The Trouble with SVU

*Look, it occurs to me that this is going to contain massive spoilers for a couple episodes of Law & Order: SVU. If you don't want to read it, don't read it because I can't edit them out.*

Law & Order: SVU has been going leftist. And it is really annoying me because it is such a good show otherwise. This week's show was the second (that I can think of off of the top of my head) that was so over-the-top in its crusade that it completely ruined any enjoyment of the episode and makes me not want to watch next week's show.

The first one that really bugged me, Storm, was about 3 girls abducted after Katrina who were taken to NYC. The twist (L&O always has a twist) was that their kidnapper had anthrax, which led the detectives to some very sleazy people who were selling dangerous biologicals, which were supposed to have been destroyed, on the black market. Federal agents shut down the detectives' investigation without explanation and the former kidnap victims disappear. Benson and the others are worried about the girls they have just rescued and so force the federal officials to let them know what happened to the girls. The girls get adopted by a family friend and, presumably, go off to live happily ever after. The end, right?

Wrong. The federal agents have returned the girls, but make sure anything connected with the anthrax is still classified. Now, I can think of several reasons why they might want this: they could be conducting an undercover investigation, they might have leads that publicity might scare off, they may have reason to believe that the fewer people who know, the less likely the biologicals will get into terrorist hands, they might think that the risk of panic is more dangerous to the public safety than the risk of it being used or any of several other reasons.

But Benson can't accept this, and goes off half-cocked. She has decided that she knows more about an investigation she stumbled into than investigators who are specializing in it. So what does she do? She reveals classified information to a reporter, who prints it, regardless of the risk. And she, along with the reporter, is portrayed as a hero. She has no way to know if she made the problem better or immeasurably worse. For all she knows, she may have altered the situation from the anthrax being in the hands of a couple of two-bit hoods on the verge of being caught to one where terrorists are alerted of the possibility of getting their hands on it.

The show does not even consider that possibility.

This week's episode, Loophole, seems like a classic child molestation case, but turns out to be one about illicit testing of chemicals on unsuspecting and vulnerable children. Horrible, right? Even more so when you consider that the chemical appears to cause brain function impairment while several of the children exposed already had developmental disabilities and that one of the (non-developmentally disabled) children now has cancer.

Of course, as Dr. Warner points out* to detective Benson, since we don't know what causes most types of cancer, no one can say conclusively whether or not this child's cancer was caused by his exposure to that chemical or even if the chemical was a contributing factor especially since the child was also exposed to rat and roach droppings as well as any number of unidentified chemicals that pre-existed in his apartment.

It's sad, of course. Tragic even. But by this point in the show, the sleazy man who tricked the parents into signing the release forms is dead. Time to move onto the next case, right?

Um, not according to Benson. See, she wants to go after the company that manufactures the chemical, which was intended to be presented to the EPA as a pesticide. The company had contracted out for testing and the testing company contracted out with the sleazeball who sprayed an untested chemical in a residential area.

Just for the record, I'm pretty sure that this would not only be illegal, but it also would not be an acceptable method for proving the safety of a product, so there is no reason why the company would try to test this way. But, of course, the show made it seem like this would be perfectly fine for testing purposes, presumably so that Benson would have the opportunity to be filled with righteous anger.

While she and Detective Fin were berating an EPA agent about the incident, they claimed that the company was engaging in an observation study and that the concept of 'observation' studies is a loophole (where the episode gets it name). Now, observation studies simply allow observing people engaging in dangerous behavior when it would be unethical to deliberately expose them by forming a double-blind experiment. While yelling they brought up that the EPA was no innocent as it had also tried to hurt children. As their evidence for this, they brought up the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS). As you can see on the link, Snopes points out that this was an observation study, where any harm that might befall the children was by virtue of living in an area that used pesticides and that, regardless of whether or not they were observed, the children would continue to be exposed.

I was so thoroughly annoyed that Fin and Benson were equating observing a potentially dangerous situation that involved legal pesticides already in use to determine how dangerous they might actually be with deliberately exposing unsuspecting children to a completely untested chemical instead of following normal, double-blind procedures as required for all new chemicals, that I was hardly able to pay attention to the rest of the episode. I suppose Benson and Fin would equate the recent observation that damage to a certain section of the brain reduces addictions including the addiction to smoking with actually causing strokes in people to see what would happen.

The rest of the show involved Benson breaking the law to find out information that put the ADA in a better position to 'bargain' with the evil chemical company to essentially blackmail them into paying the cancer-stricken child's medical expenses after implying that, without this, the kid's mom wouldn't be able to afford medical care and what would happen without affordable medical coverage? As if the kid, an American citizen in a family well below the poverty line with serious medical expenses, wouldn't qualify for Medicaid. But no, if they had mentioned that, they wouldn't have been able to indict the American medical system.

Those were just the 2 episodes that were so egregious in their political message that I felt that there were no redeeming qualities. But there are any number of other episodes that, while good overall, had leftist (most often anti-business) messages. I hope they give the politics a rest, because I love the twists that Law & Order is known for.



*and I do admire the fact that they took the time to point it out