The Real Reason Dann Florek Left Law & Order: SVU

It's not necessarily that Florek wanted to retire from his role. His Law & Order departure also wasn't down to a salary issue, as is what ended Christopher Meloni's tenure on SVU. Rather, it came down to a sense of maintaining realism. Many likely don't know the NYPD has a mandatory retirement age: 63. The official pension rules surrounding retirement further require all personnel to cease being uniformed at age 62. Although SVU can be said to have tipped into melodrama once or twice in its long history, it does try to present at least the procedural parts of its stories as realistically as possible. So then, as Dann Florek, actual human being, approached the age of 62 in 2013, fictional character Donald Cragen had to make his plans to leave the job. 

Law & Order: SVU's showrunner at the time, Warren Leight, explained (via E! Online), "In the real world, which we try to very hard to simulate, NYPD has mandatory retirement before your 63rd birthday. And we were trying to figure out how to deal with it. The reason NYPD does it is because you can't have 65-year-old guys running after guys. It is a hard and fast rule."

Even though Cragen is a captain and may not do much street-level cop work anymore, the line is the line. This was the reasoning behind Detective Munch's (Richard Belzer) departure from the show as well, though that required a little more canonical fudging of time; Belzer is actually six years older than Florek.