Law and Order: "Fear and Loathing" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 23, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 23) I watched the last new episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order series – the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime – for a month before new episodes return March 23 in one those infuriating mid-season hiatuses (hiaiti?) that have become mind-numbingly familiar. The Law and Order episode, “Fear and Loathing,” was actually quite good and fit in well with the current controversies about how police treat African-Americans. It opens with one of the show’s regulars, Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), being stopped and held at gunpoint by two uniformed patrol officers, and since Shaw is Black and the officers are white, he fears for the worst when they tell him to lie flat on the ground so they can cuff him and arrest him on suspicion of murder. Immediately both Shaw and we know that he’s being racially profiled – there’s a killer loose in the neighborhood and the description the cops have to go on is that he’s Black, but he’s younger, shorter and heftier than Shaw. Shaw refuses to comply with the orders of his fellow officers. He offers to show them his badge but they say no, and he realizes that if he reaches for it anyway they’ll decide he’s reaching for a gun and shoot him on sight. Shaw files a complaint with the police’s internal affairs division, but one of the two white officers who stopped him brings a bottle of Scotch (which Shaw throws in the nearest wastebasket) and pleaqds with him to withdraw the complaint. Saying that having it in his file will jeopardize his pending promotion to plainclothes detective. Shaw insists he’s going to pursue the case anyway, and the white officer essentially threatens him. Then he and his partner file their own internal affairs complaint, saying that Shaw violated police protocol by refusing to comply with their orders.

At this point the story’s main intrigue begins: a middle-aged Black heart surgeon is found dead on the street,clubed with a bottle. Shaw and his partner, white detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), who’s come a long way from his racist complaints when he was partnered with another Black detective in the first season of the revived Law and Order, discover that the killer is Brian Burke (Derek Cecil),who had previously been mugged and robbed by a Black man and who claimed to have acted in self-defense because he saw another Black man approaching him on the street. District attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and the two lead prosecutors on the show, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), prepare to try Burke for murder when the cops suddenly realize he3 was essentially put takes pictures of Black men on the streets of the neighbup to it by local realtor Daniel DeLuca (David Aaron Baker). Aside from making only slightly veiled racist comments of his own – when Cosgrove and Shaw interview him DeLuca says “those people” are ruining New York’s neighborhoods – also runs an Internet app warning people of allegedly threatening criminals in certain neighborhoods. To illustrate his point, DeLuca posts online photos of Black men and alleges th ey are criminals – only it turns out he’s really doing this for business reasons. To drive down property values in certain neighborhoods where he wants to buy properties, he puts allegations online that they are high-crime areas. Then he buys the apartments for well below their market value, and when the crime scares he’s stoked die down he resells the apartments at a major profit.

Various Black men have been victimized by DeLuca’s antics before, including at least one person who was beaten unconscious by local residents convinced by DeLuca’s false threats that they were criminals, and at least two others who were falsely arrested. Ultimately Price and Maroun win a jury verdict against DeLuca but only by giving Burke, the actual killer, a sweetheart deal which means he will serve no more than seven years in prison. Then we return to the internal affairs complaints and we learn that the internal affairs department has tossed out Shaw’s complaint against the two white officers, but approved their complaint against him and sentenced him to a one-week suspension without pay. The episode ends with Shaw handing over his badge to his superior officer, Lieutenant Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim), and stoically accepting the injustice of it as part of the dues of being a Black police officer. This show was unexpectedly timely after the Tyre Nichols killing in Memphis, Tennessee, where an unarmed young Blackman was stopped by five police officers – all of then Black themselves – and literally beaten to death by the Black officers, while at least one white officer egged them on and, as they were chasing the suspect who was futilely trying to get away and go to his mother’s house nearby, yelled at them, “I hope you stomp his ass.”

The lesson of this show is that Black police officers are under perpetual scrutiny by their white counterparts, constantly given the message that they have to show where their loyalties are – to their fellow police or their fellow Black people. The point was underscored by an interview Stephen Colbert did with Black journalist Isabel Wilkerson, author of a book called Caste that has just come out in paperback after it was published in hardcover two years ago, which argued that the U.S. has a caste system and it’s based on racial appearance. Her point reminded me of pre-Civil War pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun (D-South Carolina), who argued in defense of slavery that the experience of democracy in ancient Athens had proved that a democracy could not survive without a permanent servant class, and given that America was a nation that defined itself on the principle of equality for all (white) people, it was necessary that the permanent servant class be non-white.