the movie is completely dishonest about the shooting

The shooting of Khalil in the movie isn’t something that really happened. It’s a completely fictional event. Everything about it was completely made up for the movie. The movie could have created a shooting where the cop was so clearly and entirely wrong that it would have been completely impossible for anyone to defend him. But instead the movie portrayed a shooting that was easy to defend.

The movie’s very first scene is Starr’s dad explaining to all his kids what to do if they’re pulled over by cops. He tells them to put their hands on the dash where the cop can clearly see them. This comes in handy later when Khalil gets pulled over while driving with Starr. She tells him to put his hands on the dash and he does it. As a result, nothing goes wrong while Khalil is still sitting in the car.

But that all changes after the cop has him get out of the car. The cop told Khalil to keep his hands on the car and don't move while he went back to his car to look up Khalil's driver's license. He doesn't follow the cop's instructions and reaches into the car to grab a hairbrush. The cop sees that movement and thinks Khalil is grabbing a gun so he shoots him. The scene makes it clear that the cop genuinely believed it was a gun, not realizing his mistake until he was standing over Khalil and saw the hairbrush on the ground. If Khalil had just done what the cop said and kept his hands on the car then he clearly wouldn't have been shot.

Later on in the movie it tries to analyze the shooting in a way that makes the cop look ridiculous but instead just makes itself look stupid. In a scene at Starr's school she gets into an argument with her white friend Hailey over the shooting. Hailey tells Starr that the cop shot Khalil because he saw a hairbrush that in the moment appeared to him to be a gun. Starr responds by pulling a hairbrush out of Hailey's backpack and asking if it looks like a gun.

That question doesn't actually help to prove Starr's point because the situations are clearly very different. It's easy to see that a hairbrush is really a hairbrush when it's held right up to your face in broad daylight. But the cop saw the hairbrush from 30 feet away in the dark of night. In that situation it's a lot harder to see that a hairbrush is really a hairbrush. It's that much more ridiculous because the movie itself made it absolutely clear that the cop genuinely believed that he saw a gun in the moment he shot Khalil. Starr, along with the movie itself, was too stupid to see that Hailey was right about the shooting after the movie went out of its way to prove that she was right.