Should "quintessential Good Cop" Olivia Benson face a reckoning after police brutality protests?

Rolling Stone

Mariska Hargitay's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit character is "the embodiment of all of the qualities we wish law enforcement figures would have: she’s tough but fair, vulnerable yet steely-eyed, displaying constant compassion for survivors and providing no quarter to abusers," says Ej Dickson. "She always fights for and believes victims, a marked contrast to real-life law enforcement officials, whose record on convicting sexual offenders is abysmal." Dickson warns, however, that TV writers will now have to be cautious in depicting cops in a positive light, even the good ones, in wake of the George Floyd police brutality protests that SVU showrunner Warren Leight vows to tackle next season. "But Olivia Benson won’t change, not fundamentally, because nobody wants Olivia Benson to change," says Dickson. "We’re probably not going to see her making an effort to hire more police officers of color. We’re probably not going to see George Floyd incorporated into plotlines in anything but a cursory, ripped-from-the-headlines way. We’re probably not going to see her being taken to task in front of an internal review board for overseeing a cop roughing up a black male suspect. Such changes run counter to the paradigm that governs the show, which as Leight says, is 'how justice should be handled,' even if that is very rarely the reality. No matter how fraught the role of law enforcement official becomes in the cultural imagination, no matter how embedded she is in a system that perpetuates racism and misogyny and brutality, nobody wants to see Olivia Benson as anything but a hero. We need to believe the system is not totally broken. We need to believe that cops are not totally irredeemable. We need to believe that some cops can be Good because Olivia Benson is Good, even if to hold her up as the exception to the rule perpetuates the #notallcops line of thinking that leads some people to nod their heads when Fox News demonizes the protesters in the first place." Dickson adds: "The truth is that, if you agree that the system is broken and great changes need to be made on all levels to fix it, you can’t pick and choose what needs to be changed. No matter how much you love Olivia Benson, you have to be willing to grapple with the fact that she plays a major role in perpetuating the idea that cops are inherently trustworthy and heroic, and that many viewers are unable to distinguish between the gossamer fantasy of how justice should be handled, and how it actually is. If cops are canceled, that means all cops are canceled, up to and including the strong and pretty ones we like to watch break down pedophiles in interrogation rooms. Revolution can’t be built on the backs of the exceptions, and those who perpetuate toxic systems can’t be deemed immune to critique just because we like them. It’s the simplest equation there is: if all cops are bastards, and Olivia Benson is a cop, that means she’s — kind of — a bastard. (Mariska is cool, though.)"