Law and Order Reviews J

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Pride” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is basically about homophobia and I think it’s a fairly good reply to the homophobes.

“Savages” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

The Death Penalty 

This episode is about the death penalty, but the main characters, collectively, have mixed opinions about it. I won’t bother describing or analyzing those statements with two exceptions. First, it’s stated that (possibly looking just at NY state and it’s death-penalty situation) there was some kind of trend where the suspension of the death penalty saw a decrease in capital crimes or something like that.

One of the main characters (the senior detective) in a practical but not principled way opposes bringing the death penalty back to NY and says that it will create more desperation among criminals who might become more willing to shoot cops when police try to arrest them if they’re already facing charges that could involve the death penalty.

I am generally against the death penalty. To some small degree you could say this is partly inspired by or reinforced by the fact that my Church opposes it (until very recently I was a Catholic and I am now converting to the Episcopalian church that also opposes the death penalty). I know that the statistics indicate that independent of the thoughts of judges, prosecutors, and jurors, it’s application really is racist and classist. I believe there’s no reason to say that it deters serious crime.

I am open-minded about it being used in one situation. If someone is already serving a life sentence in prison with no chance of parole, where life means life, and they are convicted of a serious crime (murder (and maybe rape should also be included)) and there is no other way to significantly upgrade their sentence to reflect the new conviction, maybe they should get the death penalty. I am not sure how often murder and rape happen in prison, but it might possibly happen less often if what I just proposed was an option for judges and/or juries.

“Jeopardy” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.             

First, the Wikipedia summary is REALLY bad. The dead brother’s business had created a financial vulnerability for his family’s business. There were no rival businesses and there was no stealing of clients.

This is a type of episode that I have only inconsistently high-lighted until recently, but my plan for 1-3 years now has been that I’ll make a brief note about this when it comes up. First, the defendant is a wealthy businessperson who doesn’t seem political at all (i.e. he’s not made to look bad because he’s liberal or progressive, since he’s neither as far as we know- he’s made to look bad because he’s the kind of powerful person who thinks the rules don’t apply to him). Second, his even wealthier Mom uses her wealth-created power to subtly BRIBE the judge who gets the case and then rules in favor of the defendant a few times.

“Angel” Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

There’s 2-3 parts where racism towards Puerto Ricans in NYC is illustrated. The first time, I have to admit, the police don’t seem too offended. That doesn’t necessarily exclude the thing I want to highlight as anti-racist. After a well-attended Coleman-organized press conference is basically told that at that point the police are looking for a Puerto Rican man, the police get flooded with tips. One of the two detectives, while answering calls to the tip line, says to his supervisor: “Since the Colemans’ town meeting every nut job in the city who ever got a bad taco is pointing the finger.” It could be a better objection to what is happening to their investigation- it’s sinking into the muck of popular racism- but the detective is basically caricaturing that racism, saying that any White person who had a negative experience with a “hispanic” person is making false allegations about Puerto Ricans and the disappearance of the baby and are doing so in a way that doesn’t distinguish between different “hispanic” racial and ethnic groups. It turns out that the baby's White mother killed the baby.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews OO

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Prima Nocta” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.

Racism Towards Inter-Racial Couples

One of the rape survivors is in a interracial relationship. I include a note about that sort of thing when doing these reviews because I got the (flawed) impression about 30 years ago that hostility to such couples was sort of the more-widely-acceptable form, and/or pinnacle, of white supremacy (although White hostility towards mixed-race couples IS more common and more intense than the more basic facet of white supremacy (see the next paragraph), the more basic facet is still a massive problem). Another reason I mention it is that I think there is some much smaller degree of hostility towards such couples from some small minority of people of color. As I have explained here, although I understand that calling it racism is inaccurate and unhelpful and I understand that it’s a TINY problem which White people shouldn’t worry about, I believe it does exist. I would say something sort of similar about interracial relationships where both people are non-white- I imagine the frequency that such relationships are treated with hostility by people of color is incredibly low, but it's still noteworthy since they can be described as “multicultural” in a very positive way.

As far as the hate from white supremacist bigots in connection to the first kind of interracial relationship, I WAS open-minded about 1-3 years ago that maybe it’s declining and I should ignore it (part of that math is the fact that the show is set in NY City and there are plenty of minor characters and extras that are people of color, and I already had a policy about this show where I did not high-light everything anti-racist, because of course there are plenty of minor characters who are people of color). But racism has resurged in the last 10-17 years and I believe that white supremacists ARE much more hostile to mixed-race couples than they are to people of color in general (I’ve attached greater value than I used to to a letter the Southern Poverty Law Center published after they received it from a Jewish man in state prison in America and one thing he focused on was the Nazi skinhead-enforced rules about fraternization between different races in prison).

“Fractured” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

First, there’s a fair amount of vague talk about widespread hostility towards the police in NYC, which is probably a continuation of the ramped-up anti-racism that the show started expressing (not necessarily vaguely) in Season 22 about a year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter-aligned protests. 

“Cornered” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Anti-Muslim Bigotry

In some ways it’s not political but in some ways it is. A minor character that the Assistant DA for SVU had become close to is killed by criminals robbing a bodega and this is I think fairly significant because the character has a first and last name (Ali Imran) that is Arabic and also Muslim. The ADA is so upset that in the next episode (“First Light”) he has a graphic flashback to when his friend is killed. As I have said elsewhere about something kind of similar involving a handful of episodes of Star Trek TV shows, I believe this kind of thing can (at least) chip away at anti-Muslim bigotry in this country.

“Deductible” Season 26. See this for a plot summary.

Capitalism and Women’s Sexuality

This episode is basically about something that I don’t think comes up very often in the show. I may have failed to comment on this sort of thing 1-2 times that I should have but didn’t because I thought it was what I have decided to call “pretty basic feminism” (I have no intention of mentioning everything feminist on the show, that content would clutter my posts and surprise no one, so it has to be a pretty significant and/or extraordinary manifestation of sexism). I know I commented on this episode’s topic very briefly with one episode that was a bit different but very similar (“Hell’s Kitchen” in Season 20).

At the risk of greatly exaggerating how intellectual I am, I think it is the kind of thing that can set off Marxist Women Studies scholars. It’s about an insurance business where the boss manipulates female employees into using their sexuality to confirm new clients. He uses his power as a capitalist to exploit not just the labor but also the sexuality of female employees in order to maximize profit. It’s not clear to what degree if at all his male employees are aware of this and/or to what degree if at all they cooperate (we learn that one of his earlier female victims is now COO and helps him- it’s not clear how many of his female employees are not being exploited sexually). The imminently-signing new client featured in this episode seems slightly decent. After being misled by the woman’s boss, he, without permission, tries to give her oral sex and it’s slightly possible he may have gone further without permission if she hadn’t gotten away from him and locked herself in the bathroom till he left. But there are some statements indicating he was far from fully okay with what the boss did. I say that because it seems like, if the show SVU has the pulse of the population, maybe a surprisingly large majority of the male population is against that sort of thing.

