In "Slow Hand", Franklin and Leon enlists the help of Karvel to get back Franklin's money from Lenny, who beat and robbed him for it alongside his partner-in-crime Ray-Ray. However, Karvel takes it too far with interrogating Lenny, which ends up with Karvel viciously hitting him with a baseball and eventually taking him into his bedroom to rape him.
After the first half of "Other Lives" shows an alternate universe where Franklin got recruited by the CIA, the episode suddenly and jarringly shifts to the real world, where Los Angeles in being torn apart by a very bad gang war.
Towards the end of "Expansion", Lee and his crew are doing reconnaissance on Skully's mother's house when a car full of Skully's crew shows up. Both sides panic and start shooting at each other. And then, when the smoke clears, there's a loud wail from the car. Lee and Fatback go to look and see Skully's girlfriend in the backseat, wailing over the dead body of her daughter, who was hit by one of the bullets.
In "The Get Back", a guilt-ridden and paranoid Lee has a vivid nightmare in which Franklin comes to kill him, all while wearing an uncharacteristically wide grin on his face. And then Lee wakes up, and Franklin is gone... and then he hears Khadijah weeping frantically... which gradually turns into deranged laughter as she gloats about how he's really fucked up now...
The multiple instances of Police Brutality in the series, and just how utterly powerless the black community is in the wake of white supremacist police officers. Watching your son be choked to death while a crowd of people needs to hold you back, being choked with a baton while officers molest your woman and break your house, only to be beaten within an inch of your life when you react, being told to 'stop resisting' and roughed up when you were offering no resistance at all...
