Portland Theater Cancels Showing of Kindergarten Cop Because a Radical Leftist Complained it Glorifies Police

A Portland theater has cancelled a planned showing of the 1990 comedy Kindergarten Cop because some social justice warriors complained on Twitter that it glorifies policing.

The film was scheduled to be played during the Northwest Film Center’s summer drive-in series “for its importance in Oregon filmmaking history” because it was shot in Astoria.

The theater daring to show a classic funny movie about a cop prompted a clearly bored activist named Lois Leveen to rant and rave on Twitter about how glorifying police in schools is racist.

“National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” she tweeted. “There’s nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country. And this criminalizing of children increases dramatically when cops are assigned to work in schools.”

Leveen went on to send a letter to a local news outlet saying “it’s true Kindergarten Cop is only a movie. So are Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, but we recognize films like those are not ‘good family fun,'” she wrote. “They are relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions.”

Of course, Kindergarten Cop isn’t about policing students at all, it is about a detective working undercover to catch a drug kingpin.

The Willamette Week reports that instead, the theater is adding a second screening of Good Trouble, the new documentary about John Lewis, who died July 17.

“The additional showing on August 6 replaces Kindergarten Cop, which had been chosen for its importance in Oregon filmmaking history,” the film center said in a statement. “After discussion with staff and community members, however, we agreed that at this moment in history, John Lewis: Good Trouble is the right film to open this year’s Drive-In series.”

The cancelling of the movie and replacement with a far-left doc still wasn’t enough for the power-crazed Leveen, who responded to their statement on Twitter by saying, “I think what you meant to type was ‘Yes, we made a grave error in not realizing the implicit racism in that programming decision. We apologize and are rethinking who makes our programming decisions hereafter.’ How deep a white normativity hole will @nwfilmcenter keep digging?”

 

Thanks for sharing!