This one puts the spotlight on Lt. Van Buren, played forcefully by S. Epatha Merkerson. When she shoots a would-be young adult robber in self defense while making a late-night ATM stop, she is thrust before a grand jury and the unapologetic EADA Jack McCoy. While Detective Logan and ADA Claire Kincaid believe Van Buren implicitly, Briscoe isn't so sure, and McCoy refuses to treat her with any favoritism.
And that's just the first half of the episode.
The second half involves the DA's office attempting to prosecute the OTHER kid robber - the one who didn't get shot and who, it seems, may have been manipulating the mentally disabled victim. I cringed a few times at the characters' flippant uses of the word "retard," which is today typically used as a cruel insult; there's also an undercurrent of condescension in the way it rolls off the detectives' lips. Even the victim's mother, played by Lisa Louise Langford, uses the term kind of contemptuously... maybe it was just her performance, but when she speaks about her dead son she definitely sounds irritated with him.
The episode tries to assuage some of its political incorrectness by having another intellectually disabled character, played here by Jacklin Brooke Sanford in her only acting credit. She's convincing as the victim's friend who attended the same school he did, and she ends up being extremely important to the case. A later scene has the camera slowly panning across the victim's room, lingering on movie and baseball posters as well as other memorabilia - the passions and hobbies of a boy just like any other, snuffed out by tragedy, and a message from the show that it really *does* want you to feel bad about the kid's death, despite how dismissively everyone in the episode speaks about him.
Whether that takes it out of the realm of "problematic" territory is up to you, and "Competence" is otherwise a neat little yarn that squeezes some unique character beats out of the main cast in what is usually almost exclusively a plot-driven show.