Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "In the Wind" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired September 25, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the “Street Justice” episode of Law and Order on Thursday, September 25, NBC showed a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “In the Wind,” about a young woman named Ella Parsons (Audrey Corso) who’s raped by a secret nocturnal visitor in her apartment in New York City. It turns out her assailant is actually her landlord, Eric Burnett (Cayleb Long), who’s had a history of letting himself into his tenants’ apartments with his pass key and having his wicked, wicked way with them. This time the SVU writer, Michele Fazekas, was drawing on current news events in the classic “Ripped from the Headlines!” tradition of everyone from Warner Bros. in the 1930’s (whose marketers actually coined that phrase) to Lifetime today. The key witness against Burnett is Jorge Ruíz (Juan Francisco Villa), an undocumented immigrant who’s naturally fearful of any involvement with the criminal justice system for fear that it will earn him a trip to El Salvador, Sudan, or some other out-of-the-way location from Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Gestapo. Jorge especially has reason to fear deportation (or worse) because there’s an arrest on his record, even though he was caught up in a drug sting with $100 in cash on him but he didn’t have anything to do with drugs or their sale. Naturally agents of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which almost no Americans had ever heard of until Trump started using it as part of his fascistic crackdown on so-called “illegals” (HSI was actually started as a task force dealing with cross-border white-collar crime, but they’ve supplied most – though not all – of Trump’s masked, unidentified secret police making random arrests on the streets as well as apprehending and deporting people who were following the law and showing up in immigration courts as they were supposed to), are waiting in the courtroom to arrest and deport Jorge as soon as he testifies. Indeed, their arrogance is such that they threaten to arrest the SVU detectives for “harboring” undocumented immigrants.

There are actually three plot lines to this episode, which is centered around the memorial for the late Captain Don Cragen (Dann Florek, who by the way was born in 1950 and is still alive) and gave Fazekas, director Brenna Malloy, and executive producer Dick Wolf to write in cameo appearances by SVU cast members past and present. Not only does Christopher Meloni show up, so do B. D. Wong, Dean Winters, and Michael Park. There’s a third plot strand in which Sgt. Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T – the man who got denounced by police departments all over the country for recording the song “Cop Killer” in his previous career as a rap artist has been playing a police officer for almost 25 years now, and his successful career transition seems to have inspired fellow rapper L. L. Cool J. to take his role on the CBS crime drama NCIS Los Angeles) sees a man (Salah Ghajar) and a woman (Ashley Michelle Pynn) in a park and thinks that he’s raping her. In fact the two are working together posing as a sexual assaulter and a victim so they can mug anyone who tries to help and rob them for drug money. Though when they targeted Tutuola they had no idea he was a cop, they nonetheless stole not only his wallet but his gun – and anyone who’s seen Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller Stray Dog or its quasi-remake, Coogan’s Bluff (1968, and Clint Eastwood’s first modern-dress role in an American film after he returned from making Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” in Italy) knows that to have a crook steal a cop’s gun is a humiliating event in his career as well as an obvious castration symbol. “Fin” is hospitalized for his injuries and he never reports that the crooks who jumped him stole his gun (a big bozo no-no in copworld), though it’s recovered and brought back to him when the bad guys are arrested. Ultimately the New York police are able to grab Jorge back from the clutches of HSI and win him an “S” visa (“the snitch visa,” one of them derisively calls it), which allows him to stay in the U.S. indefinitely for having given evidence in a criminal case. The feds are shown ultimately as compassionate, unlike their real-life counterparts in the Trump Reich.