More Detective Olivia Benson, less Detectives 'Bullethead' and 'Assman' on police forces.
Detective Olivia Benson.
Doe eyes dripping with concern and sympathy for victims; the hard clench of her jaw when faced with injustice; her wine problem—how could she not, with all of the horrors she’s seen?!
Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit, where the actress Mariska Hargitay has portrayed Detective Olivia Benson for 900 years, is brilliant copaganda because it’s wish fulfillment.
In reality, the NYPD spends the bulk of its resources on narcotics units, fighting low level crimes like fare jumping, and there are like fewer than 10 people working the Special Victims Division in each burrough. As journalist Meg O’Connor told Adam Johnson for The Appeal:
If you have the NYPD, the biggest police force in America, with something like 40,000 officers and you’re seeing, so the data that I got for the NYPD shows that last year there were 695 arrests for rape, but by comparison last year there was something like 6,000 arrests for fare evasion and 3,500 arrests for possessing a gravity knife and things like that. And there are still thousands of marijuana possessions arrests.
Another fallacy promoted by the SVU franchise is that uniformed cops are insensitive boneheads, while plainclothes detectives are like Olivia Benson: sensitive, brilliant, hard-working, always balancing safety and justice.
In reality, detectives have some of the worst records. That’s partly because they’ve spent more time on the force than patrol police officers; but it’s also because the more rules you break, the more collars you‘ll get, leading to promotions in the absence of any real consequences for breaking the rules.
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