* I don’t watch television, but my mom loves all of the L&O shows. She says realistic portrayal is boring; she doesn’t want to watch another ’48 Hours’.
* Typical black crime couldn’t hold a viewer’s attention for a whole hour once a week for 22-24 weeks. There’s a reason why L&O is on broadcast prime time over the air TV and the much more true to life The First 48 is on a low rated cable network. Who wants to watch all the time TV shows about Jamal murdering N’Deshawntavious over shoes or kool aid recipes? Only white on white crime plausibly generates the complicated plot twists and nuances that are necessary to attract and retain the kind of audience that networks and Madison Avenue want for 8 PM on a weeknight.
* L&O has a multitude of “ripped from the headlines” episodes where the real-life non-white perp was changed to white in the episode.
* The worst feature of the L&O series is their predictable exculpatory and worshipful portrayals of blacks, Latinos, Orientals, and Moslems as squeaky-clean admirable victims of White treachery and crime. Finding them offensively out of synch with reality and monotonously Narrative-preachy, I stopped watching those shows years ago.
* Prior to the mid-sixties, unless you lived near a majority black neighbourhood; blacks were unimportant. Black crime then as now was mostly intra-racial. Benign neglect was the order of the day and was codified into the power relationship for several years. What was worse was that many black families were moving out of poverty and thanks to unions and the post world war II economic boom they were becoming both middle class and familial as in two parents and kids that had a future.
Worse in this sense means that they were less and less reliant on handouts and the dole and welfare … less dependent on urban dem politicians. The improvements in the life of America’s blacks could not be allowed to continue and LBJ and Teddy among others saw to it that those improvements would be and were rolled back. I suppose it is a variety of irony that black families were winning the war on poverty up until the time the government determined that black poverty was better for the democrat party than black independence.
* If you had no idea about the racial breakdown of the population of NYC and their respective crime rates and got your data points for Dick Wolf shows, you would think Manhattan was subject to a daily crime wave of murderous white people, and nonethnic Wonderbread types at that. While they often film exteriors outside the Centre Street Manhattan Criminal Court building, appears they have so far failed to venture inside. In fairness there isn’t much cinematic possibility for black and Latino guys shooting each other over drug spots in and around housing projects or corners in Washington Heights. Heck, most Dominicans in the Heights barely speak English.
