Talk about bad timing. Four days after NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was shot in the head during the chase of an armed man in East Harlem, hundreds of protestors gathered at Washington Square Park in New York on Saturday to demonstrate against police brutality. The “Rise Up October” rally drew around 300 protestors and director Quentin Tarantino was front and center, bashing the police as "murderers."
With signs that read “Rise Up! Stop Police Terror!” and “Which side are you on?”, and chants of “No racist police!”, Tarantino spoke to the crowd as he held a poster of Justin Smith, a man who was killed in police custody in 1999. Tarantino told the crowd:
…I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers…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.
Tarantino should know about murders and violence, considering he is notorious for having the two sensationalized in almost every movie he’s ever made.
When the New York Post asked Tarantino’s thoughts about the timing of the rally, given an NYPD officer was killed just four days before, he tried to explain:
It’s like this, It’s unfortunate timing, but we’ve flown in all these families to go and tell their stories…That cop was killed, that’s a tragedy, too.
The Associated Press asked Carl Dix, one of the organizers of the rally, his thoughts about the timing, he scoffed, “That’s not what this is about. This is about all the people who are murdered by police.”
Unfortunately, we don’t find people organizing rallies that have celebrities lend their support to police officers murdered by the same people they help protect.
