When “Law & Order,” the internationally acclaimed television series, made its debut in 1990, 2,245 people were murdered in New York, and several of those victims became emblematic of the haphazard, senseless violence that gripped the city.

Brian Watkins, a young tourist from Utah, was killed when he tried to stop a gang from attacking his mother on the subway. John Reisenbach, a 33-yearold ad executive, was shot by a homeless man while he used a pay phone in the West Village. The following year stray bullets alone killed 92 bystanders, including many children.

The Big Apple was “rotting,” a Time magazine cover declared; an editorial in The New York Times that year spoke of “a New Beirut.” Even Pete Hamill, the writer and hardy city champion, wrote simply, “New York is dying.”

But “Law & Order,” broadcast by numerous television stations around the world, helped to alter perceptions and bring tourists back to the city.

During the show’s 20-year run, which finally ended last month , Dick Wolf, its creator, earned awards and hundreds of millions of dollars for the NBC television network, while bringing thousands of jobs to New York.

But more than other writers and filmmakers associated with the city during that time - Tom Wolfe, Richard Price, Martin Scorsese - Mr. Wolf also created the popular narrative of an era in which crime dropped at an unprecedented rate. If Edith Wharton is identified with the city’s Gilded Age, Mr. Wolf is the chief chronicler of its Reclamation Age, when New York became safe again.

Consider the opening of a typical “Law & Order” episode: Some people are going about their business in Manhattan streets - whether wiseguy New Yorkers or lost tourists - when they stumble across a victim. “That was Dick’s format,” said Ed Zuckerman, a longtime writer for the show. “Some guy was walking his dog and found a body in the garbage can.”

The crime seems random - a stockbroker, private-school student or stayat- home mom found murdered in a dangerous part of town - and, to New Yorkers, all-too recognizable.

But while the scenarios on “Law & Order” seemed frighteningly familiar - Mr. Wolf often said his script bible was the front page of The New York Post - something very different was happening beneath the surface. The show bypassed the hard-edged realism of “Hill Street Blues” and the operatic fatalism of “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Its detectives, Logan, Briscoe and the rest, didn’t beat up suspects, take bribes or jump into bed with victims. Instead they interviewed suspects, read them their rights , waited for ballistic reports and checked their math.

They were model 1990s cops - cool, professional and interchangeable.

And as they pulled on the threads of the case, a pattern and motive always emerged. Unlike in the real New York, there is almost no pure street crime in “Law & Order.” In a show obsessed with the city’s class structure, you were far more likely to be murdered by your financial adviser than by a drug dealer. Crime has no single cause, the show seemed to argue, but crimes do, and they can be solved one at a time.

“The public fears complete strangers,” said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and author of “New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s.” “And if you look at solved cases, you’re more likely to be killed by someone you know.”

The procedural heart of the show came from the back pages of the playbook of the Manhattan Institute, the urban research center known for its systematic thinking on crime. “The second part of the show” - when the prosecutors took center stage - “couldn’t exist without the first,” said James Sanders, an architect and author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies.” “If New York falls apart a little bit in the first half-hour, the second half is the restoration.”

Mr. Wolf portrayed a city in which there were no senseless crimes, only crimes that hadn’t yet been made sense of. In so doing, for an international audience, he de-randomized New York violence.

“By the end of the hour,” Mr. Karmen said, “they gave a false impression in the sense that crime doesn’t pay, and that the long arm of the law catches up with you.”

It’s a notion at odds with how real crime occurs and is prosecuted in New York, where a third of cases still don’t even result in an arrest, and a large percentage of violent crime still occurs between strangers, according to Mr. Karmen.


By BRUCE HEADLAM