What is “that sort of thing?” It’s bad enough that you have exploitation of labor in general with capitalism and then what I believe is called “super-exploitation” of female workers in a non-sexual way. I am, to a large but not blind degree a pro-porn feminist and I believe that sex-work should largely be seen as just another kind of labor. If a woman FULLY consents to let her body be exploited, I’m not going to complain if I get to see pictures of her naked. But basically forcing a woman to put her sexuality to work for the company (a company that has nothing to do with sex and where her official job description says nothing about sex) as a whole and/or her male boss is sickening. Sexuality is something that is usually very personal, private and sacred (unless this protected status is waived BY THE PERSON INVOLVED in a fair and mutually beneficial and respectful agreement (I’ll be honest I can’t think of how to make a comprehensive and legalistic yet general and concise statement about this and I believe it is a little complicated, but what the defendant in this episode does is a GREAT example of what powerful men should NOT use their power for)). 

And it might not hurt if I say something here that I have wanted to say in recent years. At the risk of patting myself on the back too much for being a good feminist, when I think of non-trafficked pornography I am horrified by the possibility that some women do it with little or no enjoyment simply for desperate financial reasons and I think the possibility of that scenario is damning of the fact that women in our society get paid less, are often saddled with ALL the child-rearing expenses, etc. etc.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews NN

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Debatable” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.
Racism/Homophobia

There are two minor items to mention.

1. A Black man (whose son is cleared of the crime SVU are investigating shortly after his Dad’s statement) says something brief but pretty powerful about how Blacks get treated by the police. He says: “give me one good reason why any black man should trust the cops.”
2. One of the detectives says a witness is a total homophobe, and although we already know that that detective is anti-homophobic, it’s good of the show to remind viewers how the people involved in making the show feel about homophobia.

“Truth Embargo” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Racism/Criminal Justice System

This is an interesting episode. Towards the end I thought I detected a significant political shift towards the center, but I think I was wrong.

First, the woman, Natalie, who gets raped is a white woman married to another white woman.

Natalie seems pretty uncomfortable with the whole process of helping the police find her attacker. Pretty early we know that the police suspect a black youth. When the charged individual is on trial Natalie testifies and after answering some questions about what happened,  she is asked to identify her attacker, with the defendant seated in the courtroom. She doesn’t answer and after several seconds there’s a recess in the trial. As we learn a few minutes later, she IS certain the defendant raped her and that kind of complicates one part of this that I found politically pleasing.

A few minutes before Natalie testifies Benson (the woman who is head of SVU) speaks briefly with Natalie’s wife, Brook. We learn from Brook that she and Natalie are “acutely“ aware of racist problems in the criminal justice system and worry that the defendant won’t get a fair trial (I could see how even though they were certain of his guilt, good White allies like them would still worry about that). During the recess Natalie tells Benson and the Assistant DA that when she was growing up she had an adopted brother who was Black. One day at a store when they were about 12yo she dared him to steal something. He got caught (apparently she was implicated by the police) and while she got to go home with a warning, her adopted brother spent the night in jail and got a criminal record, something which had a very negative effect on his life.

It emerges in all of this that the main thing which motivates Natalie’s failure to identify her rapist is her belief that once someone gets convicted, that can affect the rest of their life in many ways that are detrimental. There’s a brief discussion about rehabilitation. I am far from an expert on rehabilitation but I recently wrote that a lot of people in prison don’t need rehabilitation. Although in general it would be really nice if rehabilitation was an outcome of going to prison, I get the impression that it often or usually isn’t, and that having a record and experiencing the nightmare of prison must make it difficult to survive once released.

At one point, I thought this episode was going to be a hatchet job on progressives, suggesting that we believe that racial justice requires that all guilty people of color be acquitted and that there is something wrong with cooperating with the police when a white woman has been raped by a black man.

I have a little more to say about this episode’s place on the political spectrum, but first I want to say this. I imagine it’s difficult to be an anti-racist white person victimized by a crime committed by a person of color. More specifically I imagine that anti-racist tendencies in the feminist movement experience a lot of stress when a White woman accuses a Black man of rape.

My conclusion? There’s a fair amount of dialogue involving Benson agreeing (at least to some degree) with Natalie and Brook. Natalie not only identifies her rapist in court, she pushes back when the defense attorney suggests that she is lying about his client.

“Duty to Report” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Police Corruption

I am not sure I should be reviewing this one. There are two incidents where a VERY senior NYPD officer commits a very serious crime against a civilian and Benson (the head of SVU) enlists the Internal Affairs Bureau (which investigates corruption, etc. in the police) in her investigation of a crime that involves her superior’s daughter. Benson apparently gets along pretty well with at least one senior IAB officer- a Black woman who Benson was investigated by a few years earlier. At the end, that IAB leader and Benson agree that she will join SVU. Assuming it lasts at least the rest of this brief season, it’s significant in that it’s only the third time there’s been a woman of color in the squad (there was one in the first season, and then in season 24 there was a RECURRING character in the squad matching that description). 

In general it’s a pretty solid endorsement of IAB which I think is either probably a good thing or definitely a VERY good thing.

Benson does, while laughing, say that together they might even break some rules. At the risk of going too easy on them, I think it might either be an insignificant line that goes nowhere or maybe there are some rules they can break that are bad and that are not foci of IAB. In general I am very happy with this episode.

“Third Man Syndrome” Season 25. See this for a plot summary.
Homophobia

This is a very political episode, as I define that, but there’s nothing very special about it. It’s about a gay bashing that seemed like a possible sex crime (which is why SVU gets it). There’s some confusing dialogue about the gay bashers possibly also being anti-immigrant and I think the fact that one of them appears Latino doesn’t rule that out- weird stuff like that happens, at least in TV and movies and real life. The victim, who is straight but presumed gay by his attackers, is a visitor and future resident from Columbia. His cousin, who’s with him, is an undocumented resident- SVU doesn’t do anything in relation to that.

It’s overall a pretty good anti-homophobic episode.

Star Trek: SNW Reviews D

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“The Serene Squall” Episode Seven, Season One. See this for a plot summary.

There are three political themes to mention.

