By Chris Rosen, Entertainment Weekly
All 14,000 Members of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 have joined officers in New York and Los Angeles in calling for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.
“Tarantino has shown through his actions that he is anti-police,” the group’s president, John McNesby,said in a statement. “Mr. Tarantino has made a good living through his films, projecting into society at large violence and respect for criminals; he it turns out also hates cops.”
The statement comes after Tarantino participated in an anti-police brutality rally in New York City last weekend. “When I see murders, I do not stand by, I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers,” Tarantino told a crowd of protesters on Sunday. The event was organized by a group called #RiseUpOctober, which cites the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, and Eric Garner as lives “stolen by police” on its website.
“The powers-that-be continue to unleash their cops to kill and brutalize and the courts continue to exonerate these killers,” reads the site. “No more!”
After Tarantino spoke during the march, which occurred four days after New York City Police Department officer Randolph Holder was murdered, Police Benevolent Association president Patrick J. Lynch slammed the Oscar-winning director as a “cop-hater.”
“The police officers that Quentin Tarantino calls ‘murderers’ aren’t living in one of his depraved big screen fantasies – they’re risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to protect communities from real crime and mayhem,” Lynch said in a statement. “New Yorkers need to send a message to this purveyor of degeneracy that he has no business coming to our city to peddle his slanderous Cop Fiction. It’s time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.”
“We fully support constructive dialogue about how police interact with citizens. But there is no place for inflammatory rhetoric that makes police officers even bigger targets than we already are,” added Los Angeles Police Protective League president Craig Lally in his own statement on Tuesday. “Film director Quentin Tarantino took irresponsibility to a new and completely unacceptable level this past weekend by referring to police as murderers during an anti-police march in New York.”
Tarantino has not responded to the calls for boycott, but #RiseUpOctober posted 18 defenses of the director on its site from people such as Dr. Cornel West, actor Peter Coyote, and the National Coalition Against Censorship, as well as family members of men and women affected by police brutality.
Tarantino’s next film, The Hateful Eight, arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.
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