Quentin Tarantino LAPD Union Boycott Over Anti-Brutality Rally

The Hateful Eight director now has coast-to-coast cop anger being directed his way after appearing at a NYC rally over the weekend protesting police brutality. Today the Los Angeles Police Protective League joined the NYC’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in calling for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming The Hateful Eight and other films of his.

“We fully support constructive dialogue about how police interact with citizens,” said of the LAPPL president Craig Lally today. “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,” Lally added.

(UPDATE, Oct 30 PM: Police unions in Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Las Vegas, as well as the National Association of Police Officer have also now called for a boycott of Tarantino’s films.

Additionally, the NAPO also doesn’t want any cops doing on-duty or off-duty work on the director’s projects.”We ask officers to stop working special assignments or off-duty jobs, such as providing security, traffic control or technical advice for any of Tarantino’s projects, they said in a statement today. “We need to send a loud and clear message that such hateful rhetoric against police officers is unacceptable!)

Just days after NYPD officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed in the line of duty, the Oscar winner gathered with Cornel West and other marchers at the #RiseUpOctober event on October 24 in Greenwich Village. “I’m a human being with a conscience,” Tarantino said at the march. “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.” The NYPD union’s president Patrick Lynch made his call for a boycott of the director’s work soon afterward. “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,’” Lynch said with a play on the title of 1994’s Pulp Fiction. “It’s time for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films,” Lynch said.“Shame on him, particularly at this time when we are grieving the murder of a New York City police officer,” said NYPD Commissioner William Bratton on October 26 in a radio interview.

“We fully support this boycott of Quentin Tarantino films,” added the LAPPL’s Lally on Tuesday. “Hateful rhetoric dehumanizes police and encourages attacks on us. And questioning everything we do threatens public safety by discouraging officers from putting themselves in positions where their legitimate actions could be falsely portrayed as thuggery.”

Such a boycott could hit Tarantino in the box office with the release of the Civil War-set Hateful Eight on Christmas Day. The Weinstein Company-distributed film goes wide on January 8, 2016.