It's important to understand that Alex does this all the time. Real events become fiction with his addition of tons of details and subplots that aren't real. And it's critical to understand how he uses fictional augmentation of real stories because it's one of the easiest ways to see his biases. When it's a black man who's killed, the story is supplemented with all sorts of extenuating circumstances and details that make it so sad that they, but the guy kind of had it coming.