Just what kind of organization is this?

This is a little story told to me by a now retired Watch Commander. This Sergeant had almost forty years on the job. There is precious little he hasn't seen or heard of. I'm going to attempt to re-tell it in his voice. He's originally French Canadian, from Montreal and he's now in his sixties.

My first year on the job, I was on probation south of downtown. The Special Investigations Unit had just gotten into a shooting. This unit follows violent, recidivist criminals and attempts to apprehend them when they commit a violent crime. Shootings are understandably quite common for this unit.

I'm about two or three months out of the academy. My training officer and I arrive and the suspect SIU has just shot is lying in a pool of his own blood that is gathering by his head. I look closer and he's been shot in the face, and one of his eyeballs is almost out of his skull and keeps blinking and looking around. I then see this plainclothes detective walk over to the suspect. This particular detective had been a policeman since the late 1940's, "when men were made of steel and ships were made of wood." This detective removed his badge and put it on the sidewalk right in front of the suspect's eye. The detective then said,

"Get a good look, you bastard.This'll be the last thing you see before you go to hell!"

It was at this time I began wondering long and hard just what the hell kind of organization I got myself involved with.