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Trying too hard to address two recent high profile police brutality cases, this week's Law and Order fell flat -- mostly because: (a) it was boring; and (b) it didn't make much sense.

A 17-year-old white prep school student, Michael Tobin, is found dead on a door stoop in Harlem -- far further uptown than he would normally be hanging out. Tobin had some defensive wounds suggesting he’d been in a fight, but it becomes evident that what ultimately killed him was hitting his head on the curb. Detective Briscoe, apparently annoyed that he doesn't get to break illegally into anyone's apartment this week, is less than gentle with Michael's parents -- imparting the bad news to them simply by handing over a picture of Michael's dead body and saying, "he's down at the morgue."

At first it looks like Michael was visiting his girlfriend, whose brother did not appreciate her dating someone who wasn’t black, but that doesn't pan out. Further investigation reveals that there had been a "disturbance" in the neighborhood, initiated when the police tried to remove a homeless man by kicking him awake, and further fueled by the "local Al Sharpton" who encouraged the community to throw bottles at the cops. Tobin had been spotted getting out of a marked police cruiser near the fracas. Two young rioters - Jerome and Marcus - saw him get out of the car and concluded that Michael was a cop, or at least an informant.

Marcus and Jerome decided to give the police a little of its own medicine, and roughed-up Michael a bit. He fell and hit his head on the curb in the process. Their lawyers plead for manslaughter, and ADA Jack McCoy (in a break from his normal prosecutorial zeal) assents. For some reason McCoy does not explain, he believes Jerome and Marcus, and the focus turns to finding out which cops were stupid enough to drop off a preppie white kid in the middle of an anti-police rally in Harlem.

The answer is Officer Smith (who is black) and Officer Flannery (who is white) --two cops who ride the beat in Michael's neighborhood. They had pulled him over for driving his parents $40,000 SUV "erratically." (Never mind "erratically" -- I'm with the cops on this one. A 17-year-old kid driving a two-ton luxury truck on the streets of New York City should be a crime in and of itself.) The officers had smelled marijuana on Michael's clothes but didn't find anything in the car. (This annoyed them -- oh so close to a bust, but no dice. ) And to add insult to injury, Michael kept mouthing off at them. In fact, he told the cops to go "up to Harlem and arrest some real criminals." This proved to be too much, so Smith and Flannery decided to teach Michael a lesson. They drove him to Harlem, where they left him to fend for himself as a group of unruly citizens expressed their displeasure with New York's finest. (My sympathy for the cops wanes at this point. If you can't handle a snot-nosed, Banana-Republic-clad Upper East Sider, you really shouldn't carry a badge.) How it is that the police came to drop Michael off just blocks from his high school girlfriend’s place is a coincidence that is never explained.

D.A. Adam Schiff, under pressure from the Mayor and the U.S. Attorney's office, insists that the cops be charged with murder. The Mayor's phone call to say that he's on board to prosecute the cops proves that the show is pure fiction: this being Rudy Guiliani they're talking about. Let’s recall that this is the same man who has frightened even his Republican supporters by his recent suggestion that an undercover cop may have been justified in killing an unarmed man because the man was no "alter boy" and "spent a good deal of time punching people in the face."

For its part, the U.S. Attorney's Office promises that unless there is a "perception" that justice has been done by the DA's case, there will be a federal civil rights case. This, at least, is more realistic than the Mayor calling to push for indictment of the cops -- the Justice Department can prosecute under federal law even after a defendant has been convicted of state charges. While they don't usually do so, there have been several notable recent exceptions to this policy in the civil rights arena. (The cops who beat up Rodney King, for example; and an investigation targeting the officers acquitted in New York of the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo.)

McCoy doesn’t support the murder charge -- it will require the D.A.'s office to portray Harlem as a minefield -- but Schiff makes the final call, and won't budge. The lawyer for the cops moves to dismiss the case on the grounds that there's no evidence of depraved indifference, because the cops cannot have thought that dropping Michael in Harlem would create a "grave risk of death." He hones in on the weakest link in the D.A.'s attenuated theory: that "Harlem is a dangerous weapon." McCoy agrees, but of course he doesn't tell the judge that, and instead argues that branding Michael a police collaborator created the grave risk of death. Not bad. The judge is convinced, and the indictment can go forward.

By the way, Smith and Flannery only have one lawyer, which strains credulity. No good judge or lawyer would have allowed this to happen. The lawyer's duty is to serve his client zealously. Here, it is very likely that one cop could decide to rat out the other - - Smith could claim that the whole thing was Flannery's idea, for example -- and cut a deal for himself while sending his partner up the river. Obviously, one lawyer cannot get a deal for one client that will hurt his other client, so a judge who's not asleep at the switch will ensure, at the beginning of a case, that each defendant has his own lawyer when there's any possibility that there might be a conflict of interest later on.

Smith and Flannery offer to plead to manslaughter. Trying to teach Michael a lesson was a stupid "lapse in judgment," they claim, but it was not intentional murder. McCoy (again showing uncharacteristic sympathy and restraint) agrees, and offers a manslaughter plea that would give them 5 to 10 years. Schiff shuts him down again, however, and McCoy has to rescind the offer. In response, Smith and Flannery ask to have the trial moved to Albany. McCoy subtly but purposely tanks the motion, by conceding at oral argument that the passions of the local jury pool have been inflamed by recent police brutality cases. Schiff is furious, but he doesn't want to try the case in Albany -- a supposed haven for cop lovers -- so he finally lets McCoy negotiate a deal giving the officers 3 to 9 years in prison. Case closed.

The show, as a whole, was disappointing: it didn't have the usual brisk Law and Order pace, and Briscoe didn't get in any good one-liners. The most humorous moments -- and I don't think they were intentional -- were when McCoy was shown braving the elements outside, in a blue knit hat and a goofy 1980s anorak. I counted four such appearances.

The entire script was little more than a vehicle for the protracted debate between McCoy and Schiff over how to charge the cops and where to try them, so I'll play along. The main problem, as I see it, is that the facts and strategies did not support the political weight the show tried to give them. As McCoy points out, the prosecution theory did have an undercurrent of racism: that Harlem is so inherently dangerous that dropping a young white man there is tantamount to murder. Would there really be such political pressure from the community, the Mayor, and the U.S. Attorney's office to embrace such a theory? (Okay, the Mayor probably would support it.)

Moreover, there's a good argument that these cops would be more likely to be convicted in Albany than in Manhattan, not less so. The Big Apple, the show claims, is full of diverse people with diverse views. Albany is full of conservatives. Wouldn't a New York jury be outraged that the government is claiming Harlem is a per se "dangerous weapon"? And couldn't a good prosecutor convince Albany jurors that their worst nightmare would be to be kidnapped by two young cops and dropped in Harlem in the middle of a small riot?

Given all this, the show's portrayal of the black community's unqualified outrage at moving the trial to Albany makes little sense. The issues would have been explored much better had the focus been less on imitating the headlines and more on the fallacy of assuming that people think only along racial lines.

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