The actor, who plays John Nolan’s (Nathan Fillion) fellow rookie officer Jackson West, found himself doing some soul-searching after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
“A lot of people are finding a voice, and I found that for myself, where I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’ve been complacent,'” Makin tells EW. “I woke up one morning and I was watching the news, and I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go play a cop on a show and not talk about the fact that I’m a Black cop.’ My character hadn’t addressed any of that.”
He adds, “I had that conversation with Alexi [Hawley], our showrunner, and he was extremely gracious and he totally understood everything I was saying. I did come to that point where I was like, ‘If you want to write me out, I politely receive that. I would rather be written out than ignore the reality and not be able to tell the story.'”
But Hawley and his team weren’t interested in ignoring that reality and were intentional about addressing Makin’s concerns. The result, or at least its beginnings, came in Sunday’s episode, “La Fiera.”
While Nolan, Lopez (Alyssa Diaz), and others dealt with the fallout from cartel boss La Fiera’s visit to Los Angeles and a possible attempt on her life, Jackson faced off against a more insidious foe: systemic racism within the police force.
Back out on patrol, Jackson’s new training officer, Doug Stanton (Brandon Routh), continued to ramp up his casual micro-aggressions and prejudiced approach to policing. Things came to a head when Stanton tackled and arrested a young Black man who West knew didn’t remotely match the suspect they were on the lookout for.
The situation quickly spun out of control as Stanton escalated the encounter, assaulting the young man and pulling a gun on his entire family as they ran out of the house to defend him. Jackson called for backup, which conveniently came via Bradford (Eric Winter) and Lucy (Melissa O’Neill), who helped calm everything down in the nick of time.
Horrified by the events, Jackson decided to report Stanton to Sgt. Grey (Richard T. Jones), backed up by Bradford. Grey countered that the best he could do is put Stanton on desk duty while they conduct an investigation, but Jackson pushed him to do better, later telling Bradford, “Silence is complicity.”