I was wrong about the usual villain being a minority member on "Law and Order" but I'll stick with everything else I said about the show. There is nothing liberal about it. To use the word liberal to describe it would strip the word of all meaning. There have been weekly dramatic series on TV that can be called liberal. I think of the Lou Grant show, All in the Family and a show about the white coach of a mostly black high school basketball team called "White Shadow", I believe. But "Law and Order" has nothing in common with them. The biggest problem with "Law and Order" is that poverty as a causal explanation of crime is simply absent from the show. All of the gangsters, drug dealers and other predators who appear in the plot are simply bad guys that the cops and DA's office have to protect the citizenry from. The show presents the victim's point of view, who are inevitably white and middle class. There are "white collar" criminals on the show, but the big nightmare in NYC is not some executive who decides to poison a corporate rival (which never really happens in real-life) but the black or Puerto Rican hoodlums that Giuliani is trying to crack down on. One show that I vividly remember encapsulates this approach. It is about a young woman who is set upon by a homeless African-American psychotic who stabs her to death. The episode is built around the efforts of the DA's office to prosecute the guy successfully in spite of irregularities present during the initial arrest. The crazy man's lawyer is a composite of every liberal lawyer who has ever gotten bad press in the NY Post or other reactionary publications. The reason this show bugged me so much is that is was based on a real-life case that had a lot of resonances for me. The real-life incident had a number of poignant ambiguities that the hack writers for "Law and Order" left out entirely. A young successful wife of a young successful man was murdered about a decade ago by an African-American homeless psychotic man a couple of blocks from where I live. The homeless man, as it turns out, spent a semester at Bard College, my alma mater. He was a dance major from an impoverished single-mother Harlem family. He was also a schizophrenic whose illness manifested itself for the first time after he came to Bard. After a few hospitalizations, the social safety net began to unravel and this young man found himself on the streets. The cops and DA's on Law and Order are incapable of addressing this reality and the show's writers never present credible characters who can. I myself was nearly killed in my apartment by a couple of muggers a few years before this incident took place. Many other middle-class white people on the upper west side where the incident took place had been victims of muggings, burglaries and car-thefts in the 1980s. One case in particular took on a paradigmatic aspect. There was a homeless veteran who stalked the streets of upper Broadway talking to himself. Every so often, he would go into a rage and curse people or attack them physically. The newspapers and upscale magazines kept demanding to know why citizens could not be protected from this "Wild Man". The "Wild Man", I might mention, was also fictionalized on another episode of "Law and Order" which bracketed out the social and economic dimensions. These dimensions had a lot to do with the guy being a Vietnam veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress and who couldn't get decent care in a veteran's hospital. When Giuliani ran against Dinkins, he promised to make the streets safe. Period. A lot of young, affluent and nominally liberal residents of Manhattan crossed party lines and voted for Giuliani. The message of the Giuliani campaign was identical to the message of "Law and Order." The streets are haunted by creeps who are getting in the way of your ability to enjoy the pleasures of Manhattan life. Vote for Giuliani and the praetorian guard will protect you. Well, the praetorian guard does not function in real-life like it does on TV shows. It sticks toilet plungers up the asses of Haitian immigrants. The other thing to keep in mind about "Law and Order" is the way that the occasional prostitute is depicted. Pay close attention, Harry; they are seen as part of the general anti-social fabric that makes NYC unpalatable, along with squeegee guys, crack dealers and boom-box carrying teenagers. The push to rid Times Square of the "sex industries" is fully in line with the social message of the Giuliani campaign and "Law and Order". I don't think there can be a "liberal" cop show. This is a contradiction in terms. American society is in a fairly deep crisis and the police are functioning more and more like occupation troops in communities where injustice cuts deepest. Police brutality simply does not exist on NYPD, Homicide, or Law and Order, etc. When Jerry Orbach grabs a guy by the collar and tells him, "You better tell me what I'm looking for or else...", this is about as far as the show will ever go. But this will not disturb the liberal yuppie enjoying his or her TV show. What will disturb them is the sight of two cops holding a black man down while a third sticks a toilet plunger up his ass. This is real life and will not appear on "Law and Order". Louis Proyect
