And Wednesday night’s episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” on NBC aims to weed through the messy and emotional aftermath of one of these shootings — focusing on what happens after New York police officers, in desperate search for a rape suspect, shoot and kill an unarmed black college student who happens to match the description of the suspect. (It’s not the first time the series, which is in its 17th season, has pulled inspiration for a story line from the headlines.)
Here’s the trailer:
In advance of the episode’s airing, we talked with Warren Leight, the episode’s producer, about why now was the time to tackle the sensitive issue of police and race. This interviewed has been edited for length and clarity:
Why write an episode based around a police shooting, and why on “SVU”?
Something seems to be going on in the nation right now, and it seems that we’re looking at, at least anecdotally, an epidemic of cops shooting unarmed people, often unarmed black men, but not exclusively black men.
We’ve just seen a spate of incidents in which that has been the case, and we have a police show. One of the things that is frustrating to me is that too few shows are tackling the tough issues. There are way more shows about zombies than about what’s going on in our judicial system. Very few shows are allowed to get away with this right now.
Our mantra is that we shed light on the darker corners of society. Police shootings of unarmed people is something that needs to be discussed.
The episode references a lot of specific incidents – Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Staten Island – and even includes a Black Lives Matter reference. Were there any specific shootings or cases from which you drew direct influence for this episode?
In our better episodes we don’t just do a movie of the week, we take elements of what is going on in the real world and tell a story.
One of the things that has been fascinating to me is the role of the district attorney. In this episode we wanted to explore the pressure district attorneys are under, and what is the role of the DA going into the a grand jury process.
I don’t think we specifically mirrored any one case, it wasn’t a specific case, but the process has become … there is a rhythm to the process now: an unarmed man is shot, the police give their story, a bystander video contradicts that story, there are protests and anger, and then the DA takes it to a grand jury.
We wanted to write a story based on that rhythm.
One of the things we did is we talked to DA’s about the process of what happens after one of these shootings. To me that process was pretty interesting. What happens in the aftermath of the shooting.