They/Them/Theirs (LGBTQ+)

Although it could possibly be construed as hostile to non-binary people because the character who makes some good statements about being yourself turns out to be the bad guy, it’s actually pro-LGBTQ+ because the prominent doctor she is impersonating IS non-binary and a good guy. This (the pro-LGBTQ+ statement made by the existence of a character who is a popular Federation doctor and is non-binary) gets a little sharper when there is some talk about how Spock, who is half human and half Vulcan, doesn’t need to choose between being Vulcan and being human:

ASPEN: Spock, you know, all species put things into boxes. It’s like you’re either this or you’re that and sometimes we act a certain way to fit people’s expectations, but that’s not necessarily who we are. And sometimes, like on the bridge just now, it can limit us.
SPOCK: You are proposing I better balance my human and Vulcan natures.
ASPEN: I’m saying maybe you’re neither.
SPOCK: That is nonsensical. If I am not human or Vulcan, what am I?
ASPEN: That’s not my question to answer.

First of all, I think this episode counts as pro-LGBTQ+ and I think that “Dr. Aspen’s” statements above are pretty well written.

I am going to use this as an opportunity to get a little long-winded and also a little personal. On one hand, I have been a fairly good or very good ally of what I call the LGB, since 11th grade. On the other hand, for some reason I have been kind of slow to see what I call the TQ+ as important. I go into a little more detail here when discussing the “Broken Rhymes” episode. This is the first time I have commented on the non-binary part of the population (I have watched every season of Discovery an average of three times (including the last three seasons that include a non-binary main character) but I have yet to do “reviews” of that show- something I’ll do in about a year).

First, if “Dr. Aspen” is talking about Spock identifying as equally human and Vulcan, that seems like a better idea than identifying 100% one way or the other. In The Original Series I believe that Spock identified mostly or overwhelmingly as Vulcan. If “Dr. Aspen” meant creating some kind of brand new identity I have tried to grasp what that would be and it has slipped through my fingers or has been as ethereal as smoke, dispersing into nothingness as I try to grasp it. There’s a good chance I am overthinking this and/or I need to get a firmer grip on the LGBTQ+ identities, so I think I will just move on very soon. The good news is that I think that in the process of typing this I DID improve my grasp of the LGBTQ+ identities.

A Clockwork Red??? (Rehabilitation of Convicts)

(Although I was a fan of “A Clockwork Orange” in 9th grade I don’t think I have watched it since then. Wikipedia’s explanation of the term “clockwork orange” doesn’t help, but it sounds like what some assortment of society and government leaders want people to be upon leaving prison, and I believe we need a progressive view of rehabilitation of convicts)

There’s a brief part of the episode that’s about criminal rehabilitation on Vulcan. It sounds pretty good. When I think of that issue in reality in America, I think it’s probably a really good thing, although it must have some short-comings. Although therapy and vocational opportunities and education and such in prison CAN help with some of what’s wrong in our society, I think that a huge majority of convicts wouldn’t be there if they weren’t poor and I would add a similar statement about an overlapping large minority of convicts who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t people of color. In the next three paragraphs I will offer an abridged explanation of exactly what I mean by that.

I simply assume that there are innocent people in prison- and I mean completely innocent- I will say something about the others soon. This belief is partly just a vague one based on being engaged with American liberalism and progressivism for roughly 35 years. It’s also influenced by a work of non-fiction (The Innocent Man) and at least two works of fiction (The Confession and The Guardians) by the author John Grisham. Although I don’t look for this, about once a year I stumble on to a story about someone being declared innocent years after their conviction- I assume that for every such case I hear about there’s probably something like 100 I don’t hear about. There was at least one statement by a main character in the TV show Law and Order: SVU about there being innocent people in prison. And then there’s the people who are sort of guilty but don’t deserve to be convicted - i.e. abused women who killed their abuser, 18yos who had sex with a 17yo in some of the nation’s states, the character Carl Lee Hailey in Grisham’s A Time To Kill, etc.

To a large degree the majority of inmates who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t poor don’t need rehabilitation. Many are completely innocent and would have been acquitted if they hadn’t been represented by an over-worked, under-resourced Public Defender. Many more wouldn’t have committed a crime if not for one or more poverty-related factors that drove their criminal behavior (i.e. they wouldn’t have stolen a loaf of bread for their family if they weren’t penniless, or they wouldn’t have gotten work selling marijuana if they had been able to afford college). In general, POVERTY, not bad morals or a lack of civic values, is why they committed a crime.

To a large degree the majority of those inmates who wouldn’t be there if they weren’t people of color don’t need rehabilitation. They’re there because a racist cop framed them, and a jury fell for it, or they’re guilty but it’s because the racist nature of this society alienated them from trying to work within the system, because the people criticizing crime were the same ones brutalizing their community economically, physically, institutionally, etc. What I’m talking about is well illustrated in the 1996 non-documentary film “Set It Off” starring Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith. One of the four Black women turns to crime partly because her racist bank employers fire her after a man from her neighborhood tries to rob the bank. Another of the four women turns to crime after her brother, an innocent and unarmed man, is killed by police. There is of course the aforementioned overlap between the population of non-white convicts and the population of poor convicts.

It’s likely that some or most of the convicts I write about above could benefit from therapy and/or vocational and/or educational opportunities while in prison. Ideally there may, in theory, be some way for that to be progressive- i.e. if convicts get therapy and/or college degrees in prison, is the education or therapy compatible with their experiences as (for example) working-class Black Americans? I also wonder how radical books collected by progressives and donated to prison libraries fare when they’re examined by whatever prison official looks at them. When I think about this stuff I worry that at this point, with increasing politicalization outside prisons because of George W. Bush and now Donald Trump, prisons are not creating opportunities for progressive values to be learned or explored or weaponized (depending on which prisoners we’re talking about).

Spartacus (Slavery)

Although it turns out to be a red herring deployed by the bad guy, at one point the crew of the Enterprise thinks that they’re going after slave traffickers. It would be a good story if there WAS an ST episode about going after such scum. About 3-6 years ago I watched the movie “The Birth of a Nation,” which is based on a true story of a major slave rebellion in the American South, and it is a really good movie. I also watched, about 6 years ago, the movie “Harriet” about the Underground Railroad, and I have it in my collection. ST has reminded us of the issue of slavery several times in it’s life, but an episode just about fighting slavery would be great- one story possibility would be a StarFleet crew helping maintain a sci-fi version of the Underground Railroad. About 33 years ago I read a The Next Generation novel called “Spartacus” about the Enterprise encountering a ship adrift with a bunch of android slaves.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews MM

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“A Better Person” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

Once in a while I actually read the Wikipedia summaries I link to (or copy and paste, 2-4 years ago) (I almost never read ANYTHING in the summaries I link to on the “All Things Law and Order” blog because they are REALLY long, probably around 5-7,000 words). In this case the wikipedia summary is worthless.

