Why did Jackson leave The Rookie? The actor walked for reasons of his own
Officer Jackson West — smart, principled, one of the show's three original rookies — was shot in the back in the opening minutes of The Rookie's season 4 premiere. No farewell scene. No face on camera. Just CCTV footage and a body in a car park.
If that felt abrupt, it 's because it was. Actor Titus Makin Jr chose not to return, and the writers had to work around his absence in real time.
What happened on screen
The season 3 finale ended with Jackson and Angela Lopez being kidnapped from Lopez's wedding by men working for drug trafficker La Fiera. When season 4 opened with "Life and Death" in September 2021, Jackson's death was revealed through security camera footage — shot in the back while resisting his kidnappers, his face never shown. A stunt double filmed the scene.
Showrunner Alexi Hawley was blunt: "Titus was not coming back to the show, so we needed to do the best that we could to honour the character who's been so primally a part of the show."
The kidnapping cliffhanger from the finale left no graceful way to write him out alive.
Why Makin left
No official statement was ever issued, and Makin gave no exit interviews. But his earlier comments tell most of the story.
In a 2020 Entertainment Weekly interview — given during the airing of season 3 — Makin revealed he'd seriously considered leaving after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As a Black actor playing a police officer on network television, he felt the show wasn't addressing the reality of what policing looked like in America.
"I realised I could not go back to play a cop on a show and not talk about the fact that I'm a Black cop," Makin told EW. "My character hadn't addressed any of that."
He stayed for season 3 after a conversation with Hawley, who introduced a storyline in which Jackson's new training officer, Doug Stanton (Brandon Routh), turned out to be an overt racist. Jackson exposed him, collected body-cam evidence, got him fired — and then Stanton was reinstated at another precinct. If the show was trying to prove the system works, the storyline arguably proved the opposite.
Was there more to it?
Likely. Alongside the racial-justice concerns, Makin was building a second career:
- Music — performing as a soul/funk artist under the name Butterfly Ali, with an album released in 2021.
- Film — supporting roles in On the Come Up, Sins of the Bride, and two short films.
- No major TV since — he hasn't taken another series-regular role.
Hawley handled the aftermath carefully, folding Jackson's death into the squad's grief arc across season 4 and giving Sergeant Grey (Richard T. Jones) several scenes processing the loss. But fans still felt the death was too sudden and too impersonal for a character who'd been there from the start.
The Rookie is now in its eighth season. Jackson West lasted three. The show moved on — but Makin's reasons for leaving haven't stopped being relevant.