Mark Wahlberg at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, 2010 | Photo by The Cosmopolitan via Flickr (http://bit.ly/1A8Ksdo)

Mark Wahlberg wants to become a reserve police officer. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone with a passing familiarity with Wahlberg’s wholesome, family-man image: Daily churchgoing Catholic, father of four, would-be hero of 9/11.

But there’s one thing standing in his way. Wahlberg has a history of criminal behavior, including some incidents that could possibly be considered hate crimes, from his teenage years in Boston. You may have heard by now that Wahlberg is requesting a pardon for the crimes he committed, but if you haven’t heard much about the crimes themselves, you’re in for a surprise.

When he was fifteen years old, Wahlberg was named in a civil suit for verbally harassing and throwing rocks at young African-American children. He was part of a group of older white teenagers who followed a brother and sister home from school in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood yelling, “Kill the n*gger, kill the n*gger.” The next day, the same group yelled racial slurs at a group of black students returning to school from a field trip. Wahlberg and others hurled stones at the group, hitting and injuring one of the (white) teachers.

Worse still is the attack Wahlberg carried out on Thanh Lam, a Vietnamese man who, according to court documents, was walking on a Boston sidewalk near his car when Wahlberg approached him and beat him unconscious with a five-foot-long wooden stick. Wahberg called Lam “Vietnamese f*cking shit” and, when the police arrived, fled the scene only to find another Vietnamese man a few blocks away, Hoa Trinh, and beat him so badly that he left Trinh permanently blind in one eye. Moments before Wahlberg punched Trinh he pulled him aside, put his arm around him, and said, “Police coming, police coming, let me hide.” He pretended like he was making an ally of the man, then turned around and assaulted him.

When the police did bring Wahlberg in, he told them, “‘You don’t have to let him [Thanh Lam] identify me, I’ll tell you now that’s the motherf*cker who’s [sic] head I split open,’ or words to that effect.”

Now, saying that he is “not the same person that I was on the night of April 8, 1988,” Wahlberg wants a pardon as an act of “official public redemption.”

Despite his earnest plea for redemption in the eyes of his public, Wahlberg still hasn’t found his way to apologizing to the man he blinded back in 1988. “[T]hough the right thing to do would be to try to find the man and make amends, Wahlberg says,” said a 2007 ABC interview, “he admits he hasn’t done so — but says he’s no longer burdened by guilt.”

Well, good for him. Wahlberg says he paid for his mistakes, although he spent only 45 days in jail for the attack on Trinh, who will be blind much longer than that. It’s hard to see any real repentance on Wahlberg’s part, and while the request for a pardon doesn’t require reconciliation with a person’s victims, the standard should be a little higher than “some time has passed.” How can Wahlberg show that he’s sincerely sorry for what he’s done? Find Lam, and Trinh, and the Coleman siblings, and say he’s sorry. It would at least be a start.