I will readily admit that my taste in men has, at best, been questionable in the past. Thankfully, with age comes wisdom and experience, and I can now see clearly the red flags I ignored at the time. Just as I’ve had to reckon with some poor choices in my real dating life, I’ve also come to grips with a problematic crush I held on a TV character throughout my youth: Elliot Stabler.
Stabler was the hypermasculine, in-your-face, ultimate guardian detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He was violent, plain and simple, but his intentions were always presented as pure. He wanted to protect women and children from the offenders that haunted his streets, and sometimes, when the system got in his way, he had to take matters into his own hands to get the job done. Frankly, I found everything about this highly attractive.
The show itself has been called addicting, and with 20-plus years on the air and multiple iterations of the series, it certainly seems plenty of people are partaking. The show is indulgent because it doesn’t ask viewers to think. There’s no nuance to the characters or the cases. There are bad guys who do bad things because they are evil (which ignores a whole body of scientific research we have on violence). There are good guys who work to catch the bad guys, and though they may act unscrupulously now and then, it is always to protect women and children. The system is shown to operate as if it came right out of a glossy American history book. Wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, and bias never enter the narrative, and the police brutality depicted is painted as sympathetically justified.
For millions of viewers, this is as close as they will ever come to the justice system, and the stark black-and-white portrayal has created lasting ramifications on both public opinion of, and participation in, our system. Known as the “CSI effect” in the justice community, the law enforcement genre of entertainment has led to juries who are overly reliant on forensics and unduly trustful of the prosecution and police.
Anyone who has spent the slightest fragment of time around our justice system finds this Hollywood whitewashing of our system nauseating. But although most of the show is detached from reality, Stabler’s character is one of the few elements the show accurately presents.
When I watch SVU as an adult, I now see an officer who should never have been allowed within 10 feet of a badge. In direct contrast to his name, this guy is a seriously unstable individual with anger management issues, erratic behavior, and an inability to control his emotions. He’s a hothead with no humility, poor discretion, and a superiority complex. Those traits should be disqualifying enough, but it gets worse.
Stabler’s frequent abuse of suspects, and consequentially the Bill of Rights, is so infamous that whole YouTube compilations have been dedicated to his greatest hits (pun intended). In the season eight episode “Annihilated,” Stabler locks a suspect in the interrogation room and places him in a chokehold, nearly killing him, in a move that would certainly draw more ire today than it did during its original air date in 2007. In season 10, Stabler is found in the home of a suspect with bloody knuckles and a severely beaten tenant. And in season four’s “Pandora,” Stabler debates killing a suspect after delivering a severe table thrashing and an elbow to the throat.
For all of these incidents, Stabler is rarely reprimanded, much less disciplined. This, unfortunately, is also a valid depiction of real life.
SVU plays to our most base impulses, and thankfully, we have a Constitution to restrain those. It’s natural to be overcome with emotion in the face of violence and to want revenge, but we should not allow those underdeveloped instincts to set public policy. We have rights to due process, a fair trial, representation, and privacy for good reason. Even with these protections, the government still frequently gets it wrong, violates our rights, and fails to uphold our values of individual liberty and justice for all.
I no longer think characters like Elliot Stabler are attractive; I think they’re dangerous and a threat to our liberties. Let’s stop romanticizing this system and start ogling the Constitution instead.
Hannah Cox (@HannahCox7) is a libertarian-conservative activist and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
