Guest star Alec Baldwin wrote the Law & Order (1990) episode "Tabloid (1998)", which he based on his own experiences with tabloid journalism.
Jimmy MacArthur mentions "Tawana Brawley" several times. In 1987 Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl, was missing from her Wappingers Falls, NY, home for four days. She was found in a garbage bag, covered in feces and with racial epithets scrawled on her body. She alleged that she had been kidnapped and raped by four white men, including police officers and a district attorney. After months of national outrage about this so-called hate crime, a grand jury in Oct. 1988 reviewed the evidence and determined there had been no forcible sexual assault and that it was possible Brawley herself made the whole story up. To this day Brawley and her family contend her story was true and not a hoax. This was the debacle that made Al Sharpton famous/infamous.
When Elias Kemp Jr. enters the office where Amaro and Tutuola are waiting, they hear him telling a colleague to "always be closing." Alec Baldwin, who guest stars as newspaper reporter Jimmy MacArthur, famously said the same line in the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross.
When Odafin Tututola (Ice-T) is told about a businessman having a conference call with Hong Kong, he says that he gets confused with the timeline, asking "Are they in front of us or behind us?" The answer is in front of us, as Hong Kong is 12 hours ahead of the East Coast.