r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after such a compelling Law and Order, the other two shows on the NBC program September 29 were considerably less interesting, though they had their points. The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit featured a gang of teenagers from El Salvadoran immigrant families, obviously patterned on the real-life MS-13, who target a Midwestern family – a husband, wife and their two daughters – who are in New York to check out potential colleges one of their daughters could attend. The gangsters waylay them on a subway train and their leader takes a machete to the father, killing him, and they gang-rape the daughter who was there to check out potential colleges. The real antagonism is between SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Nick Duarte (Maurice Compte), who has just been assigned to SVU by chief of detectives Tom McGrath (Terry Serpico), who has clashed with Benson before. Duarte previously worked in the anti-gang unit and he’s obsessed for personal reasons with bringing down this gang in particular, so much so that he pleads with district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and his associates to give the two gang members they’ve been able to arrest immunity from prosecution in exchange for information on the whereabouts of “Oscar Papa,” the head of the gang.
Benson insists that the business of her unit is to prosecute rapists, not let them go in the interest of capturing someone higher up the food chain of crime. Of the original four suspects, two of them are killed before they can be indicted or put on trial, and Benson suspects at least one of the deaths was deliberately caused by Duarte and wasn’t the “accident” he said it was. Duarte makes the case that just as it took Italian-American police detectives and officers to bring down the Mafia, so it’s going to take Latinos on the police force to bring down the Latino gangs. He even tries to recruit Benson’s own Latino detective, Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisan0), to join him on the anti-gang unit, but Benson – who didn’t care for Velasco at first because he was another detective McGrath forced on her, but he’s since matured and become “one of the team” for her – esents that Duarte tried to poach one of her people without telling her first, and in the end Duarte returns to the anti-gang unit from whence he came and the two surviving gangsters get convicted and go to prison while the gang itself continues to terrorize Salvadoran teens into joining and the evil spreads.
