Much like the “War on Christmas” narrative is shattered the moment you step foot in a department store the day after Halloween or the “War on Christians” narrative falls apart once you read the FBI’s hate crime statistics, the “War on Police” narrative disintegrates once a Fox News fact checker realizes that in order to be called a war, more than one side has to be suffering casualties. Despite the fact that 2015 has been one of the safest years on record for police in recorded history, I assume there’s a war on police because the American population is asking them not to kill with impunity? Something like that? Anyway, on October 24th, Quentin Tarantino attended a rally in NYC to protest police brutality. This is what he said:
“I’m a human being with a conscience. And when I see murder I cannot stand by. And I have to call the murdered the murdered and I have to call the murderers the murderers.”
As expected, police unions and people on Facebook who want you to respect authority until you mention the President or the 2nd Amendment, immediately thought, OMG HE’S CALLING ALL COPS MURDERERS. I don’t know what level of delusion you would need to believe that, but here we are. And as soon as he said it, the police unions in Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago (as well as the National Association of Police Organizations and 241,000 individual officers) issued a boycott of Tarantino’s upcoming film, The Hateful Eight. Because I guess asking police not to brutalize the people they are sworn to protect is just asking too much. The New York Post actually wants him to….apologize. Tarantino doesn’t have time for that bullshit.
Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out,” he said. “And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth, and even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument.” He added: “All cops are not murderers. I never said that. I never even implied that…Frankly, it feels lousy to have a bunch of police mouthpieces call me a cop hater. I’m not a cop hater. That is a misrepresentation. That is slanderous. That is not how I feel. But you know, that’s their choice to do that to me. What can I do? I’m not taking back what I said. What I said was the truth. I’m used to people misrepresenting me; I’m used to being misunderstood. What I’d like to think their attack against me is so vicious that they’re revealing themselves. They’re hiding in plain sight.”
And as far as Harvey Weinstein being “furious at Tarantino”, here’s the official statement from The Weinstein Company:
“The Weinstein Co. has a longstanding relationship and friendship with Quentin and has a tremendous amount of respect for him as a filmmaker. We don’t speak for Quentin, he can and should be allowed to speak for himself.”
Yeah, so much for that. I’d tried to find which cops Tarantino was talking about. Maybe it was Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz who died on September 1st after saying he was chasing “two white men and a black man”. Turns out he killed himself because he was embezzling money from his department to pay for his mortgage and porn. I don’t think it was him. Maybe it was former officer Daniel Holtzclaw who raped 13 black women while on duty, and by what I’m sure is sheer coincidence, got an all white jury. Probably not him either. Or maybe it was the NYPD officers who stopped Karim Baker, the man who inadvertently gave directions to a cop killer, 20 times in 9 months without giving him a ticket then curbed stomped him for parking too close to a fire hydrant. Not sure is he’s talking about them. Maybe it was Pennsylvania cop Stephen Rozniakowski, who wasn’t fired despite 75 counts of stalking and harassment, shot and killed his girlfriend and wounded her daughter. Could it be him? Not sure. I’m sure it’s the St. Paul cops who beat up a 17-year black kid with autism because they thought he was on drugs. No, that can’t be it. Oh, I know. It’s Warren County Sheriff’s Deputy Linkee Israel Carrillo who shot up his own patrol car and said he was ambushed. Then claimed he had PTSD and earned a Purple Heart. That was also a lie. I don’t think any of these are who Tarantino is talking about. Maybe I should go back further than a month.
