Prosecutor Casey Novaks job was simple convict bad guys that New York City Police Department detectives had arrested and give rape victims some semblance of justice. And on more than 100 hour-long episodes of Law & Order Special Victims Unit she almost always got it done.
Diane Neal the actress who played Novak for seven seasons on the TV crime drama thought thats how it worked in real life. Police worked with victims to catch scumbags rarely arrested the wrong guy and almost never left a case unsolved. Then prosecutors sent the criminals to prison.I am embarrassed to admit I used to think the way it worked on the show was like real life Neal wrote on Twitter. Then I found out the hard way I was wrong.
Neal was reacting to the latest episode of HBOs Last Week Tonight in which host John Oliver spent nearly 30 minutes blasting the Law & Order franchise for having propagandized police and prosecutors for more than 30 years. More than 1,200 episodes of Law & Order and its numerous spinoffs have created a distorted view of how the American criminal justice system works or does not Oliver told viewers in a clip that had racked up more than 2.8 million YouTube views by early Wednesday. Representatives for Neal and Law & Order creator Dick Wolf did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
Over the course of dozens of seasons and hundreds of episodes the Law & Order universe has delivered a core thesis to its viewers Oliver said The cops deeply care about getting justice for victims and their gut instincts mean that they almost always get the job done in the end.
Thats not true. The vast majority of crimes reported to police in the United States go unsolved although those include lower profile property crimes like burglary and theft according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. The criminal justice systems track record with rape is particularly bad. Less than a third of sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement according to the nonprofit advocacy group RAINN, or the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. About 16 percent of those reports lead to an arrest, while 9 percent result in a felony conviction.
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