The Drill Rap Episode of ‘Law & Order’ Is Full of Stereotypes and Propaganda

Opinion: ‘Law & Order: SVU’ depicted the New York drill scene in a new episode, and it’s full of harmful anti-rap stereotypes and propaganda.

Ice T in 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'
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Image via Getty/Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

Ice T in 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'

Last week, NBC aired an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit titled “Nightmares in Drill City,” a drill-rap-based episode that’s as sensational as the title suggests. 

The episode synopsis states, “[Assistant District Attorney] Carisi asks the SVU for help with a murder investigation when one of the witnesses shows signs of abuse.” But that neat summation downplays the hyperbole of what actually takes place. The episode follows the fallout of a murder that took place after one rapper (David “G” Graham) robbed another rapper (Milly2K) for drugs they saw in their music video. If that’s not enough propaganda, the guilty rapper turns out to also be a sex trafficker abusing a harem of women, including Victoria Warshofsky, a 17-year-old white girl who becomes the star of the episode. 

The 31-year-running franchise is known for pulling from pop culture headlines. There have been episodes based on Chris Brown and Rihanna’s fight, the Jay-Z-Solange elevator incident, and Michael Jackson’s child abuse allegations, among others. Last year, show producer Dick Wolf stated that the show has “always adapted to current events in a nonpolitical way and our viewers can expect us to keep doing so.” But there was nothing apolitical about this racist, tone-deaf depiction of rap. 

That quote from Wolf is from a Forbes article questioning how the show would operate during a nationwide defund the police movement. The Emmy-winning franchise, which has spawned numerous offshoots, is one of TV’s chief examples of copaganda, or romanticized dramatizations of law and order that serve to shape public opinion in favor of law enforcement. A 2020 study by Color of Change and USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center found that television like Law & Order “glorifies, justifies and normalizes the systematic violence and injustice meted out by police, making heroes out of police and prosecutors.” This episode is a quintessential example of copaganda and anti-rap propaganda. 

All the broad strokes of politician-stoked fears and stereotypes around rap are checked off: a rapper gets killed because they had drugs in their video (and gets their chain snatched). The offender then brags about doing it in a music video (while aiming the murder weapon at the stolen chain in his hand). The murderer also happens to be a pimp who’s enslaving an underage white girl. And for good measure, the writers got the terms “drillers” and “clout chasing” in the script. It’s as if Law & Order producers employed Breitbart writers to have at it for an episode. 

During a scene from the show that went viral, the SVU cops are watching a music video where G’s rapping about the murder. Detective Odafin Tutoula, played by rap legend Ice-T, notes that G’s performing drill rap, which he credited to Chief Keef and framed as “competition on whose crew is the hardest.” Another cop notes, “I’ve seen this crap in street crime; they’ve been shooting each other up all over the city.” Ice-T replies, “These kids are clout chasing,” and adds, “The dummies want to be famous so bad they’re doing our job for us.” But someone could have also said that about Ice-T’s music if they had an agenda to push. 

The clip was clowned on social media for its after-school-special-level corniness, but Ice-T’s presence made it more than just a cringe-worthy, hilarious depiction of rap from outsiders. One of our own was complicit in it. Ice-T is a rap icon who created one of the first so-called gangsta rap records with “6 N The Morning.” He explains the impetus for the record on Netflix’s Hip-Hop Evolution docuseries, where he recalls being in the streets, then realizing, “I can’t just live the game; I gotta document the game.” He joked that he rhymed about the streets because “even gangs have their own entertainment division,” which was said in jest, but references the reality that gangs have creative people in and around them expressing the reality of their surroundings. Many people perceive artists rapping about violent misdeeds as “self-snitching,” and in some cases it very well may be, but when society engineers survival-mode conditions in which people are perceived as “savages,” it’s no surprise when some embrace that identity. 

Many rappers come from poverty-stricken environments where they may have nothing but their reputations. Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep” chronicles the life of a stick-up kid who enjoys that “mad brothers know his name, so he thinks he got a little fame from the stick-up game.” Biggie rapped about “kickin’ niggas down the steps just for rep.”

