Quentin Tarantino Clarifies Police Comments: ‘I’m Not a Cop Hater’
As more police unions nationwide joined the boycott against Quentin Tarantino after the filmmaker spoke at RiseUpOctober’s anti-police brutality rally on October 20th, Tarantino appeared on All In With Chris Hayes to clarify his remarks. “I’m not a cop hater,” Tarantino said after being labeled as such by police unions across the country. “Anybody who acknowledges that there’s a problem in law enforcement in this country right now is considered by law enforcement as part of the problem, whether that be me, whether that be [New York mayor] Bill de Blasio, whether that be President Barack Obama.”
At the rally, Tarantino called some police officers “murderers,” and while he stood by the crux of those comments, he fine-tuned his rationale on MSNBC. “We were at a rally where unarmed people – mostly black and brown – who have been shot and killed or beaten or strangled by the police, and I was obviously referring to the people in those types of situations. I was referring to Eric Garner, I was referring to Sam DuBose, I was referring to Antonio Guzman Lopez, I was referring to Tamir Rice,” the director said. “In those cases in particular that we’re talking about, I actually do believe that they were murder.”
Tarantino admitted he was alarmed by the backlash from his rally comments. “I was surprised. I was under the impression I was American and had First Amendment rights and there was no problem with me going to an anti-police brutality protest and speaking my mind,” Tarantino said of the police outcry. “Just because I went to an anti-police brutality protest doesn’t mean I’m anti-police.”
Tarantino added that instead of law enforcement tackling police brutality directly, he’s being used as a scapegoat to further avoid the issue. “There was a lot of people at that rally, and we were all crying for a lot of things, but there was one thing in particular, which was ‘Stop shooting unarmed people.’ We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people,” Tarantino continued. “But [law enforcement] don’t want to deal with that. They would rather start arguments with celebrities than examine the concerns put before them by a citizenry that’s lost trust in them.”