The Speed of Justice, According to Law & Order

It was November 7, 2020. Four days after the election, which I had been covering closely at work, and the beginning of the end of a grueling year.

After publishing a series of articles — the culmination of days of detailed data crunching and very little sleep — I was in desperate need of comfort TV. My pick? “Making of a Rapist,” the second episode of season 18 of Law & Order: SVU.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a serial watcher of SVU, must be looking for a comfort watch.

You can find article after article analyzing just what it is about these police procedural shows that audiences, especially women, find so comforting. As one SVU superfan put it: “There is only one specific circumstance in which you can say ‘I can handle murder today, but probably not rape’ … and that is when you’re choosing an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.”

But even some of the most ardent L&O fans will admit that it paints a rosy picture of the criminal justice system.

And there are many critics. Here’s John Oliver, slamming the L&O franchise in a 2022 episode of “Last Week Tonight”: “Instead of depicting a flawed system riddled with structural racism, the show presents exceptionally competent cops working within a largely fair framework.”

He cited NYPD statistics showing that they close only about a third of sexual assault cases, as well as a 2021 review of sexual assault cases over a two-year period that found that only 6% led to an arrest. And a vast majority, 97% according to this 2022 article, do not make it to trial.

These statistics are exemplary of the idealized portrayal of policing that fans enjoy and critics decry. Arguably, though it predates the term, L&O fits neatly into a category of TV that has only grown in popularity as our world has gotten more and more chaotic and uncertain — the genre known as “competence porn.”

Fans might be drawn to L&O precisely because of its depiction of smart, well-intentioned police detectives and prosecutors working to solve crimes and bring justice to the victims. It’s the same reason people watch West Wing or The Pitt.

Being the kind of spreadsheet-loving person I am, I have long wanted to gather stats for the two shows under the L&O umbrella that I watch the most: the original L&O and SVU. Just how idealized are they?

If in reality, only about 6% of cases result in arrests, and only 3% only go to trial, then by that metric, SVU and L&O are wildly unrealistic in their portrayals. Virtually every episode contains an arrest or two and more often than not, there is a trial. 

Then again, the show depicts a sampling of cases handled by the NYPD, not the totality of each detective’s caseload. So it’s hard to benchmark L&O detectives’ case closure rates with reality.

I came up with a better way to measure the shows’ realism: Looking only at cases where an arrest was made. How long do those cases take from start to finish in L&O land? Is that longer or shorter than the time it actually takes for cases to move through New York City’s criminal justice system?

Where did I get the data to explore my question? I decided to start with L&O’s episode scene cards. Even a casual viewer will notice a few distinctive features of the show: The voice narration that opens each episode (“these are their stories”), the “dun-dun” that demarcates scene changes and the episode scene cards with the date and address where the scene is supposed to be taking place.

And, luckily for me, the fine folks on L&O’s Fandom Wiki have diligently jotted down the contents of the episode scene cards for a vast majority of episodes. Here’s an example, from the season 24 episode “Folk Hero,” a ripped-from-the-headlines take on the Luigi Mangione case (it’s as cringe as it sounds).

Looking at the scene cards from that episode, I would conclude that the events took place between January 13 and March 19. Three months. Meanwhile, the real Mangione case is still pending, over a year after his arrest in December 2024. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I compiled the available episode scene card data from every episode of Law & Order. I limited my analysis here to the original Law & Order series rather than SVU, since I felt like the variety of murder cases it covers would be more comparable to real-life statistics.

(Side note: by my count, 20% of L&O episode pages on Fandom Wiki are still missing episode scene cards. Here’s a list of them, in case any intrepid fans want to fill them out.)

Now, I need to make some assumptions here: namely, that the first scene card that appears marks the beginning of the case, and the last one marks the end. Also, because scene cards include just month and day, not year, I used the year of the episode’s airdate as the year. For episodes whose last scene card appeared to occur before the first when I did this, I assumed the last scene card took place a year later. 

This excludes a handful of early episodes, including season 1’s “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” which ends with a couple of lengthy scene cards that, paradoxically, both imbue a sense of realism and remind the audience that the story is fictional.

After some data munging, here’s what I came up with: The average L&O episode takes place over the course of about 68 days.

Only one episode, at least by this method of accounting, has taken place over the course of more than a year: Season 8, Episode 21, which chronicled the case of a woman who stabbed a police officer. That episode was unusual in that it devoted a good chunk of time to the appeals process and the debate over capital punishment, after the initial conviction was handed down.  

How does an average of 68 days to process a case compare with how long it takes in real life? Short answer: It’s way faster!

Here’s a quote from a 2024 report commissioned by the New York City Comptroller: “Since 2019, the average time to process a murder case has risen by 37%, by an average of 221 days, from just over nineteen months to almost 27 months.”

27 months = 821 days. So, justice in L&O land happens about 13 times as fast as it does in reality. This likely underestimates the speed of justice in a typical L&O episode, because the report measures the amount of time it takes from when a person becomes an inmate in the New York City Department of Correction (DOC) to when they are discharged from DOC custody, due to a plea, sentencing, or case dismissal. Basically, the time from the initial arrest to the resolution of the trial. An episode of L&O, by contrast, typically begins when the crime is committed. So, if anything, L&O should take longer than it does in reality, because the police take time to investigate the crime and identify the suspect. 

