Summary
Khalil pulls over and the cop walks up to the car. Anxiously, Starr puts her hands on the dashboard like her father taught her and tells Khalil to do the same, but he is indignant about the fact that he has done nothing wrong. As the policeman approaches, Khalil finally agrees to put his hands on the dashboard.
The policeman asks for his license and registration, as Khalil asks why he has been pulled over, growing more angered by the interaction. "You failed to signal a lane change," the officer says, telling Khalil to turn off his music. Khalil refuses, even though Starr pleads with him to comply, and the officer orders Khalil to get out of the car.
Starr goes to take a video of the officer, but he barks at her to drop the phone. The officer takes Khalil's license and goes to check on it in his police car, as Starr scrambles to find her phone. Khalil peeks his head in the window, but Starr urges him to stay where the officer told him to stay.
As Khalil picks up a hairbrush off the front seat, the officer shoots Khalil. Starr tries to run from the car, but the officer orders her to stop and handcuffs her, sitting her down on the ground. As the officer calls for reinforcement, Starr pleads with him to help Khalil, who is bleeding. "Where's the gun?" the officer asks, before noticing that Khalil had only picked up a hairbrush. Starr pleads with Khalil to stay alive, but he dies on the street.
Later, Starr is at the police headquarters with her mother, who urges her to breathe as she cries. A woman named Detective Gomez comes in with her partner, Detective Wilkes, and asks Starr to tell her what happened that night. Starr recounts the night to the detectives, saying that Khalil was there for the same reasons everyone else was there. They ask Starr if Khalil had anything to do with the altercation and gunshots at the party, and Starr tells them he did not.
Starr tells her side of the story, and relates that Officer 115 pulled them over for no reason—she remembered his badge number. Detective Wilkes asks Starr if she knows why Khalil reached into the car, and she says, "I think just to see that I was okay." The detectives continue to question Starr, asking if she drank at the party, or if she ever saw Khalil do or deal drugs.
"You have not asked my daughter one question about the cop," Lisa says, annoyed. "115 killed Khalil, and he didn't do anything wrong, so I don't know what kind of a bigger picture you need!" Starr says, upset. In the middle of questioning, a police officer, Carlos, comes into the room and tells them that Starr's questioning is over. "You know her?" Gomez asks, and he tells her that Starr is his niece, as he leads Starr out of the room.
Starr wakes up the next day from a nightmare about the police killing Khalil. As she jolts awake from the dream, her father holds her and comforts her. She throws up in a trash can as he rubs her back and gives her some water. "Nightmares are always the worst right after," Maverick says. Downstairs at breakfast, Maverick tells Starr to shine her light, and the family laughs together when Sekani takes some bacon.
At a memorial gathering for Khalil, Seven and Starr hug Khalil's grandmother, Rosalie. She takes Starr aside and asks Starr if she was with Khalil when he was killed. "You've been by his side since day one and you stayed all the way to the end," Rosalie says, before commenting on the fact that Khalil was selling drugs.
Carlos comes in and hugs Lisa and then Starr. As he goes to give his condolences to Rosalie, Starr checks her phone and finds a text from Chris asking if she's coming to meet him. She sends back a text apologizing and saying she cannot meet him. When he texts back, "Not again," she writes, "Still want to see you," which seems to only hurt Chris' feelings more.
Maverick, Starr, and Lisa ask Carlos what is going to happen with the officer who killed Khalil. "They're going to place him on paid administrative leave," Carlos says, and Starr is disappointed. Carlos tells them that there will be a full investigation, but Maverick is annoyed that he won't be charged with murder. Lisa asks if Carlos will be involved in the investigation, and Carlos tells him that the D.A. will be working on it. Lisa and Maverick get anxious about the fact that Starr will have to be a witness in front of a grand jury about the case. Carlos tells them to trust the system and gets in an argument with Maverick. Fed up, Starr walks away.
Starr realizes that a grand jury will bring her a lot of unwanted attention, death threats, getting targeted by cops. The scene shifts to Starr in the bathroom at Williamson, looking in the mirror. "Will I suddenly be the poor girl from the hood that saw her friend get killed?" she says, in voiceover, before resolving, "I just gotta be quiet."
We see her at lunch, trying to remain calm and discreet about her own feelings. She smiles at Chris, who keeps walking. During basketball practice, Starr messes up a pass, and her friend Hailey tells her to just pretend the ball is fried chicken, which Starr takes offense at. "We had fried chicken at lunch, it was a joke," Hailey says. Hailey asks Starr what's going on, but Starr doesn't tell her.
