"And if you believe there's murder going on then you need to rise up and stand up against it. But the protest also was days after a New York police officer, Randolph Holder, was shot to death while chasing a bicycle thief.
– NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was shot dead Tuesday, and by Saturday Quentin Tarantino was in Washington Square Park, protesting "murderers"—not the ones going after cops, but the cops themselves. "When I see murders, I do not stand by … I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers," Tarantino said during the "Rise Up October" rally, per the New York Post, adding too often it is cops who kill. The head of the NYPD's labor union wasn't impressed and responded by asking locals to boycott the director's films, including the upcoming Hateful Eight. "It's no surprise that someone who makes a living glorifying crime and violence is a cop-hater, too," Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said in a statement, via the Post. "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.'" About 300 people gathered for the rally, chanting and holding up signs that said things like "Rise Up! Stop Police Terror!" and "Murder with a badge is still murder." Tarantino concedes that the timing so soon after Holder's killing was "unfortunate," but he also says people had already traveled to attend, the Post notes. "I'm a human being with a conscience," Tarantino says, per the AP. "And if you believe there's murder going on, then you need to rise up and stand up against it. … I'm on the side of the murdered." Not everyone sees it that way. "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," Lynch continues in his statement. One of Holder's cousins tells the Post that the rally was "very disrespectful." "Everyone forgets that behind the uniform is a person," she says.