Award-winning director Quentin Tarantino joined a police brutality protest in New York Saturday, participating with hundreds, many of which were family members of people unjustly killed while in police custody.
The protesters gathered at the Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village in Manhattan before marching along Sixth Avenue for 2 miles. Police officers cordoned off a lane for the protesters, who walked as they shouted stories of police brutality over megaphones and waved signs showing photos of victims and the places and dates of their deaths.
Tarantino said that he is a human being with a conscience so if there is a murder going on, it is necessary to rise and stand against the crime.
"I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers," he added.
The protest is the last of three demonstrations organized by the group RiseUpOctober in New York. Though coincidental, it also occurred just days after Randolph Holder, a police officer from the NYPD, was shot dead while chasing after a bicycle thief. A suspect has been charged with robbery and murder in the case.
Carl Dix, an activist who helped establish RiseUpOctober, said that he sympathizes with Holder's family and reiterated that the protest was not held at the time as a result of events involving the police officer. Instead, it was about all the people that had been murdered by the police.
One of those in attendance at the protest was Temako Williams. La-Reko Williams was her son, was killed in 2011 by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. While a federal jury decided that excessive force had been used by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer while detaining La-Reko, awarding Temako with $500,000 for damages, no criminal charges were filed.
To Temako, money was not a substitute for justice, saying that all that was not worth the price of her son's life. During the protest, she walked arm in arm with Cornel West, one of the RiseUpOctober organizers.
Examples of strained relationships between police officers and the people they serve are found nationwide and the NYPD is just one of them. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and police commissioner William Bratton have said, however, that they are serious about reforming the ranks, pledging to rebuild trust between police officers and communities within their jurisdiction.
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