Tarantino defends police remarks: 'I was under the impression...I had First Amendment rights'

Quentin Tarantino at a protest against police brutality in Manhattan.

(Image credit: Kena Betancur/Getty Images)

published 5 November 2015

"I'm a human being with a conscience," said director Quentin Tarantino while attending a New York City rally against police brutality on October 24. "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's comments immediately drew controversy, with the National Association of Police Organizations issuing a statement calling for a boycott of Tarantino's films and suggesting he believes all police officers are murderers.

But Tarantino is not backing down. "I was under the impression I was an American and that I had First Amendment rights, and there was no problem with me going to an anti-police-brutality protest and speaking my mind," the director said on MSNBC Wednesday. "Just because I was at an anti-police-brutality protest doesn't mean I'm anti-police." Tarantino also argued that police attacks on his remarks were a way to skirt the larger issue "with the fact that the citizenry has lost trust in them."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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