over other people, and it helped feed and freshen his heroic fantasies.
On patrol (for which he was not paid a cent) he always secretly hopes that some spectacularly complicated and expensive criminal enterprise will precipitate its most climactic actions in his immediate environs, and he will rise to the occasion, leap on top of a car, vault into a helicopter, and save Bruce Willis from anti-Israeli commandos. This has not yet occurred.
After some frustration with the real police officers, partly for their unfamiliarity with laws and regulations, partly for their willful disregard of such, Mark packed his things and moved to a completely different jurisdiction. At first he tried to get a paying job as a real police officer, but he failed all his interviews in the “ethics” portion of questioning.
Mark took a hard look at himself and resigned himself to the fact that he was not cut out to be paid to treat people like criminals, and that he would have to continue doing it solely out of love. So he found another department that would accept him as a volunteer, and pretends to be making a difference to this day.