Law & Order: Organized Crime Narrowly Avoids a Common Cop Shows Mistake

But the Law & Order franchise, with its numerous spin-offs, is the most recognizable of them all, rising like a titan above all competitors, and currently including both the first and the second longest-running live-action series on American TV.

One of the difficulties that nearly any cop shows faces this day is potential accusations of "copaganda". Various branches of the Law & Order franchise pre-empt it in various ways.

Law & Order: SVU, for example, can get away with just using black-and-white approach.

Sexual predators are viewed as the most irredeemable of criminals, so when officers of the titular SVU use methods which are typical for police-related TV shows, but would have been considered questionable at best in the real life, the audience is too busy feeling revulsion towards people they bring to justice.

Meanwhile, the new addition to the Law & Order family, Law & Order: Organized Crime, employed a similar trick, but set it up in a more elaborate way.

Instead of being part of a large department within the NYPD, its main character, Detective Elliot Stabler, joins with a task force of Organized Crime Control Bureau, consisting of a few cops carefully selected and vetted for their moral integrity – most of all, their squad supervisor, Sergeant Ayanna Bell.

So there is no doubt that the protagonist are "good cops". In fact, one of the key points of their unit's existence is being such.

Meanwhile their opponents are sophisticated career criminals who clearly chose to benefit from the misery of others.

So, there is little room for doubt about who is morally in the right here.

And of course Organized Crime is also smart enough to acknowledge that not all cops are good cops – in fact, dealing with corruption within law enforcement and morally dubious methods of hunting criminals are staples of cop stories, involving organized crime, and this show does not shy from them.

You can witness another organization letting criminals walk to protect their sources of information, or corrupt groups within the police, which our heroes are trying to take down.

But that just gives the clearly heroic lead character something to struggle against – while keeping the police as a whole from being too whitewashed.