Wednesday on ABC’s “The View,” filmmaker Quentin Tarantino answered questions about the controversy created by his speech at an anti-police protest and said he is being “demonized” and explained he believes the head of the NYPD union is “slandering” him by calling him “a cop-hater.”
Tarantino said, “I think what I mean is fairly clear, you know. I was talking about these specific instances that we have seen these tragedies captured on video time after time in sickening detail of, in some cases, what I actually do believe is murder. In the case of Walter Scott, that absolutely was murder, and he was indicted for murder. In the case of Eric Gardener, I believe that was murder even though those cops were exonerated. I was there to, one, to be part of this rally which is—there was a lot of ideas behind it, but the basic idea was stop killing people, stop taking your gun out and shooting unarmed citizens. Just stop that. That was was the main thing that we were trying to get across. But the other thing we were there, and particularly what I was there to do, was to meet the families. We had actually sent about 40 families because this has been happening all across America. We sent 40 families to New York to take part of this. Part of the thing that we’re trying to get away from is the fact that everyone quotes these statistics all the time, but these people who were alive and who are now dead are not statistics. they’re not numbers. They’re people who lived and died. We wanted to say their names, see their pictures, think of them as citizens, as human beings, and hear their families tell their story, and I wanted to hear the families. I wanted to bear witness to their pain.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked, “So, you’re not anti-police?”
Tarantino said, “I am not anti-police. I am not a cop-hater. They are trying to vilify me as that. As far as I am concerned, Patrick Lynch, the head of the NYPD union, is slandering me by calling me a cop-hater because they can’t deal with the criticism I am giving them. … I, obviously, do not believe that all cops are murderers. I didn’t say that. I didn’t imply that. I was talking about these specific cases.”
When asked about people saying his criticisms are ironic because he makes a living off of violent films,” Tarantino said, “I reject that. To me, Rice was shot and his mother saw him dead. That wasn’t candy syrup. That was real blood. When she was crying and holding her son, that was acting. It wasn’t real. I’ve never killed anybody. We were all play acting…They are kind of demonizing me. They don’t want to handle this kind of criticism at least coming from somebody from where I’m coming from, from my type of stature. And so the thing is, they have to tear me down in the public and they’re doing it by slander, not by my own words, and they’re trying to discourage me from talking, to shut my mouth, and in particular, they’re trying to tell any other person like me that feels this way to just stay out of it. You see what we’re doing to Quentin, we can just as easily do that to you. Keep your mouth shut.”
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