It’s about a man whose “son” is killed and it turns out that she was transitioning towards being female and her dad didn’t know that or tried to bury it mentally. This results in him messing with the crime scene (he’s a cop and is the first one to find his daughter dead) to eliminate all the evidence that she was female. He doesn’t seem ridiculously transphobic and with some help from SVU he moves towards recognizing and valuing the change that his late daughter made.

“Jumped In” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The head of SVU expresses support for a federal investigation of a small part of the NYPD.

“Intersection” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

The couple that gets engaged seems to be an inter-racial one, probably a black man and a white woman. Also, at one point a SVU detective makes an interesting statement. He says something about how humans are just “homicidal monkeys” who don’t respect the planet. I think it’s a non-bigoted environmental statement, but intertwined with it is another statement about how humans treat each other, and I am not sure the writers should have used the word “monkeys” because when NYPD cops refer to humans as “homicidal monkeys” I usually find that very offensive (in this case the detective I’m talking about gets along very well with the character played by Ice-T, so he probably isn’t a racist).

“Dutch Tears” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.

One of the two criminals is a Corrections Officer.

“Bubble Wrap” Season 24. See this for a plot summary.                     

They tell a rape survivor that they don’t care if she was using cocaine.

Law and Order Reviews I

 I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Scoundrels” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

To a large degree this is about a convicted white-collar swindler (who headed a mainstream “Savings and Loan” financial institution) who arranges for a threat to him to be eliminated (killed). The Assistant DAs prioritize prosecuting the swindler over the man who actually pulled the trigger. Earlier, when we first hear about the swindler, one of the detectives says that instead of being sentenced to a short stay at “Club Fed” (a very minimum-security prison) he should have gotten life.

“Progeny” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about abortion and is generally pro-choice. The commanding officer of the two detectives speaks briefly about how massive chunks (probably less than 100% but still a large majority) of the pro-life community don’t care about what happens to babies after they are born. SO MANY of these pro-lifers consistently support centrist or center-right economic policies which make it very difficult for children born to poor people (and to a large degree you could say something very similar about the children of working-class people).

“Seed” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

There was a gay couple.

“Wannabe” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is generally about classism. I don’t talk a lot about classism on my blog because A) it’s not the same thing as Capitalism, and B) I don’t believe it’s quite as dehumanizing as racism or homophobia or sexism, etc. But I think it’s usually a good thing to expose it once in a while.

There is one minor aspect of this episode that I want to talk about. Towards the very beginning there’s a brief reference to unions by someone who is a corporate opponent of unions and the senior detective cautions him to watch what he says because the cops are in a union. I get the impression that occasionally it’s a good thing that cops are unionized (i.e. when there’s some kind of attack on public sector workers below the federal level, they MIGHT, to a SMALL degree stand in solidarity with the other public sector workers in that area). But I also get the impression that a big part of the contracts negotiated by cop unions make it easier for cops to get away with murder, etc. And cops are FREQUENTLY mobilized in support of management during strikes, organizing drives, and lock-outs.

Sometime around 2004 “The Labor Exchange” (the pro-labor bi-weekly show on Boulder’s progressive KGNU radio station) interviewed a representative of the cop union in a nearby city (Longmont). It was very non-confrontational and I’m open-minded that maybe it was okay. As I said, I am not in favor of constant hostility towards cop unions. But I also remember reading, at some point between about 2002 and about 2008, that when a strike in Longmont was broken, management had the local SWAT team present when the workers first came back to work. On one hand, the strike was already broken, so in all fairness this probably wasn’t as offensive as it would be if they had tried to intimidate pickets with the police DURING the strike. But it still pisses me off (and it’s possible they DID try to intimidate pickets but the article I read left that out for some reason).

“Bad Faith” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

This is about the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.

Britts Out! (Katie Britt, immigration, and sex-trafficking)

(a very similar version of this was published as a guest opinion in the MSM paper for Boulder here) 

 

(That’s what I say about Ireland and the US Senate!)

As you probably know, a month ago GOP Sen. Katie Britt was under a storm of criticism in response to her rebuttal speech after the State of the Union address by President Biden. She told the story of a Mexican woman sex-trafficked when she was a young teen in Mexico- well, for the most part Britt didn’t want you to know it was in Mexico. Britt’s been less than consistent about this, but the idea was to make you think it was in this country and on Biden’s watch (when in fact it was during the George W. Bush administration).

In addition to everything else that has been said about Britt’s rebuttal, I have some more to add. Crucially, read the two paragraphs towards the bottom that are in italics, they’re very important.
 
She was talking about the surge in migration from Mexico to the US, but she also talks about sex-trafficking and Mexican drug cartel activity and she is conflating all three of them (it should be noted that the Mexican woman who was trafficked was not a victim of the cartels contrary to what Britt implied). Has sex-trafficking surged? I’ll be honest- I don’t know, but I think Britt wants you to think it has and that it's coming here with Mexican migrants.

At one point in a March 10th The Guardian article, she is quoted as saying:
 
“We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”
 
I believe that although this is in conflict with what she was saying the rest of the time, she was trying to say in that quote that this kind of sex-trafficking is common in Mexico and Mexicans want to come here and rape your wife or daughter, etc. and only Donald Trump can stop them. She was saying that the sex-trafficking inside Mexico, deaths of migrants at the border and deaths of Americans at the hands of immigrants inside America are one unbroken chain that can only be addressed comprehensively by Trump’s approach to immigration. This is nonsense.

Tough immigration policies will not affect the Mexican drug cartels (it certainly wouldn’t have stopped what happened in Britt’s anecdote because the cartels and the the border had nothing to do with it). Separating children from parents at the border will do absolutely nothing to the cartels. I’m not sure what WILL stop the cartels because I’m not as familiar with recent Mexican history as I should be, but tough immigration policies are not going to help.

As far as “there are victims at the border,” I am not sure what she’s talking about, but there are reports that migrants waiting to cross the border often find themselves in bad situations, which probably does include all kinds of sex crimes. I am not sure how much time is spent at the border by migrants who are not asylum seekers, but as far as the asylum seekers, you must remember that Britt’s party and her hero, Trump, strongly support the “Remain in Mexico” policy where asylum seekers must wait in Mexico until a decision is made about granting them asylum. So, the GOP believes that Mexico is just one big nightmare for teenage girls trying to get to America, but they want such survivors to either wait in Mexico for months or years, or to just stay in Mexico permanently.

