SVU Episode #2: Bullseye

Summary:  An interesting show about a brutal serial child rapist, it correctly showed some places where pedophiles lurk, and how citizen vigilantes use technology to fight crime.  But it also got some laughable moments wrong about using Census data to find crime victims, and a wacky mental illness to explain a mother’s scorn for her daughter.

Verdict: C+

What They Got Wrong:  The detectives want to find all 10-year-old girls living in New York. They type a few keystrokes, and – presto! – blue dots appear on a map on their enormous flat-screen TV, showing every house with a 10-year-old living in it. Where did they get this magical information? From the U.S. Census! This is the stuff of law enforcement dreams, but it’s pure science fiction. Law enforcement can’t use Census data to find witnesses. All the information collected by the Census is confidential (see U.S. Code, Title 13, Section 9).  And can you imagine if we did have that kind of technology? How many 10-year-old live in Manhattan? Thousands? Tens of thousands? This moment was as realistic as if Benson & Stabler had set their phasers to “Stun.”

 A little girl is being sexually abused by her stepfather. Her mother ignores it. Why? Because Mom was hit by a bus and now has Kep-Kross syndrome (or something like that), a mental illness where she thinks her daughter is an imposter, like in “Return of the Body Snatchers.” Maybe this is a real mental illness, but in real life, that’s not why mothers look the other way. I’ve had countless cases where a girl was being sexually abused by her stepfather, and the mother simply refused to believe it. In one trial, a beautiful 13-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather, she got pregnant and had the baby, and everyone said the baby looked just like Stepdad. DNA testing confirmed he was the father. Despite overwhelming evidence, Mom still testified for him. She simply couldn’t accept that her husband had sex with her daughter. It was easier for her to believe that her daughter was lying. (That guy was convicted and is now serving 20 years in jail.) Using some rare syndrome like Kep-Kross disease makes it seem like a mother has to have been hit by a bus to do this. Tragically, this happens all the time, with mothers who’ve suffered no brain injury. For a painfully realistic perspective on this, check out the movie “Precious.”

What They Got Right: Sex offenders do love to hang out with kids. The perp in this episode turned out to be a children’s karate coach. So many real-life pedophiles are coaches, teachers, and volunteers at children’s organizations – anywhere they can get positions of trust with kids. It’s tragic, because most people in these jobs are dedicated to doing good work, but these positions are also attractive to sex offenders who want to exploit children.

This episode had a timely depiction of vigilante justice, with a fictional community group, COAP (Citizens Organized Against Pedophilia), using high-tech methods like tweets and iPhone apps to do their mission. There is a ton of electronic sex-offender information these days. For example, you can easily look up the sex offenders living in your area.  Here’s D.C.’s sex offender registry, which shows exactly where convicted sex offenders are living on a map. This is great information for the public to have, but occasionally, people use it to take matters into their own hands – sometimes in controversial or even illegal ways.

I had a case where a community learned that a local man was a child molester. A gang of citizens wielding bats and machetes chased him down the street. (Machetes are popular weapons in D.C., where owning a gun was illegal for several decades.)  The guy ran from D.C. into neighboring Prince George’s county. When the D.C. police caught up to him, he was out of their jurisdiction. But he threw himself into the MPD cruiser and begged the cops to take him to jail, because the crowd was going to tear him to pieces. 

Original air date: 9/22/10

*All the views expressed here are mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Justice.

What did you think?  Leave a comment! I’d love to chat.