Law & Order: SVU 27.1: Olivia Benson vs. ICE

Just caught up with the season 27 debut of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC this past Thursday evening. It was excellent in all kinds of ways, but none as ethically important and politically relevant as Olivia Benson standing up to the American Gestapo aka ICE as they do their utmost to impede Captain Benson and the NYPD from bringing a rapist to justice.

ICE is bent on taking Benson's witness into custody and having him deported to El Salvador or who knows where.  Never mind that the witness is here legally.  He looks like a foreigner and that's all Trump's racist goons need to haul him off.  When Benson attempts to stop them, she's taken into custody.

Benson's arrest is actually the least of what these Federal criminals have been doing in real life to fair-minded, hardworking people in government who try to do their job and stand up to ICE when necessary, which is all too often.  Alex Padilla, US Senator from California, was thrown to the ground, when he tried to ask Homeland Security Kristi Noem a question, by another branch of Trump's Storm Troopers a few months ago.  But it was good and important to see a fictional character, wonderfully played by Mariska Hargitay all these years, do the right thing in New York.  Hats off to NBC.

Would a real captain of the NYPD do what Benson did?  I would certainly hope so, but I don't know that I would bet on it.   I don't know that other networks and streaming services would have characters in their dramas do what Benson did, either.  I'm a lifelong devoted Yankee fan, and it's always great seeing them play baseball on YES.   But I was very disappointed to see ads for ICE more than once in between innings on YES in the past few months.

Baseball is about American as you can get.  ICE is about as un-American.  Good to see NBC and Olivia Benson on the right side of this battle for our democracy.

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Senator Alex Padilla vs. the American Gestapo

  

The above is the complete extant video of what happened to US Senator Alex Padilla the other day in California, the state he represents.  We don't see what happened before this, but the video begins with Sen. Padilla being pushed by some kind of Federal agent.  Padilla tells his assaulter who he is -- "Senator Padilla" -- and his assaulter's response, joined by other assasulters, is to wrestle the Senator to the ground.

I use the word "assaulter" because assault is defined as any offensive or unwanted touching of the body.  Assault is a crime, and it doesn't matter whether the assault is done by whatever kind of Federal agent.  The job of any kind of police is to apprehend criminals, and stop crimes from happening if the crime has not already occurred.   Their job is manifestly not to assault a US Senator, or any other person exercising their Constitutional rights --  in Senator Padilla's case, the right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment.

And assault, unfortunately, is not the worst crime that can be committed.  In 1970, four unarmed protestors at Kent State University were shot dead by National Guardsmen sent there by the governor of Ohio.  None of those murderers were ever brought to justice.

I call them, and their current incarnations, Gestapo, because that's what this flagrant disregard of rights, and appliance of violence to crush those rights, ultimately leads to.  Whether it's a US Senator pushed to the floor and handcuffed, or Marines facing down peaceful protestors in Los Angeles today, these assaults on our democracy need to stop.  And their perpetrators, and the people who put them in that place, need to be brought before a court of law.

Law enforcement needs to stay focused on the prevention and solving of real crimes, like the assassination of Democratic State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in Minnesota early today.

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And here's another video of Sen. Padilla at Secretary Noem's event*. That video shows that Padilla was a little rude, for asking a question (in a conversational tone of voice -- certainly not shouting) while Noem was talking. Certainly not grounds for being forcibly removed from the event. Had I been in Secretary Noem's place, I would have answered the question and invited the Senator up to join me on the stage.

*Thanks Frank Tomasulo for sending me this URL for the two videos in this post.