As far as victims in this country, yes, it occasionally happens as it might have recently with Laken Riley (I said it- satisfied, MTG?) (I said “might have” because of the presumption of innocence). Those are tragedies but you need to consider a few things:
1) From what I have read non-immigrants here are more likely than immigrants here to commit crimes (yes, that statement probably is based on ignoring the “crime” committed when they enter this country without documents- but that’s a victimless crime).
2) That percentage of the immigrant population that commits violent crime must be incredibly small- why punish everyone in that population because of a very few bad apples?
3) I cannot remember a lot about how often this happens but what about the immigrants who die at the hands of racist and violent white people who listen to the anti-immigrant rantings of people like Britt? Fueling that racism as Trump does will only increase the number of immigrants who get viciously beaten to death by angry teenage males.

In her statement that I quoted above Britt implies that liberals ignore what she's talking about. There are probably better counter-examples than this, but I’m going to go with something that I think is important and probably doesn’t get mentioned very much. The TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit FREQUENTLY makes it clear that NYC is a "sanctuary city" where cops don't collaborate with Immigration authorities and not only do they oppose all kinds of sex crimes in general, there was one season 19 two-part episode (Remember Me and Remember Me, Too) about a "coyote" (someone who helps undocumented immigrants get across the southern border and to their destination in the US) who repeatedly raped women he was transporting. Another episode, “911” in season seven, is about a young girl who was brought over the Mexican border by someone who then sold her to child pornographers. In season 16 there is an episode “Girls Disappeared,” about sex-trafficked teenage girls crossing that border. There might be other episodes like that.

 

(UPDATE 7/19/24 The woman Britt talks about was sex-trafficked far from the border)

Liberals and progressives believe that migrant women and girls being sexually exploited and/or assaulted is a serious problem, but they don't support Trump's extreme approach to immigration.

Law and Order Reviews H

 I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Kids” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although it’s a minor aspect of the story, the main characters are concerned that police friends of the defendant’s father (an ex-cop) may have conspired to get a key witness killed, without whose testimony the defendant would probably be acquitted.

“Old Friends” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about a whistle-blower being killed by someone trying to protect a small (or at most medium) sized business from lethal exposure about moldy baby food that could easily sicken or even kill babies. On the other hand, I am not absolutely sure I should be doing this review because it’s a mobbed-up business and the mob is responsible for the murder, so it’s less damning of capitalism than it would be if there was no mob involvement.


“Blue Bamboo” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

There is one small part of this episode I want to highlight. It sounds like one of the detectives is saying there should be more funding for education. I realize that’s hardly something the Left has a monopoly on, but it is also an important part of our agenda.

In general there’s something that’s a bigger part of the episode but which I am unsure I should comment on. It basically says that there is some massive problem with anti-Japanese bigotry in America. It says nothing about bigotry towards Japanese-AMERICANS. I think it might be exaggerating how much anti-Japanese bigotry there was in the mid-1990s in America. I do have one little anecdote about this. When I was about 6-7 years old in the early 1980s I saw that in a men’s room stall someone had written “Remember Pearl Harbor, stone a Toyota” (or something very similar to that). To be honest, at the time I thought it was clever and/or neat. I had no idea that shortly before or after that day a Chinese-American (Vincent Chin), mistaken for a Japanese-American by two white Michigan auto-workers, was killed in a hate crime in 1982.

“White Rabbit” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

To some degree this episode could be considered in conflict with the New Left of the 1960s, but the DA and the senior ADA, to one degree or another express some degree of sympathy with those who passionately opposed the Vietnam War. Although I’m not that familiar with him, William Kunstler was for decades an important civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, and in this episode he played himself.

Overall, politically it’s one of the best episodes.

Law and Order Reviews G

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Manhood” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about homophobia in the police. Four cops conspire to fail at backing up a fifth one (a gay man) who is in need of assistance, because they’re homophobes and either want him dead or at least wounded.  It seems like the head of their precinct (a geographical division of the NYPD that probably includes something like 100-300 cops) was at least opposed to the Assistant DA’s effort to prosecute the four cops and may have encouraged the homophobia of his men.

At one point one of the four cops talks about gay people and political influence the same way that anti-Semites talk about Jews and political influence.

The prosecution loses when the jury acquits 3 defendants (one testified against them as part of a deal). In some ways it’s a sad ending, but probably more realistic than convictions would have been and sort of more likely to inspire anti-homophobic action (in general, not necessarily in relation to homophobia in the police).

“Volunteers” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a homeless man being  beaten (almost to death) by a middle-class resident of the NYC neighborhood he (the homeless man) lives in. To a large degree the residents and business-people of that area are jerks, but this specific homeless character is possibly worse (until you factor in the attempt at murdering him by the residents of the neighborhood, that is). That kind of undermines the liberal-progressive message the show is trying to give about being sensitive to the problem of homelessness but the writers probably needed the homeless character to provoke the people he lived near. The jury’s vote to convict on one count related to the attempted homicide is practically over-turned when the judge sentences the defendant to time served (a couple days) and a short period of probation. I think that highlights that a lot of this country’s elite is hostile to the homeless.

“Profile” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although not especially noteworthy or inspirational, this is a pretty good anti-racist episode. At one point there’s a brief statement about racial scapegoating. I think that racial scapegoating is a major problem. There’s a lot of white capitalists out there who, to one degree or another like the idea of convincing white workers that their economic misery is the fault of people of color and/or white anti-racists, and/or policies like Affirmative Action.

“Black Tie” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

In general I was thinking that maybe I should make a brief note when the defendant is a rich person. Especially with episodes like this when they use their influence to obstruct the investigation and/or get away with it because of their wealth.

Law and Order Reviews F

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“The Corporate Veil” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is a good one where a corporation is the criminal. There’s also a brief positive reference to Ralph Nader.

“Wedded Bliss” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is about sweatshop labor. It’s pretty damning.

“Mother Love” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

One of the detectives says that crack cocaine should be legalized, and his partner doesn’t seem to strongly disagree. I support ending the war on drugs, at least in relation to some and maybe all drugs. I think marijuana legalization is great. To one degree or another, I believe other drugs should be either legalized or decriminalized- that is decriminalization of possession of a small amount (this approach would probably not change the law as far as people who sell drugs). Decriminalization would involve treating addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal one. I think that this would be an appropriate way to deal with crack.

“Jurisdiction” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

Although he’s alone and pretty junior, a corrupt cop is stopped.

“Conduct Unbecoming” Season 3. For a plot summary see this.

