Cops in Culture #8 - Law & Order: SVU
“The powerful medium of television is attempting to change the reputation the police have as being brutal, racist, corrupt and the protectors of wealthy and powerful interests. Television tries to legitimize the police by distorting on the screen what the police practice daily.”
The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of U.S. Police (1975)
By Elio Sea
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (aka SVU) is a police procedural television show set in New York City featuring a rotating cast of dedicated detectives investigating those sexually based offences considered especially heinous - or so the famous opening montage voiceover tells us. A spin-off from the original show simply called Law & Order, SVU is one of many cop-focused shows in a wider set of interconnected franchises. While the show puts forth the disclaimer that all its storylines are fictional, it has long had (and encouraged) a reputation for being “ripped from the headlines”. Despite once being considered one of the more progressive cop shows because of its interest in sexual violence, SVU's gruesome and graphic preoccupation with the worst things people do, functions only to prove to audiences just how much we need cops.
These days, SVU is fairly commonly understood to be a form of ‘copaganda’. Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent global protest on issues of police violence and racism, we’ve seen an increased public interrogation of the role of policing in society. Many of these reflections have engaged with the role that SVU has played in popular culture, and how the storylines and characters have served to undermine and discourage police reform. Criticisms usually emphasise how the show sanitises police violence, demonises criminal defence attorneys, defends civil liberties violations, and depicts a fantasy version of how police officers behave. The most disturbing layer of copaganda is how it removes from sight the role of the police in maintaining state power, convinces audiences to trust the police and consent to policing, and in doing so reflects and extends the real life practices of the state in defending and protecting cops and policing.
Take for example Guardian (season 19, episode 21, 2017). Accused of attempting to rob a bodega with a friend, Malik is arrested by police. He pleads with them to not take him to jail as his teenage sister, Tiana, is in a nearby playground having just been raped - the scene at the bodega was an attempt to access a payphone. Tiana corroborates her brother’s story and the SVU team investigates, tracking down three other teenage boys as the perpetrators. In a classic SVU narrative manoeuvre, this is where the story twists: the teenage boys say it wasn’t rape but prostitution, they’d paid Malik for time with Tiana. Confronted with this and questions about the extent to which her brother acted as her “pimp”, Tiana walks back her story and says she wasn’t raped, nothing happened. Given the options of being put in foster care while her beloved brother is in prison (her mother already incarcerated, her father long dead) or refusing to cooperate with police in the investigation into Malik, her choice is quick and easy: no cooperation.
So far, this is standard SVU. A crime occurs, the police come to investigate, complications in the case produce an opportunity for conflict. In this “ripped from the headlines” world, real life stories aren’t borrowed only for entertainment purposes but to offer audiences an opportunity to reflect on the issues of the day. Season 19’s showrunner, Michael Chernuchin, told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that "Everybody's political now and everything is political now, and we want to deal with that." I think it’s fair to assume that what Chernuchin is attempting to describe is the increased climate of political awareness in the United States following the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent Ferguson uprising, the 2016 Dallas standoff over police killings of black men followed by the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. In this context of far right organising alongside deeply contentious public discourse about racist police violence towards black men, putting an episode about an unsympathetic young black man committing crimes on television in 2017 apparently seemed to the SVU writers to be a meaningful way to - as Chernuchin says - “deal with that”.
As the case against Malik progresses, lawyers on both sides shout at a silent jury about the clients who paid him for access to Tiana, the terrible men who raped a “drugged out” teenager. Taking the stand, Tiana instead speaks to the poverty she faces and the options that prostitution gives her to alleviate the struggles of her circumstances and support her family. Lieutenant Olivia Benson plays the role of the victim-whisperer, telling Tiana she is strong, she is smart, she has a future. Benson's goal here is encouraging Tiana to testify against her brother, shifting rapidly between understanding mother figure and hard-nosed police officer as she tries to bring Tiana on board with securing Malik’s conviction. Tiana names this at one point - “Not so caring now!” - frustrated at Benson’s manipulations and threats of arrest if she doesn’t comply with the police and District Attorney’s wishes.
Yet, even while Benson expresses her disgust over Malik’s actions of funding his drug habit by facilitating his younger sister's sex work, the episode ends with a sympathetic tone for the now sentenced and imprisoned young man. Benson recognises Malik’s drug use as a symptom of the violence he also experienced as a child, a method to alleviate his pain. Detective Tutuola (played by real life cop-hater Ice-T) takes a steelier view on this idea of victimhood, speaking to individual responsibility and resilience. As this conversation demonstrates, the cops involved in this case are somewhat aware of the ways systemic injustice and poverty mark the lives of the victims and perpetrators they encounter. But their naming of the individual problems - and individual responsibility - is an obfuscation of police complicity in the systemic problem. Rather than being recognised as a source of the violence inflicted on Tiana and Malik’s lives, these cops are remade as outside observers. Sitting around in the station house, they discuss the factors that produce violence as though they don’t themselves participate in and structurally enforce them. This is copaganda at its finest.