The report also has detailed data on all felony cases, not just murder cases. Those took an average of 126 days to process. L&O mostly focuses on muder, so this stat is less relevant. Even so, using it as a benchmark would mean that the average L&O case resolves about twice as quickly as the average felony case in actuality.

There are plenty of caveats to the above. Here’s a big one: The first episode scene card might not show up until well into the episode, and the last one might show up before the end of the case. That could mean I underestimated the length of time to resolve a case by using the scene card method.

How else to measure the passage of time on L&O? I myself was unsure. But I found this post by a person known as Tribble314 on The Comic Board discussion forum. Tribble314 used the scene cards as guideposts, but also looked at the outfits the characters were wearing from scene to scene to determine whether that scene took place the same day as the preceding one, as well as using dialogue clues (“last night”, “tomorrow afternoon”). They did this for some early L&O episodes, then skipped ahead to the post-pandemic era episodes of L&O, SVU and Organized Crime (that’s the newest show in the franchise, but its formula is a bit different, so I’m not covering it here).

The resulting spreadsheet is remarkable! I am truly impressed by the work that went into it, and I decided to use it to refine my initial analysis.

Here, I cleaned up Tribble314’s original spreadsheet, extracting the first and final date that each episode was estimated to have taken place. Season 1 was the only complete season of the original L&O that Tribble314 had data for, so I cross-referenced my episode scene card data for that season with this data, and compared the amount of days elapsed over the course of each episode using Tribble314’s dates vs. the episode scene card dates. Most of the time, using Tribble314’s dates yielded longer time frames, which confirms my theory that the scene card method may underestimate time elapsed per episode.

Using whichever dates resulted in the longest time elapsed, I found that the average season 1 case in L&O took 111 days. That’s still much shorter than the real-life average of 800+ days. Of course, season 1, which first aired from 1990 to 1991, was depicting a much different era in New York City policing, and it’s possible that real-life case processing times were shorter back then, though 101 days from start to finish still seems faster than reality to me. (I couldn’t easily find comparable statistics for the city going back so far, but feel free to shoot me a note if you do.)

This dataset also allows me to create a timeline of cases, to see cases that are effectively overlapping — e.g., detectives closing one case while in the midst of another. Here it is for L&O season 1, organized by episode air date:

(“Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” excluded from the last analysis, is included in this one.)

There is a fair bit of overlap between cases, suggesting a very busy and productive police department and district attorney’s office in the world of L&O.

For fun, I made the same chart for SVU season 24, the most recent season Tribble314’s data goes up to. Sadly, season 24 on Fandom Wiki doesn’t have episode scene cards filled out (another opportunity for intrepid fans), so I couldn’t compare Tribble314’s data with those. Still, taking Tribble314’s dates at face value, here is the chart, which strikes quite a contrast with the L&O one:

Cases in this season of SVU do not overlap at all, and they take much less time than the ones in L&O season 1: an average of just 5.3 days. Why is this the case? Sex crimes, I would imagine, take even longer to investigate and prosecute in real life than murder or other kinds of felonies, if they even make it to trial. It could be that the writers’ rooms for these shows have gotten more self-aware about the dates they put on the episode scene cards, and there is some desire to reduce overlapping dates within a season (though, in my opinion, having overlapping dates would be more true to reality, not less).

But a look at the timeline for the cases in season 22 of the original Law & Order, which aired contemporaneously with season 24 of SVU, still shows a fair bit of overlap (the episodes jump around less, which has to do with the fact that they broadcast episodes in a different order from when they filmed them in season 1). The cases take less time than they did in season 1 (an average of 66 days in season 22 vs. 111 in season 1), but they don’t go by nearly as fast as the SVU cases.

Exploring the SVU vs. L&O timeline question will probably take another post the length of this one to get to the bottom of, so maybe I’ll return to it at a later time. If anyone has ideas as to why SVU cases would take less time from start to finish than regular L&O, I’m all ears.

I am not a legal expert, and I could be off in my collection of the data, or my interpretation of the stats.

But I watch a lot of Law & Order. And since starting to work on this post, I have paid more close attention dates shown in each episode. I even made my own version of Tribble314’s spreadsheet, for the SVU season 14 episode “Twenty-Five Acts” (the one and only Raúl Esparza’s first appearance as ADA Rafael Barba). In that episode, a woman is brutally raped by a TV show host on July 9. The court case begins about a month later and lasts just one day, with the jury out for three (“Three days, jury’s still out. Longer than the trial,” one character remarks). It ends with the host being charged with rape in the first degree and taken into custody.

Whatever you think of the franchise, or my analysis of it, if you watch enough episodes, one thing is incontrovertible in the fictional universe of L&O: How swiftly, and effectively, justice is served.

You can find the code I wrote for this analysis here: https://github.com/underthecurve/WrongNumber/tree/main/law-and-order-timeline

And all of the resulting data is in this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Kx3jrh44nrAW4jhUkGhZAOQrtEzCqaCL_u3YwtJEWDI/edit