‘Homicide: New York:’ Nefarious, yucky crimes in Manhattan 

In this day and age where police procedurals and other crime dramas pervade modern television, we need to remember the pioneers that elevated the genre to the heights it now reaches. Dick Wolf, creator of the tried-and-true “Law & Order,” has constantly been experimenting with new intellectual properties based in different areas of the United States, such as Chicago. Evidently, he is willing to try new styles for his productions, considering this new series “Homicide: New York” consists of documentaries with testimonials from former and active members of the NYPD. 

Setting a crime show in New York in 2001 demands an expectation for 9/11 to play a role in the story, which it later does. However, the focus of the first episode, “Carnegie Deli Massacre,” is on the months preceding the attack, when three individuals were killed above a deli neighboring the theater of “The Tonight Show.” Weirdly enough, one of the slain victims bore a striking resemblance to author Stephen King, possessing the same name and glasses, establishing cognitive dissonance as to whether the author was murdered or still alive. Nevertheless, it is horrifying for anyone to have been bound and shot in the head. Thankfully, two victims survived this treatment, one of which was dramatically introduced through the common technique of walking to the interview chair instead of already being sat down. 

Immediately, the NYPD staff expressed how this case shook them to their cores. Barbara Butcher, who was ironically a death investigator, lamented having to witness a person, who was living and breathing hours before police arrived, mangled into a disfigured corpse. Bill McNeely, a former detective, recalled the displeasure of telling families that someone near and dear to them had passed away. Therefore, this heavy emotional burden was eased when the two murderers were caught and tried using camera footage and DNA evidence. Roger Parrino, a lieutenant at the time, mentioned that there is a melancholy that is hard to alleviate from dealing with a case like this, although the relief of attaining justice was felt around the department. 

To further feed our morbid curiosities for true crime, it appears the crimes chosen for analysis in “Homicide: New York” were picked for their brutality, both in their scale of lives lost and the ways in which the victims were murdered. The setting also played a part, as the first two episodes covered crimes in central areas of Manhattan — quite literally in “Central Park Slaying.” As the NYPD explains, one’s age must be disregarded when identifying a killer, because kids younger than college students have murdered before. 

One fascination of the true crime crowd revolves around how young adults can commit heinous crimes that are thought to only be committed by grown adults, but “Central Park Slaying” disproves that belief. As with many young killers, it was a collaborative effort perpetrated by two fifteen-year-old outcasts who bonded over their hatred of people and withdrawal from society. This led them to beating and stabbing a man, thirty years their senior, to death. Differing from commentary on the previous case, a defense attorney, or a devil’s advocate, was brought in to explain the legal aspects of charging someone with a crime when there is inadequate evidence. 

They looked like they were off of a set of ‘NYPD Blue.’

Barbara Coleman

Richard Plansky, once an assistant defense attorney, had been assigned to the case as his second case on the job, referring to it as “a baptism by fire.” Despite his disdain for the crime, he could not point fingers until evidence could describe the killers’ intentions and actions “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Finding evidence to illustrate the crime is often placed under time constraints to keep the court proceedings moving along, so time is the NYPD’s greatest obstacle that can prevent them from prosecuting criminals and sending them to the slammer. 

According to Butcher, times were tough when the department had to handle roughly 2,500 homicides per year, which became more chaotic when problems arose between NYPD branches that were both pivotal and trivial to fix. Extracting stories from discombobulated killers, or victims if they are still alive, can lead to workplace feuds, along with detectives simply sporting improper attire on the job. 

Parrino was punished by the police commissioner for wearing a T-shirt and shorts to the murder scene above Carnegie Deli, and DA Plansky called out another detective for rocking a Grateful Dead lapel pin in court. The latter detective, Rob Mooney, stood by his accessory, as it was one of his defining features that humanized him. His defiance proved to show his strength of character, resulting in this anecdote that provided a much-needed excursion from the heavy topics at hand, and an eventual friendship between Plansky and Mooney. 

“Blue Bloods,” a police procedural on CBS, parallels the real NYPD in an uncanny fashion. Irma Rivera, a retired detective, must have been an inspiration to detective Maria Baez in that show, given their similar appearance and interrogation techniques of using their own personal lives to help connect them to the suspects. Barbara Coleman, a friend of one of the Carnegie victims, shared a similar sentiment when the real NYPD came to her, noting: “They looked like they were off of a set of ‘NYPD Blue.’” 

“Homicide…” uses an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, a common format for films to portray the magnitude of these crimes, as well as using 3D graphics to present the size of Manhattan to conceptualize how much misfortune the NYPD has the potential of dealing with. The runtimes of each episode average fifty minutes, giving a strong synopsis of the murder to the prosecution, but these shows always miss in representing the meticulous nature of solving a crime, like the hours of interrogations and uncertainty of prosecution that may last for years if the case goes cold. There were points, even in a linear case such as the Carnegie murders, where the police were lost and frustrated with certain leads, yet we only see the outcome of that struggle. Additionally, the episodes finish with a trailer for the next episode, a powerful tactic to make it difficult for the audience to stop watching until completing the five episodes currently in circulation. 

The subject matter may be wrought with wrongdoing, but you cannot go wrong when viewing true crime shows, especially if they are produced by Wolf Entertainment. 

Rating: 7/10