Los Angeles's police union has joined New York's largest police union in boycotting Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino's movies over his participation in an anti-police brutality rally in Manhattan over the weekend.
"Tarantino took irresponsibility to a new and completely unacceptable level this past weekend by referring to police as murderers," the Los Angeles Police Protective League said in a statement released Tuesday. "Hateful rhetoric dehumanizes police and encourages attacks on us."
The filmmaker on Saturday joined hundreds of demonstrators waving signs and shouting through megaphones in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood to protest police brutality nationwide.
Tarantino said "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."
Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, called on New Yorkers to send a message to Tarantino, whom he called a "purveyor of degeneracy," by boycotting his films.
"The police officers that Quentin Tarantino calls 'murderers' aren't living in one of his depraved big screen fantasies - they're risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to protect communities from real crime and mayhem," Lynch said.
The Philadelphia police union is also backing the boycott.
