How Many Police Groups Have Joined the Quentin Tarantino Boycott?

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | October 29, 2015 |

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | October 29, 2015 |

How many police groups have pledged to boycott Tarantino’s Hateful Eight? A lot.

You probably heard last week when Patrick Lynch, the New York City police union chief called for a boycott after Tarantino made a speech at a protest against police brutality. He told a crowd of people holding signs reading “Rise Up! Stop Police Terror,”

I’m a human being with a conscience. And if you believe there’s murder going on then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I’m here to say I’m on the side of the murdered.

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.

It’s no surprise that someone who makes a living glorifying crime and violence is a cop-hater, too. 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.

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 like this: It’s unfortunate timing, but we’ve flown in all these families to go and tell their stories … That cop that was killed, that’s a tragedy, too.

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.

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.

Now police groups in Philadelphia and New Jersey have also joined in, calling for a boycott of Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. Can we just say that maybe Tarantino’s new work probably wasn’t going to be a big hit with police forces anyway. Walter Groggins’ character is described in the official synopsis as “a southern renegade claiming to be Red Rock’s new sheriff,” and Tarantino doesn’t have the best history of treating his cop characters well.

So sure, cops across the country, your boycott isn’t going to get Tarantino to change anything about his movies, and probably not anything about his everyday words either. But Hateful Eight probably wasn’t going to be your favorite movie anyway. So let’s call it a draw.