Today in news of the People Very Obviously Missing the Point variety, we have this: the New York Citypolice union is calling for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino's untouchable filmography in the wake of the director's appearance at a police brutality protest over the weekend. "I’m a human being with a conscience," Tarantino told fellow protesters during the rally, according to Variety. "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."
Though similar statements from others, including the increasingly visible #BlackLivesMatter movement, have faced predictable criticism from the far-right over the past year with an almost deafening level of consistency, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association response to Tarantino's outspokenness on one of the gravest issues currently facing America is especially baffling. In a statement obtained by the New York Post, the union's president calls Tarantino a "cop hater" and suggests that his films have contributed to violence against police officers:
"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.’"
The main source of contention for the union appears to be that the rally just so happened to take place days after an officer was killed in East Harlem, an inarguably tragic occurrence that Tarantino himself acknowledged during the rally. However, for officers to suggest that protests against a profoundly flawed policing structure should pause or cease altogether seems, at best, patently hypocritical.
