My last year in Colosse, my car was broken into at a very inopportune time where there was much of value inside of it. It was enough that I would actually call the police (much to their dismay at being bothered with $3000 worth of stolen property). The only problem was that I couldn’t find the police department’s phone number on their website. I mean, I looked and looked and it wasn’t there. I didn’t want to call 911 since it wasn’t an emergency, but I was getting really frustrated (and irritated at myself for having thrown away my old fashioned phone directory. While they couldn’t be bothered to list their regular phone line, they did have, on every single page, a hotline to call in the event of a hate crime. Even “Call 911 for emergencies” wasn’t on every single page.
I was reminded of this when I came to a realization about Law & Order. For those of you that don’t know, there are currently three variations of the show. The flagship program follows a murder investigation, Criminal Intent follows a high-profile murder investigation, and Special Victims Unit follows typically anti-woman crimes or anti-kid. The realization I came to is that for the first two shows, which investigate murders, there are two detectives on each case. Whether it’s some fellow that was in the wrong place at the wrong time or the Mayor’s kid, you got two detectives. Meanwhile, the attempted abduction of a child on SVU gets four detectives.
Lesson: If you’re going to attempt to abduct a kid, you’re better off killing them. That way you’ll only have two detectives on your trail.
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6 Responses to Priorities
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I know you are kidding, but I would think that the murder of a child would attact extra attention from the police. As would the murder of a female. Murder a pretty teenage girl, and you are toast. Look the wrong way or disagree publicly with one as a middle-aged man, you are also toast.
Oh, I’m sure it would attract more attention.
I think you are talking about two different degrees of toast between murdering and looking the wrong way at a pretty teenage girl.
Could be. Of course, those are TV shows and if SVU has a larger female audience than the other two, they’re going to want more characters so they can have complex social dynamics; men will be more interested in the detective story.
That said female victims get a lot more sympathy. Something the feminists haven’t done anything about…hmmm…wonder why…
SFG, that sounds pretty credible to me.
When you say “attempted kidnapping,” do you mean that the kid was safe with his parents while the police were chasing after the perpetrators?
Well, a real-world reason to have more detectives on a kidnapping than a murder is that the corpse will wait. Time really matters in a kidnapping: smaller search area, less chance that the kids already dead…