In general, it’s almost critical of the US military. The plot includes the Navy trying to bury the scandal by sacrificing a low-ranking officer in a court-martial but on the other hand the Navy apparently had come down slightly hard on the senior officer who had engaged in “conduct unbecoming.”
Then there's the time that one detective mentions that the tax-payers paid for the massive party the Navy crew had at an NYC hotel. The other detective says: “nice to know my tax dollars aren’t being wasted on school books.”

Law and Order Reviews E

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Cradle to Grave” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

At the beginning there’s one very progressive statement. The cops are looking for the parent(s) of a dead baby and are asking at child care places. A woman working at one says that they used to watch babies, but because of a cut in the federal funding they got, they had to stop. She says something about how the federal government was able to buy a couple more military aircraft because of those nation-wide cuts to child care subsidies, and implies that it was a bad set of priorities.

After about 10 minutes it became clear to me that it was about a lazy, greedy slum-lord property owner. In order to transform her decaying, low-rent buildings into something more profitable, she encourages tenants to move out- a corrupt building superintendent and a thug posing as a tenant make life very difficult for the tenants. The owner and her two helpers are charged in connection with the baby dying because the heat was turned off and there was a broken window in the apartment the baby died in.

“The Fertile Fields” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

Initially there’s some chance that the murder was an anti-semitic hate crime carried out by Black teens. The senior police officer is reluctant to rush to that assumption, worried that it will greatly aggravate relations between NYC Jews and NYC Blacks. The way that the murder turns out to have been committed by a white, non-Jewish criminal I think says a lot about a tendency to blame black teens when they’re innocent.

“Intolerance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a little bit of anti-racism. The white suspects (their conviction was overturned when a mistrial was declared) brought a bit of racism to the academic competition between their loved one and his Chinese-American peer, who they probably killed.

“Silence” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

This is basically about homophobia. It’s a little flawed but overall it’s anti-homophobic. It’s about a black-mail scam by straight prison inmates against closeted gay men outside prison (I think it might happen in reality because I first read about it in a John Grisham novel two decades ago, and now this (this episode was done about 10 years before that book, so people were thinking about it at two different times in our recent history)). If it IS real, that’s just one more reason to fight homophobia.

“The Working Stiff Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

Although it could be more pro-union and I wouldn’t call it socialist, it is in a fairly good way about conflict between the working-class and the upper-class. The union activist with an attitude toward the bosses gets along well with the cops and the Assistant DAs, so I think the viewer is sort of supposed to like him.

Law and Order Reviews D

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here.  In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Heaven” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things worth mentioning. First, the senior police officer says that in the absence of a tragedy like the lethal fire they’re investigating, most New Yorkers don’t care about brown-skinned immigrants.

Also, the junior ADA says (approvingly) that constitutional protections like the 4th and 5th Amendments are for everyone including undocumented immigrants.

“Severance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

The killer was hired for the job by a crooked defense contractor.

“Blood is Thicker” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s one brief mention of how GOP politician Dan Quayle (VP of the US 1989-1993) avoided Vietnam by joining the National Guard, at a time when getting in the Guard meant you wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. Although the Washington Post article I just read wasn’t explicit about Quayle’s position on the war at the time he avoided it, in general he was a hawk during his political career. There were millions of people who supported the war and tried to avoid fighting in it because they didn’t want to be killed.

“Vengeance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a tiny bit of dialogue between minor characters that might be considered pro-union.

“Sisters of Mercy” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

To one degree or another this is about a man, probably around 30 years old, coercing girls in their mid-teens into having sex with him.

Law and Order Reviews C

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Sonata for Solo Organ” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about an INCREDIBLY wealthy man spending 1-2 million dollars on a plot to extract a kidney from an unwilling donor (who almost dies) so that his (the wealthy man’s) daughter can get a new kidney. The head of the national agency handling organ transplants demands that the prosecutors go after the wealthy man who demanded special treatment because of his wealth- instead of just the MD and nurse who did the dirty work. He says that his organization “is the one true democracy. One of the few instances where money doesn’t talk- at all.”

“The Blue Wall” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

There are three aspects of this episode which are good politically.

1. It’s indirectly about an effort to go after white-collar crime.
2. It’s also partly about corrupt cops, including a very senior one.
3. There’s a corrupt  congressman involved. He’s an ex-cop, which makes me think he’s Republican- I have gotten the impression that some massive majority of cops are Republican.

“Asylum” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things about the senior Assistant DA. First, although he is sort of in conflict with supporters of the homeless in this episode, he DOES say that “homelessness may be the greatest tragedy of our time.” Also, it sounds like he was a member or at least an active supporter of the ACLU, and his opinion of them changed when they defended the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois. I’m not saying he’s a progressive, but I think he might be more or less a liberal (although I don’t have a philosophical definition of liberal, A) I’d say they’re to the left of former President Bill Clinton (what he was like in office) and to the right of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and B) I go into more detail here).

“In Memory Of” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is sort of about homophobia. The original NYPD investigators (about 30 years before the events in this episode) suspected  a gay couple in the disappearance of a young boy. Although at the very beginning of their investigation two of the main characters spend a little time pursuing that lead, after about 10 minutes of the 45 min. episode that assumption is illustrated  as nonsense. One of the detectives says that cops know that a majority of child molesters are straight. It’s a good statement (not the first part (I imagine that back then there was a ton of homophobia among cops)), although I assume it could have been better without sacrificing accuracy- it should have been said that gays are no more likely to molest kids than straight people are (i.e. if 10% of the population is gay, 10% of child molesters are gay). They identify and prosecute another suspect who’s straight and he pleads guilty at the end.

Law and Order Reviews B

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Life Choice” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

Although it’s a little mixed, this episode leans heavily towards being pro-choice.

“A Death in the Family” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

In this episode the detectives and the ADAs see things differently. The ADAs ask if the life of a cop is worth more than the life of a civilian. They find themselves investigating the death of a corrupt cop. Most damning of all, the senior ADA says that a lot of cops carry an untraceable gun that they can plant on someone if they shoot a suspect and it turns out the suspect was not armed.

“Mushrooms” Season 1. For a summary see this. 

The Black woman whose sons are killed or wounded doesn’t get along perfectly with the police. But that’s just realistic (MANY people of color don’t get along with cops) and I don’t think it dilutes what I’m about to say- she’s not seen as a suspect or an enemy of the police or something (you’re supposed to sympathize with her). She says at one point that her supervisor (she’s a janitor) wouldn’t allow her to go to the morgue and the hospital about her two sons. First, that’s just messed up in general. But people of color are more likely than white people to be in a financial situation where they cannot afford to lose their job in a crisis like that. Poverty is a more common problem among people of color than it is among white people. Part of this means that they are less likely than white people to know someone who can loan them some money until they get a new job after they lose their job (for leaving work during a family emergency). And, even more damning of some supervisors and employers, in some cases like this it’s a job that probably can be skipped for a day.

