Saying Goodbye to <em>Law & Order</em>
Growing up, I wanted to work in law enforcement. Actually, what I wanted was based on a television franchise I began watching as a teenager: Law & Order. Dick Wolf’s world of procedural crime dramas, the good guys working via the legal system to catch the bad, mesmerized me throughout high school and into college. In particular, I fell in love with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, following Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler as they brought criminals to justice.
Benson and Stabler made me want to be one of those good guys, but it was their colleague Detective Odafin Tutuola, the street-savvy black cop on the same elite squad, who welcomed me. Cop-centered dramas brought with them a specific struggle for someone like me, a black boy from a poor family in a poor city who was interested in law enforcement: the struggle to reconcile heroic depictions of