Starr and Kenya get some barbecue, and as they sit and eat some pound cake, they see Khalil's death being covered on the news. They see a woman, bedraggled and sobbing, talking to an interviewer on the news. "Why would they put Miss Brenda on T.V. like that?" Kenya says, as the news reporter references the witness that will have to testify about the shooting.
Kenya confronts Starr about the fact that she knows it's her who will testify as the witness. "You're gonna stand up for Khalil, right?" Kenya asks Starr as they walk down the street. King, the head drug dealer and Kenya's father, pulls up and offers to give the girls a ride. While Starr resists at first, she eventually gets in the car. King offers Starr some cash, but she doesn't accept. He talks to Starr about how she saw Khalil killed, and how it's hard to move on from that kind of trauma. He drops the girls off at Maverick's grocery store.
Maverick gets in the passenger seat and talks to King, who teases him for being a family man. King then acknowledges that he knows Starr was with Khalil when he was shot, and that she should not speak to the police. "You take care of your girl and I'll handle mine," Maverick says. Before he drives away, King tells Starr to keep the memory of Khalil's death in the past.
That evening, Lisa tells Maverick she's worried about King wanting to hurt Starr for revealing anything about his drug ring to the police. Maverick isn't convinced, but Lisa is adamant that her daughter's life is now in danger. Maverick trusts King, but Lisa insists that they need to move. "We could do some good stuff around here," Maverick says, but Lisa tells him, "Where you live does not define who you are, Maverick." She yells at Maverick, telling him that it's important to make sacrifices for their family, that her mother moved their family out of Garden Heights so that she and her brother could go to a Catholic school. She then tells Maverick that they should leave the neighborhood in case Starr's school gets wind of what happened.
Starr opens the door and tells them she doesn't want to go to the funeral. As Starr gets ready, Maverick comes in and talks to her. He mentions the fact that both of Starr's old friends, Natasha and Khalil, are gone. "That's THUG LIFE," Starr says, and Maverick sits down. He asks her what she thinks THUG LIFE means, and she tells him, "I think it's about more than just the youth. I think it's about us. Black people, poor people, everybody at the bottom." Maverick tells her that because there aren't real jobs in the neighborhood, people start dealing drugs, thinking it's a way out, "But that shit is flown into our communities, and I don't know nobody with a private jet." He continues, telling Starr that drugs land black people in prison, another billion dollar venture, and that he went to prison with his own father.
Analysis
In the tragic altercation between Khalil and the policeman, we see not only the hateful prejudice of the police force, but the collision of Khalil and Starr's differing philosophies about how to handle that prejudice. While Starr has been taught to put her hands on the dashboard, to bend to the ridiculous standards of the police force as a means to survive, Khalil's impulse is to resist and fight back, to be more irreverent to the cop. Khalil takes his cue from Tupac, railing against an unjust system, while Starr works to find a way to survive through it. The tragedy is that Khalil's idealism, his desire to resist and combat injustice, costs him his life, while Starr's cautiousness saves her.
The injustice of the law enforcement system only becomes clearer when Starr is brought in for questioning. Detective Gomez and Detective Wilkes question Starr endlessly about Khalil's history and his behavior that evening, but they do not ask Starr anything about the officer that shot him. They insinuate various things about Khalil's biography, but they do not question the system that allowed Khalil to be wrongfully killed. Starr fights back, insisting that the only facts they need are that the officer, Officer 115 shot and killed Khalil, even though he had done nothing wrong.
Director Tillman aligns us with Starr's plight not only through the story, but also in the way that he shoots the film. While we do not see fully what happens in the moment that Khalil gets shot, we see his death from Starr's perspective, and then we see her expression of horror as the police lights flash in through the window. Then, when she is brought in for questioning, Tillman films her in a tight close-up, and the tears rolling down her face and her expression of betrayal shows us all of the emotions she is feeling.
Philosophies about how to handle the racial injustice get more complicated after Khalil's death, when the family begins seeking counsel from Carlos, a relative who is also a police officer. As a black man, Carlos sympathizes with the Carters' plight, but as a police officer, he also urges them to trust the system. Starr, however, has already felt betrayed by the law enforcement system, and is fed up with the adults in her life urging her to go along with protocol.
With the approaching trial, Starr is worried not only about the unwanted attention from the general public about the case, but also the attention coming at her within her own community. When King hears about the fact that Starr was a witness and will testify in front of a jury, he warns her to leave the memory in the past, not talk to the police, as he believes she will expose his drug ring. King is a dangerous man, even if he has ties to Starr's family, and his thinly veiled threats put even more pressure of Starr.