“The Troubles” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

This is largely about N. Ireland. There are so many statements that are demanding I comment on them that this review would be about 3,000 words if I commented on all of them. The short version is that there’s a lot of nonsense.

There is one thing I’m going to comment on, something that, for some weird reason I haven’t really commented on before. One of the two cops buys the IRA member’s PR effort for America, and is sympathetic to him, basically because he (the cop) is Irish-American. Does law enforcement and the intelligence community in America go easy on the IRA because the vast majority of IRA supporters here are white Irish-Americans? First, as I explain here and here, the IRA was not a terrorist organization, and that has nothing to do with their skin color or their political goals. Second, the US government was largely on the side of the British, as I explain in note #17 of the poem here.                              

Are there or were there racist NYPD cops who supported the IRA but not the armed wing of the African National Congress? Yes, and there may have been a few FBI agents like that (although probably just a few- I imagine the FBI was less tolerant of IRA supporters than the NYPD were). Was there something racist about the fact that the IRA was never on any US list of terrorist organizations? Although I’m not real familiar with those lists, as I explaIn above, the IRA were, objectively, not terrorists.

If you look beyond the white privilege of most IRA supporters in America, globally their supporters were mostly what we would call in America “progressive.”

Law and Order Reviews A

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

"Subterranean Homeboy Blues” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

I am not sure I should be reviewing this episode since it’s not real clear exactly where the main characters and the writers are politically. But there is some anti-racism involved and some feminism involved (unfortunately, they’re sort of at odds with each other, but it’s still an okay episode politically (the white woman who killed a black man on the subway was either a feminist warrior who had earlier been attacked by a man, or she’s a racist who shot the man partly because he was black)).

“The Reaper’s Helper” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

I’m not sure I want to review this one, but it does involve the gay population and AIDS. Is it about homophobia and/or AIDS-phopbia? Not really. It’s about a gay man who euthanizes gay men with AIDS, AT THEIR REQUEST (the jury says the guy is only guilty of promoting a suicide attempt). One of the two detectives seems a little homophobic and the other seems a little better than that. The prosecutors have mixed feelings about prosecuting the killer and at the end the senior of the two ADAs sabotages their effort at prosecution and the killer is acquitted of 4/5 of the charges. It’s pretty complicated, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of HIV+ people would like it (it was made in 1990, when there were few effective drugs for AIDS and people with it faced a short life and a horrible death). I think it’s good that the killer wasn’t convicted of anything serious.


“Everybody’s Favorite Bagman” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

A small part of this is about a successful effort to bring down a corrupt senior officer in the NYPD.

“Poison Ivy” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

They go after a white cop who killed an unarmed Black man and planted a gun in his hand.

“Indifference” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show. With that in mind, in this episodes there is a fair amount of stuff about not just domestic violence and child sexual abuse, but EXTRAORDINARY domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

At the beginning of this episode a Puerto Rican elementary school teacher calls the police when she strongly suspects that a child is being abused at home. When the detectives show up, the white principal says at first that the teacher is “trigger happy,” and then later says that she is “prone to excitability” (that time he says it’s a “cultural thing”). The principal says the teacher should have followed the school district's process for suspicions of child abuse and then explains it. One of the detectives responds by saying: “When someone, anyone- even a high-strung Puerto Rican lady, COMPRENDE? -thinks a child is being beaten, that person is supposed to report it to the authorities.” To a large degree I think it’s an anti-racist statement by both the character and the writers who wrote the episode.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews LL

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Silent Night, Hateful Night” Season 23. See this for a plot summary.

Overall there’s some good stuff about violent bigotry towards religious minorities, although it’s a bit muddled since they had one batch of hate crimes committed by one group (Black teens) and one batch carried out by white fascists. I have mixed feelings about this episode. I’m not saying it’s just generally bad for the show to include stuff about Black-Jewish tension in NYC, but I’m hoping they’ve only addressed it 1-2 other times on the show (out of 500+ episodes), since it should be an incredibly minor theme. In that spirit, there is one very valuable part of this episode. When the team of detectives that includes SVU learn that some of the hate crime violence was carried out by anti-Semitic Blacks, they are reluctant to act publicly on that (by involving the media in their effort to arrest someone) because they worry that it will increase tension between those two groups. They eventually go with pursuing the Black teens for the anti-semitic hate crimes (or at least some of them), but only after a little more investigation.

“Tommy Baker’s Hardest Fight” Season 23. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a boxing champ coming out of the closet, coming out as a gay man.

“Video Killed the Radio Star” Season 23. See this for a plot summary.

The rape survivor is in an inter-racial relationship.

“Promising Young Gentlemen” Season 23. See this for a plot summary.

One of the SVU detectives says that if the suspects were people of color, the investigation would be a lot more aggressive.

“Once Upon a Time in El Barrio” Season 23. See this for a plot summary. 

This episode includes some statements and actions reflecting the fact that NYC does not help the federal immigration authorities. It’s also about a corrupt NYPD Captain.

Possibly the most valuable part of it politically is when the head of SVU (UPDATE 11/21/22 for a couple days that erroneously said NYPD, but it's correct now) points out that the corrupt cop was saved at one point in the past by something called “qualified immunity.” It basically means that government employees can often avoid lawsuits that are about how they do their job. It’s often cited by campaigners against police brutality as part of the problem.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews KK

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Our Words Will Not Be Heard” Season 22. See this for a plot summary.

This is another anti-racist episode, with some stuff about homophobia added as well. Some of that is:

1. The head of SVU acknowledges that police don’t do as much about missing women of color as they do about missing white women (the media are also mentioned).
2. The head of SVU also gives a man suing the NYPD for racism some tips on what kind of demands to make in settlement negotiations (her suggestions are pretty good) (it’s emphasized that the people behind such lawsuits are looking for justice and change, not money). Part of what she says is that the courts need to mandate that the NYPD start a program of anti-bias training.
3. The bad guys in this episode are white supremacists who go after an inter-racial lesbian couple.

“In the Year we all fell down” Season 22. See this for a plot summary.

This is a little complicated, but I think there is an anti-racist element to this episode. At the center of the episode is a Manhattan restaurant with a BLACK LIVES MATTER poster at the front entrance. When her business is in serious financial trouble the owner DOES freak out and take the head of SVU hostage, but she’s willing to be a hostage to try and keep the situation from becoming critical (she is friends with the owner and loves the restaurant; she doesn’t want the owner to be killed). Also, at the end, after the owner surrenders without harming anyone, it’s revealed that the restaurant’s customers and/or the neighborhood in general raised money to help keep the restaurant from going under.

“Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” Season 22. See this for a plot summary.   

In this episode, a small part of it is about the immediate superior of the head of SVU. He’s a black man and seems willing to cooperate with legal efforts at reforming the NYPD and the rest of the NYPD leadership become incredibly hostile to him.

“Nightmares in Drill City” Season 23. See this for a plot summary.

The ADA working for SVU expresses opposition to prosecuting people for having some marijuana.

“The People vs. Richard Wheatley” Season 22. For a plot summary see this.

One minor character is a female detective married to another woman.

That character is a main character on the Law and Order spin-off “Organized Crime” and we are reminded that her wife’s family (both women are black) is suing the NYPD for excessive force.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews JJ

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Guardians and Gladiators” Season 22. See this for a plot summary.  

I read somewhere in late 2020 that after the anti-police protests in response partly to the death of George Floyd, the creative people behind SVU were going to shift things closer to the anti-racist end of the spectrum. This is the first episode they made after that shift and it’s very obvious. I might not remember every anti-racist thing, but here’s a few items that I remember:

1) When SVU arrests a black man at the scene of an assault, the head of SVU has to be interviewed by Internal Affairs. The IA interviewer is a black woman who has some good thoughts about how even the relatively anti-racist white officers have a lot of room for improvement.
2) An attempt at getting an indictment of a white man for sexually assaulting an Asian-American man fails because of hostility among the grand jury towards NYPD.
3) A Black member of SVU who saw what happened to their ADA (see item 2) gets into a confrontation with the (white) ADA and says at one point that when NYPD was carrying out “stop and frisk” operations Black officers would try to avoid participating.
4) When the black man is arrested (item 1) it’s partly in connection with a white woman claiming that he was acting threateningly towards her son. At the end the head of SVU tells him that the woman is being investigated for false reporting.

Item 3 makes me think of something else. About 1-2 years after Ice-T’s heavy metal band Body Count recorded the song “Cop Killer,” there was a backlash from police and  conservative organizations, but the then-35,000-strong National Black Police Association didn’t join the boycott of the label BC was on and kind of sided with Ice-T- not just on first amendment grounds, but because they realized that the song was about the need to do something about police brutality.

“Ballad of Dwight and Irene” Season 22. See this for a plot summary.

A black member of SVU talks about how when he was growing up he didn’t trust cops.

“The Long Arm of the Witness” Season 22. Wikipedia summary is: “When a powerful judge (Josh Stamberg) dismisses a rape case and announces a run for New York Attorney General, Carisi investigates the judge's own history of sexual assault. However, he and the rest of the Special Victims Unit have difficulty getting some victims to come forward after their careers are threatened.”

First, a recurring character (another ADA) is identified as gay and bi-racial. Second, the defendant is incredibly classist. That doesn’t mean the episode is anti-capitalist, but it’s still pretty cool.

“Hunt, Trap, Rape and Release” Season 22. Wikipedia summary: “The Special Victims Unit team up with former Major Case Squad detective Carolyn Barek (Annabella Sciorra) who is now a lieutenant with the Bronx SVU on a serial rape case that crosses city lines. Their fraught collaboration is hampered by police malpractice and inconsistent modus operandi.”

This is about a cop that is a serial rapist.

“Welcome to the Pedo Motel” Season 22. For a plot summary see this.

Although this is less anti-racist than it could be because the people most directly responsible for the lynching of a black man are also people of color, it’s a fairly anti-racist episode overall. A young black man (18 yo) was arrested for sleeping with his 15-yo white girlfriend because her father is a racist, and then when he’s on parole and a suspect for another sex crime involving a white girl younger than him, he’s essentially lynched- something carried out by Latinos but inspired by a white gang in the same NYC neighborhood. It turns out that he was framed by his GF’s racist father.

Law and Order: SVU Reviews II

This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Townhouse Incident” Season 17. See this for a plot summary.

Two minor characters are in an inter-racial relationship.

“Collateral Damages” Season 17. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a senior NYPD official who gets caught with child porn.

“Manhattan Transfer” and “Unholiest Alliance” Season 17. See this and this for a plot summary. 

Although it’s obscured by other suspects, part of this is about two corrupt cops moonlighting for a crime ring that traffics teenage minor girls.

“Assaulting Reality” Season 17. For a plot summary see this.

It’s about a reality TV show and at one point a member of the crew (she seems like she’s senior) basically says that using a non-union crew makes it difficult to successfully complete episodes of a reality TV show.

“Intersecting Lives” and “Heartfelt Passages” Season 17. For a plot summary see this and this.

This is about SVU investigating a jail guard who is raping inmates and ex-inmates. He’s white and all the women he targets are black and that’s part of his theory that no one will believe them. It also kind of makes it worse, as there is a history of white men using black women for non-consensual sex. Also, practically all of the other guards passionately support him and automatically believe him.

(We also learn that the ADA working for SVU has been getting threats on a frequent basis since he got a grand jury to indict three cops who killed an unarmed black man)

(The ADA is threatened by a street gang member in connection with his prosecution of a prison guard; it’s implied that the union for prison guards is behind it)

Law and Order: SVU Reviews HH

 This is a set of reviews of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I’ll often do no more than make brief notes about an episode, although occasionally I’ll go deeper. Also, often there are dissenting main characters on almost any political issue, but you can usually tell what the general position of the show is. All the rest of the reviews are available by clicking on the l&osvu label at the bottom.

“Glasgowman’s Wrath” Season 16. See this for a plot summary.     

Two of the girls (sisters) have two gay moms.

“Forgiving Rollins” Season 16. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a senior police officer getting accused by SVU of rape.

“Agent Provocateur” Season 16. For a plot summary, see this. 

A minor character is gay. They show him in his bedroom with another man (who might be naked and is sleeping in the bed). I’m not sure this is as significant as I think it is. I’m also not sure it’s as unprecedented on this show as I think it is. But I think the average straight man is less comfortable with a scene like that than he is with a similar scene involving two women. I’m not sure how helpful that kind of thing is (occasionally, in non-porn contexts, emphasizing the SEXUAL aspect of same sex relationships (the first man I referred to said he met his friend in a “meat market” bar (where I assume they were both looking for sex))). But I think it’s helpful to do that occasionally. On a last note, the first man I referred to was white and his friend was black.

“Transgender Bridge” Season 17. For a plot summary see this. 

Transphobia is a big part of this episode.

“Patrimonial Burden” Season 17. For a plot summary see this.

I’m not sure how many times I have done a note for similar episodes, but I think this one deserves one. The rapist is a socially conservative clergyman.