
Idk why the MC is being convinced by the ML. It’s an extenuating circumstance. It’s not fair to the friend (nothing about the situation was fair), but the MC had to make a judgement call in the moment. Emergency service members are taught “life over limb.” The MC’s choice didn’t make him dirty or prove he threw his justice away.
The MC is woefully naive though. As a cop you should know to never 100% trust someone, even your fellow cops. There are so many crooked cops. Cops are just people. People can be both good and bad. So obviously there’d be bad cops. Also, if you’re a cop that long you for sure have at least looked the other way when you saw other cops doing wrong, so in a way there’s eventually not a completely clean cop….
But you know that “no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument… no one is perfectly clean. We just try to be better and do better as we live our lives.
MC needs to give himself some grace.

The good thing about the MC is that he adapts rather quickly. Remember the there are no dirty victims monologue? His moral compass is so intact that if you give him time to calm down, he’ll pull himself together. This is just particularly jarring for him because he was RESCUED by this guy when he was literally too young to think, so being caught off guard by your hero being a dirty cop is excusable.
Seems fun ¯_(ツ)_/¯