On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot Renee Good multiple times as she sat in her SUV in Minneapolis. One week earlier, an off-duty ICE agent killed Keith Porter Jr. outside his Los Angeles apartment complex on New Year’s Eve. In both cases, federal officials defended the shootings using language that witnesses and local authorities later disputed.

The killings occurred days after Rashad Robinson launched Freedom Table, a monthly conversation series. The first episode examined how entertainment shapes public attitudes toward law enforcement. A social justice strategist who has spent more than a decade documenting crime television’s influence on policing narratives, Robinson launched the NewsOne partnership to give a platform to important voices who can translate research into organizing tools. The timing connected theory to consequence, with state violence unfolding inside a cultural environment long conditioned to accept law enforcement’s version of events.

When crime television becomes infrastructure

That work informed two landmark studies. Normalizing Injustice, released in 2020, and Normalizing Injustice 2, released in 2025, together represent the most comprehensive analysis of the crime genre ever conducted—examining dozens of scripted series across major networks, cable channels, and streaming platforms. Rather than treating crime television as passive entertainment, both reports argue the genre functions as sustained propaganda for law enforcement—a term the 2025 report formalizes as “copaganda.”

The 2025 report introduced the Copaganda Index, a tool developed to measure how systematically a given show depicts police and others in the justice system in a one-sided, uncritical, propagandist way. The findings were stark: across the genre, the overwhelming majority of wrongful actions by law-enforcement characters were portrayed as acceptable, justified, or so routine they went unacknowledged entirely. Shows like Chicago P.D., Mayor of Kingstown, and City on a Hill ranked among the worst offenders. Paramount Global and NBCUniversal dominated the bottom of the rankings—and most of those shows were still in production or returning when the report was released.

The production side told the same story. Creative leadership across the genre was overwhelmingly white, and the correlation was direct: shows with the most diverse showrunners consistently scored better on the Copaganda Index. Where creative control remained narrow, the narrative did too—and what millions of viewers absorbed as common sense about crime, race, and law enforcement reflected that narrowness.

What Freedom Table shows about narrative permission

The inaugural episode of Freedom Table brought together NPR critic-at-large Eric Deggans, journalist Josie Duffy Rice, Black List founder Franklin Leonard, and actor-activist Kendrick Sampson. The episode, released on NewsOne, examined how decades of crime procedurals manufacture consent for the kinds of actions that killed Good and Porter.

Duffy Rice described the incentives that drive the system and argued that crime television routinely reverses them. The genre presents a world in which trials are standard and truth is the guiding principle. The reality she outlined is far narrower: most reported crimes produce no arrest, and of those that do, the overwhelming majority never reach a courtroom. “Most charges end in guilty pleas, which is not really about guilt, per se,” she said during the episode. “It’s about risk because you risk a longer sentence by going to trial”. When procedurals center heroic law enforcement and tidy moral resolution, they turn that systemic reality into an exception rather than the norm.

That distortion becomes a permission structure. When officials describe controversial killings using language that implies imminent danger, the phrasing lands on audiences trained to hear those terms as neutral description rather than rhetorical justification. Reporting around the Good shooting included senior officials using extreme framing, while local leaders said video and on-the-ground accounts did not match the federal narrative.

The economics of a mono-narrative

Leonard described why these narratives persist even when the genre’s claims do not match lived reality. He argued that writers effectively serve two audiences, viewers and the corporate executives who control what gets produced and promoted. Networks and studios also maintain relationships with law-enforcement agencies that provide technical support and access, which can shape what types of stories are easier to make.

Deggans explained the genre’s industrial logic. He characterized police procedurals as a “cookie-cutter factory floor,” built to be replicable and rerunnable. The reward structure favors familiarity over experimentation, and accuracy can be treated as a disruption rather than an improvement when it breaks expectations.

From perception to consequence

The real-world impact of these portrayals is not theoretical. Crime procedurals spend years conditioning audiences to treat certain language—imminent threat, active danger, necessary force—as neutral, factual descriptions rather than justifications.

When law-enforcement officials deploy that same language to explain a controversial killing, it does not arrive cold. It lands on audiences already primed to receive it as credible. Normalizing Injustice 2 documents how that conditioning is built: show after show portrays sympathetic law-enforcement characters committing wrongful actions and frames those actions as justified, unremarkable, or simply the cost of doing the job. The effect is cumulative. By the time official accounts reach the public, the narrative logic that makes them sound reasonable has already been rehearsed thousands of times on prime-time television.

Robinson has also discussed what happened after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, when he said networks and creators sought guidance and consultation. Deggans described the result with some precision: “We did see some problematic shows like Cops get canceled, and of course, those shows that got canceled are now back”. With the rise of MAGA and the institutional rollback of DEI commitments, Deggans noted, many of the gains from that period have since been reversed. The genre’s underlying incentives and its relationship with law enforcement agencies remained intact throughout.

Sampson warned that the problem is not only misinformation but the emotional satisfaction these stories can offer audiences who want punishment to feel righteous. He argued that procedurals can serve viewers invested in seeing violence against Black and Brown communities explained as necessary or deserved. The shows do not invent prejudice, but they can make it feel orderly.

Why narrative literacy is organizing infrastructure

Robinson launched Freedom Table to create a space where people can connect the dots between systems, actors, and opportunity—helping movements understand how to leverage power more clearly and act more strategically. The project translates research into tools that organizers, journalists, and policymakers can use when institutions claim authority through language that already feels familiar.

The series also models method. It treats narrative analysis as operational knowledge, not cultural critique for its own sake. It asks how tropes circulate, who benefits when a story becomes default interpretation, and where movements can intervene when entertainment and power reinforce one another.

Panelists also emphasized practical choices. Duffy Rice encouraged audiences to interrogate the “prism” through which they consume crime content, especially programming aimed at children. Deggans urged viewers to seek stories that humanize non-white communities and to stop rewarding shows that rely on dehumanizing shortcuts.

Robinson’s point extended beyond individual media diets. Freedom Table frames narrative literacy as collective infrastructure, useful when democratic systems bend toward authoritarianism and when opponents control not only policy and courts, but also the stories that make violence appear reasonable.

Building power through strategic analysis

Good’s killing prompted significant backlash, including legal action and protests. Reporting described aggressive crowd-control responses that many people recognize from crime TV’s narrative logic, where dissent is treated as a threat and force is framed as order.

The first episode of Freedom Table aired as ICE operations expanded and public debate intensified over what happened, what video shows, and who gets believed by default.

Robinson’s partnership with NewsOne creates an accessible entry point for people trying to understand how narrative infrastructure can enable violence. By translating storytelling mechanics into shared analytical vocabulary, Freedom Table equips movements to recognize when they are fighting not only policies, but also the stories that make those policies feel inevitable.

For those working on police accountability, criminal-justice reform, or immigration enforcement, narrative literacy is not abstract theory. It is practical knowledge about how public permission for harm is built, maintained, and challenged.

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