Brooklyn-raised filmmaker Spike Lee has never shied away from focusing his lens on race relations and police abuse.

In his nearly 30-year-old seminal film, “Do The Right Thing,” New York Police Department officers choke a black man to death with a baton, sparking a riot. In 2014, he spliced footage of that fictional scene with video of Eric Garner dying after police put him in a chokehold in Staten Island. And at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the director attended rallies, filming interactions between protesters...