On New Year’s Eve, Keith Porter Jr. stepped outside his Los Angeles apartment complex and fired celebratory shots into the air—a dangerous but not uncommon holiday practice. An off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent living nearby heard the gunfire, retrieved his service weapon, and shot Porter dead. Within hours, the Department of Homeland Security described the killing as a brave response to what it characterized as an active shooter situation, reframing a civilian death as a necessary act of heroism.
That language did not originate with federal officials improvising a justification. It came ready-made, drawn from decades of crime television that taught audiences—and law enforcement—how to narrate civilian deaths as reasonable outcomes of perceived threat.
Rashad Robinson, a social justice strategist, has spent more than a decade documenting how crime procedurals build permission for this kind of violence. Days before Porter’s killing dominated headlines, Robinson launched Freedom Table, a monthly conversation series on NewsOne. The first episode examined how entertainment shapes public attitudes toward law enforcement. Robinson has long argued that crime procedurals are “apolitical” and come from people insulated from the consequences of the criminal justice system. As ICE expanded operations, he understood that the narrative infrastructure built by television would once again make lethal force legible—and defensible—to the public.
The Language Factory
Crime procedurals do more than dramatize policing. They manufacture a vocabulary that makes state violence sound inevitable. Across thousands of episodes, suspects become “active shooters,” officers face “imminent threats,” and scenes demand “immediate response.” The language appears technical rather than ideological, but repetition transforms professional jargon into common sense.
Robinson helped produce Normalizing Injustice, a study analyzing 353 episodes across 26 scripted crime series. The research showed how shows repeat the same narrative beats until viewers internalize a framework where law-enforcement accounts carry presumptive credibility. Evidence becomes secondary to narrative logic: threat is declared, response follows, and the system is ultimately vindicated.
When DHS labeled Porter an active shooter, it relied on that logic. The term required little proof because audiences have watched hundreds of episodes where similar language preceded righteous violence. Crime television trained viewers to accept the sequence long before Porter stepped outside.
Journalist Josie Duffy Rice articulated the gap during the first episode of Freedom Table. “The goal is convictions—that is the incentive that drives the system,” she explained. Crime television inverts this reality, portraying justice systems as truth-seeking institutions rather than efficiency-driven ones. When law-enforcement agencies describe their actions, they borrow a narrative structure in which their version of events is treated as fact.
Manufacturing Permission
The persistence of that structure is not accidental. Franklin Leonard, founder of the Black List and a Freedom Table panelist, traced how corporate incentives shape what stories reach audiences. Writers must satisfy viewers and the corporate executives who control production—executives who maintain relationships with law-enforcement agencies that provide technical consultation, filming permits, and access.
As Leonard noted, creators who want to portray policing accurately often can’t get the resources to make those stories and distribute them to audiences at scale. Procedurals that reinforce familiar narratives, by contrast, run for decades.
NPR critic-at-large Eric Deggans described the genre’s production model as a “cookie-cutter factory floor kind of process.” Networks know they can produce multiple iterations with minimal risk because audiences have been trained to expect specific outcomes: crime occurs, police investigate, and the system delivers justice. “You don’t need super talented directors or writers to make these shows,” Deggans said. “They’re a conveyor belt.”
That formula matters beyond entertainment. When Porter was killed, officials immediately deployed procedural logic: gunfire heard, threat assessed, force applied. The sequence mirrored countless episodes in which law enforcement’s justification proves sound regardless of initial circumstances.
Los Angeles officials later told activists they had no intention of investigating the agent involved, according to Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founder Melina Abdullah. The response reflected the permission structure procedurals establish: once an individual is framed as a threat, accountability becomes optional.
Data Behind the Deaths
The connection between fiction and consequence is measurable. The FBI has found that more than 50 percent of gang members portrayed on television are depicted as Black, while fewer than 30 percent of actual gang members in the United States are Black. The disparity does not reflect reality—it manufactures a perceptual framework in which claims about dangerous Black men feel immediately plausible.
Normalizing Injustice documented how that framework is produced. Eighty-one percent of crime-show showrunners were white men. Seventy-eight percent of writers were white, with only nine percent Black. Across nearly 2,000 characters, the study found that “good” law-enforcement figures committed wrongful actions at high rates, yet those actions were routinely portrayed as justified by circumstances.
Robinson has drawn a sharp distinction between diversifying a cast and diversifying the content itself. “Folks can diversify a cast, but not actually diversify the content,” he said during the first Freedom Table episode. “On crime procedural shows, you’ll get way more Black judges than you’ll get in the real world. And while I don’t want to take away jobs from those brothers and sisters, having a Black judge where a white writer’s room sends the justice through their mouths in a symbolic way without any backstory doesn’t actually do anything to help us contextualize the criminal justice system, the society we live in, race, or anything else”.
Actor-activist Kendrick Sampson identified the audience these stories serve during the Freedom Table episode. “There is an audience that wants to see us harmed, that wants to see us punished for being, just being,” he said. Crime procedurals do not create that desire, but they provide scaffolding that allows it to masquerade as reasoned response rather than prejudice.
Following her son’s death, Porter’s mother, Franceola Armstrong, spoke during public testimony before the Los Angeles City Council. “He didn’t deserve this,” she said. “He didn’t even get to pop the champagne.” Her words described a son and community member—details erased by the active-shooter designation that made his killing administratively comprehensible.
From Writers’ Rooms to Organizing Infrastructure
After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Robinson recalled being invited into writers’ rooms across Hollywood as networks sought guidance on improving representation. Some shows were briefly canceled. Most returned. The underlying production model remained intact.
Deggans explained why reform stalled. Procedurals are easy to produce, endlessly rerunnable, and reliably profitable. That conveyor belt continues supplying the language officials use when civilians are killed.
For organizers working on police accountability, criminal-justice reform, or immigration enforcement, Robinson’s analysis offers more than critique. It identifies intervention points. The problem is not a single show or episode; it is an industrial system producing thousands of hours of content that reinforces the same justificatory vocabulary.
Robinson launched Freedom Table to build narrative literacy—the capacity to recognize how storytelling constructs permission for state violence. The series translates media criticism into organizing knowledge, helping movements understand how opponents leverage stories to pre-empt accountability.
Rather than asking audiences to stop watching television, Robinson asks them to recognize how language works—who benefits from it, and how it shapes institutional response before facts are established. His partnership with NewsOne creates accessible entry points for that analysis, positioning Freedom Table as a resource for journalists, organizers, and policymakers working to challenge not only state power, but the narratives that sustain it.
For movements confronting state violence, narrative literacy is not abstract theory. It is operational knowledge: an understanding that challenging policy requires challenging the stories that make policy outcomes feel inevitable.
