Law & Order Taught Americans to Root for the Police

This op-ed argues that cop shows helped convince Americans that more policing is always the answer.
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This piece was published in coordination with Zealous, an organization working to amplify the perspective of public defenders.

Recent news stories about the horrors of Rikers Island have reignited a national conversation about New York City’s most notorious humanitarian crisis: an infamous jail where disease, suicide, and violence are commonplace — and about 90% of those trapped in packed cells are Black or Latino. They are caged in conditions that shock the conscience because they cannot afford to pay the bail to purchase their pretrial freedom. The heightened attention to this crisis is a result of a particularly hellish year in the jail complex, punctuated by 14 deaths so far in 2021, many of which were suicides

But the brutal realities of Rikers and pretrial jail facilities across the country are not revelations. I, other local public defenders, and the people we represent have long known about the horrors of Rikers, but the 2015 death of Kalief Browder, a young man who killed himself after three years incarcerated in the city’s jail, led to greater scrutiny of the facility, the launch of a campaign to close it, and even an announcement by Mayor Bill de Blasio of an insubstantial — and not yet realized — plan to do so. Coverage of the jail's barbarity has come and gone since, prompting sporadic public outcries, but little has changed or improved.

It already feels like this latest crisis has faded from the headlines, while it very much continues behind the walls of the jail. It’s a familiar pattern.

Extreme events of injustice or cruelty, usually perpetrated against the most “sympathetic” people targeted by mass criminalization (those charged with low-level offenses, women, youth, and the elderly), generate public outrage and awareness. Then the stories fade from the news, everyone forgets, and the status quo prevails. Meanwhile, “everyday,” but no less harmful, injustices persist on a mass scale and are never covered. So unless you’re in court every day, like me, or living in an overpoliced and criminalized community, or caged on Rikers itself, it’s as if this crisis isn’t happening.

Last year, Black Lives Matter, a movement steeped in opposing the racial injustice that permeates the criminal system and police brutality, became, arguably, the largest civil rights movement in this nation’s history. People protested in over 550 locations nationwide. I went to protests both as a protester and a legal observer. I heard thousands chant, “Defund the police!” Yet less than a year later, the supposed progressive stronghold of New York City added hundreds of millions of dollars to the New York Police Department (NYPD)'s spending, resulting in city-funded expenditures totaling more than $10.4 billion. The city also elected a former cop in the Democratic mayoral primary and general election, and rolled back historic bail reform, leading to the human rights crisis that is underway at Rikers right now.

As a public defender and a Black woman, I find myself asking now more than ever: “How does the criminal system and mass incarceration continue to expand and worsen despite all these people opposing it?” I’ve come to think it is because everyone is more aligned than we think. We have been educated by the same popular culture — taught to accept the same cruelty as the status quo.

It might seem cliche to blame societal ills on the media, but the relationship between our country’s comfort with mass caging and the depiction of crime and punishment that we see in popular culture seems more than coincidental. Media consumption is what we all have in common. It’s why even my mother, who lives in The Bahamas, often tells me “some people belong under the jail,” or that “some people are just evil, Olayemi.” She, too, has spent years watching Law & Order: SVU.

I see this connection most clearly when I think about the interactions I’ve had with a wide cross-section of actors in the criminal legal system. Regardless of where people fall on the spectrum of support for change, they seem to operate on a shared set of assumptions so embedded in our culture that we hardly notice they exist.

I think about one of the many times I was misidentified as a criminal defendant in court, when a court officer angrily screamed at me to get out of the first row, where attorneys sit. I was sitting there with my colleagues, dressed like them, holding court files like them. The only difference between us was that I am a Black woman. I told the officer I was in the right seat because I am an attorney. He left the courtroom and when he returned, he said, “My bad, Ms. Olurin; I thought you were a defendant.”

The interaction was illuminating not because he assumed I was a defendant because I’m Black (racism isn’t novel), or even that he was mistreating me because he thought I was a defendant; the illuminating part was that he told me. He was willing to offer me an explanation of his mistreatment because he thought it was reasonable. In his mind, it was perfectly acceptable to scream at a person accused of a crime. So acceptable in fact, he expected that even I, a criminal defense attorney, wouldn’t object. When I replied, “It would’ve been unacceptable even if I were a defendant,” he looked confused.

I think about that confusion….

I think about the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, who declined to charge an officer who kneeled on the neck of my client, SirCarlyle Arnold, despite stating that she “supported the spirit” of the Say Their Name Reform Bill, which promised New Yorkers an end to the NYPD’s use of illegal choke holds and neck restraints. I think about why Mayor de Blasio condemned the officer who killed George Floyd but refused to have the officer who killed Eric Garner fired or charged.

I think about the many times self-proclaimed progressives have asked me how I can sleep at night representing guilty people, never thinking about the fact that the people I represent are usually profiled, arrested, and incarcerated for crimes of poverty and behavior that simply wouldn’t be criminalized if they weren’t poor people of color.

I think about apparent allies I saw protesting police brutality, tweeting about how no innocent person would refuse the police and only guilty people get a lawyer.

We’re taught to fear and dislike the people caught in the crossfires of the criminal legal system, rather than to fear the system that inflicts pain on them. We are taught there are bad people who were just born bad, who do bad things, and that the only way to keep the good people safe is for police to do whatever they can to lock the bad people away.

This is why Law & Order has run for over 30 years, showing all manner of police violence, coerced confessions, and blatant violations of the law and a suspect’s rights. People not only watch faithfully, but root for the police and the prosecutor. Many episodes tell you a story about an evil person doing evil things for evil's sake, the morally bankrupt defense attorney representing them, and the heroic police and prosecutor who must stop them. So when a detective does happen to beat someone to a pulp or coerce a confession, viewers see it as a necessary evil, or at least justified.

Until our most basic intuitions about the criminal legal system change, the system itself will never change. We need to move away from the Law & Order mindset, which taught us to root for the prosecutors and despise defendants, to assume anyone accused of a crime is guilty, to see those who break the law as evil or cruel, rather than victims of circumstances created by a society that accepts poverty and inequality.

It's easy to be outraged about Rikers. It’s harder to look beyond Rikers to all of the factors and circumstances — the fundamental, ingrained assumptions — that have allowed the situation there to get so dire. It may sound daunting to reconceptualize and reevaluate our views of the criminal legal system and the people it targets and abuses in answer to an immediate crisis, but that work — which can come in the form of reading, scrutinizing media coverage of the “justice” system, and even attending court and watching proceedings that are open to the public — is critical for the greater task of systemic change.

Thousands of individuals — fathers, sisters, husbands, community members — are still languishing in Rikers’ cages because that is our societal status quo. For that to change, we must change first.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Rising Crime in Cities Like Chicago Should Not Lead to More Policing

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