On Hip-Hop Evolution, Ice-T spoke to “living backwards” in the streets, expressing the “really strange” dynamic where “you’re livin’ in a world with all these villains, thieves, and scoundrels, and you take pride in that.” It may seem like a strange source of esteem to people with no proximity to these neighborhoods, but it’s a reality of what happens in communities blighted by politicians’ “really strange” by-design decisions to deprive people of the resources they need to thrive.

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Ice-T 100 percent understands the conditions that created gangsta rap, and now drill rap. But he was still fine with ignoring that nuance and reciting reductive lines condemning rappers as “dummies.” Perhaps he thought he was merely embodying a character who feels a way he doesn’t. But what’s the use of celebrating rappers on TV and in movies if they’re not going to be protective of the genre? Law & Order is a popular show celebrated in part by a demographic uninterested in the nuances of Black art. There are too many people who only get their perception of rap music from exaggerated dramatizations like this, which makes them unwilling to consider the changes needed to create a better world for poor people.

When conservative critics hear modern drill rap, they hear “dummies” trying to “prove whose crew is the hardest,” not brute depictions of an environment that must be mended with radical policy change. Propagandist framing of rap music as literal is also what causes people to look the other way when artists are targeted by police task forces and have their lyrics used against them in cases. The fear-mongering of terms like “drill city” makes rap detractors and fans alike think that artists deserve to be criminalized. The show could have explored the reality of lyrics being used against artists in a way that tackled the tenuousness of blurring art and reality, but instead they decided to write a hyperbolic account of an artist killing a peer, rapping about it, and putting their chain in a video—which has never actually happened. TV shows like this aren’t mere entertainment; they serve prosecutors, politicians, and the rest of the oppressive establishment. Ice-T should have pushed back on his lines, if not the episode as a whole. He probably wouldn’t be on the show without rap, so he owed the game more. 

Another troubling aspect of the episode is the way they referenced, then subverted, the dynamic of Black men being unjustly vilified by a white woman’s words. In the show, 17-year-old Victoria knowingly sets up the robbery by texting Milly2K’s brother that she wants to hook up with him. But prosecutor Carisi ends up wanting to give her a lighter sentence after the revelation that she was one of G’s “girls” who was being forced to be a sex trafficker. The DA is reluctant to do so, referencing the optics of pinning the worst charges on a Black man while giving his white woman co-defendant a deal. There’s a long history of Black men facing unjust consequences from the perception that they assaulted white women, from Emmett Till to the Central Park Five. But it’s troubling that the show references that prevalence in a situation where the Black male is actually guilty of abhorrent abuse against a young white woman. If they were going to reference the system being stacked against Black men, they should have actually reflected it in the script. 

In a vacuum, the scenario could have simply been a narrative voice. But in the context of it being on a cop show, on a sensational episode about rap, the plot point nestles too comfortably into a long history of Black men being pathologized as menaces to white women. 

At one point in the show, Carisi asks the DA’s office, “What kind of office do you want to run?” when campaigning for Natasha to receive a lighter sentence. It’s a question that strikes the root of the justice system’s perceived purpose. But despite Carisi’s noble depiction as a prosecutor, his real-life counterparts are key cogs in a system disproportionately warehousing Black people to maintain legal slavery, which maintains systemic inequality. 

And it’s shows like Law & Order, with criminalized depictions of Black people and Black artists, that make their job easier. It’s simple to sensationalize rap as a violent “drill city” that needs legal intervention, but more difficult to face the reality that it’s the existence of police that perpetuates the crime that rap music depicts. The NYPD police budget is over $9.9 billion for the fiscal year 2021. If that money was instead reallocated to housing, employment, education, and other resources for needy communities, then so much of the crime that occurs because of lack of opportunity, and gets dramatized for middle America, wouldn’t exist. And neither would poorly written propaganda like Law & Order. 

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