I've never seen it confirmed, but it strikes me as pretty obvious that the TV franchise "Law & Order," which debuted in 1990, was heavily influenced by Tom Wolfe's 1987 bestselling novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe's novel is about NYC detectives and prosecutors, bored and depressed by arresting and convicting countless poor minorities, hunting down for fun and political profit The Great White Defendant, rich white guy Sherman McCoy. "Law & Order" is the irony-free version of Bonfire, with the first half hour consisting of detectives arresting a rich white person and the second half hour consisting of the prosecutors torturing the law to come up with some absurd justification for charging the defendant with homicide. This formula has made L&O perhaps the biggest franchise in television history.
A reader writes
It might be an interesting factoid for an article that there are more white murderers plotted on Law & Order (all editions) than there are actual white murderers in New York City.
There were 572 murders in New York City last year. We know that only 10% of violent crimes in NYC were committed by non-Hispanic whites, so if the same is true for homicides in particular, that's 57 white murders. There are three "Law and Orders," I think, with about 25 episodes per season with, say, 80% being white. That's 60 white New York murderers on one set of shows compared to about 57 in all of the real world New York.
Anyway, I bet it's close.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Just read up on the Amanda Knox case in Italy and am struck how this is Europe's version of "The Great White Defendant." She is obviously innocent, all she did was come home from her boyfriends in the morning and had the misfortune to be the first to stumble upon the crime scene. For that the cops interrogated her for 43 hours and demanded she "imagine" how it may have happened. They then announced "case closed" until two weeks later the forensic evidence came back all pointing to a local black burglar. Yet the local cops and tabloids refused to believe it and instead defamed an ordinary college girl out of pure spite and hatefulness towards Americans. To them a granola crunching, pot smoking, hippie Seattle girl is a right wing, rich, spoiled, warmongering, arrogant Bush loving American. Just like a liberal getting caught in a race riot, they hate us all no matter what our politics.
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