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The very first season of SVU aired right in the heart of New York City’s introduction of ‘broken windows’ policing - an ideology which asserted that visible signs of crime in a neighbourhood, like a broken window, encouraged petty crime and led to more serious crimes. Cops were directed to take a stricter approach to minor offences and public antisocial behaviour, leading to a much greater criminalisation of poverty, and an increase in the disproportionate racist policing of black and brown communities. This ‘zero tolerance’ approach to policing encouraged the police to react more quickly and more harshly to minor offences, increasing instances of individual police aggression towards members of the public. While the idea for SVU (originally titled ‘Sex Crimes’) came to producer Dick Wolf in the late 80s, SVU didn’t go into production until 1999. That same year, Amadou Diallo was murdered by New York City police under a hail of 41 bullets, 19 of which hit him. Eyewitnesses reported that the officers kept shooting even after the unarmed Diallo had fallen to the ground. A lawyer for the cops described the shooting as “tragic” but “proper”. That a man had been killed was considered an unfortunate accident in the normal, necessary business of policing the city.
It was in this context that SVU and it’s focus on sexual violence first appeared on screens. The majority of rapes in early SVU seasons are rape-homicides, in which living victims don’t exist. Storylines focus on the efforts of the detectives to solve crimes, catch criminals and work as a team, rather than on the fallout on those who have been raped. Nonetheless, in Closure (Season 1, Episode 10, 1999) we meet Harper Anderson, who has been raped during a home invasion. Whereas in real life most rape victims know their rapist, if you survive a rape in season one of SVU it’s always a rape that was done by a complete stranger breaking into your home. The episode is upsetting to watch, involving a young woman recounting her rape in graphic detail. But it’s an episode that is all about the details, emphasising the repetitive, cog-like logistics and practicalities that come with reporting a rape; the counselling support on offer, the home repairs that will be funded by the state, the rape kit that will be paid for the state. It’s a system made smooth and rote by just how common rape is, and made better and easier for victims because the state - and cops - are there to take action.
Harper’s case runs cold but six months later a second rape allows the detectives to identify a suspect, and they need Harper to come in and identify her attacker. Despite early cooperation, Harper is no longer interested. She’s moved on, she doesn’t want to think about the rape anymore. Benson is despairing and again tries to arrest a rape victim, asking the prosecuting District Attorney Abby Carmichael if there’s some way they can compel her to cooperate - an outstanding parking ticket perhaps? Carmichael looks at her with disdain: I’m not going to rape her again, Olivia. The cracks in Olivia’s obsessions start to show, her drive to find the rapist, to punish, to prove guilt, appears to be an outcome she will achieve at any cost. She goes back to Harper’s apartment and insists on speaking to her, telling her that it’s important she cooperates. Harper is angry: Is that going to change anything for me? Is that going to give me closure? Olivia is angrier, and rough in her reply: Closure is a myth. You will never get closure, it will always be with you.
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An important thing to know about Olivia Benson (the show’s most prominent and longstanding character) is that she herself is the product of rape. This is the kind of fucked up backstory that SVU usually reserves for its more disposable guest characters, but here it is an exercise in framing Benson less as a mundane cop and more as a noble hero on a moral quest. Going off on a somewhat Freudian limb, SVU spends several seasons asking us to invest in this storyline and the importance of Benson’s personal psychology. Fundamentally, her desire is to punish her biological father and perhaps finally earn the love of her traumatised and emotionally abusive mother. The reason she can switch so swiftly between reassuring a victim and asking the District Attorney if she can arrest that same victim, is because her goal is not so much to find justice for victims but to catch and punish rapists. Rape victims, rather than being her priority, are merely tools that are useful in the pursuit of this goal.
Some might consider this deep psychological trauma as something better unpacked with a qualified psychotherapist; Benson instead unleashes it on the unsuspecting population of New York City. Within the world of the show this is a good thing, that’s the kind of policing it wants you to believe in. The narrative priority of SVU isn’t to pretend to an audience that aggressive cops don’t exist, but rather to offer you the opportunity to understand and eventually sympathise with them. Even better, to convince you to believe that their wildness is an honourable quality. While the highly-publicised murders of people like Amadou Diallo might leave the public worried about out-of-control cops, the investigative techniques of Benson and her fellow officers reassure audiences that this aggressive approach is actually the apparatus necessary to keep us safe. Who else better to deal with the rapist coming in through your window?
Ultimately, SVU is a project of legitimation. The purpose of copaganda is to obscure the structural violence of policing and make it easier for the public to trust the police. Whether it be reports about institutionalised oppression or Olivia Benson realising she’s a racist, police change typically only acknowledges problems with cops in order to hide the bigger problem: policing itself. Similarly, the recent attempts by police forces across the UK to manage their many crises of public legitimacy by loudly arresting, suspending or firingsomeoftherapists in their ranks are part of the same legitimation project SVU contributes to. By emphasising individual cases, and by making a public display of rooting out the bad apples, the cops once again hide their structural role in producing violence and shift attention instead to individual officers. Taking women’s safety and sexual violence seriously is reduced to finding individual perpetrators and getting rid of them. Like the business of everyday policing, guilt is assigned, punishments are applied, order is maintained. Rather than the police being the problem, they suddenly become the solution. The only thing about policing that is changed is the public’s opinion.