Is there anything more pathetic than a leader whose charges have all simply walked away?  Hard to look big and powerful when that happens.

That's the pretty picture in Hallandale Beach, where the entire SWAT team resigned after the police chief and members of his command staff took a knee in religious obeisance to the Black Lives Matter anti-police activist group.

Here's the Miami Herald's account of the embarrassment:

The 10 members of the Hallandale Beach Police Department’s SWAT team have stepped down from their roles, citing among other grievances anger over the city’s police chief kneeling with protesters earlier this week, a memo the officers signed read. They will remain with the police department.

On Friday morning, Hallandale Beach received a memo from the members of the SWAT team with a list of grievances, Hallandale Beach City Manager Greg Chavarria said.

Police Chief Sonia Quiñones has set a meeting with the 10 officers on Monday to hear their concerns, collect their equipment and thank them for their service.

Here's the self-abasement:

These Swat officers felt disrespected and demonized and left behind by their commanders...so they quit https://t.co/m4yLf2TSg1

— 笨ｭ Wayne Dupree 笨ｭ (@WayneDupreeShow) June 13, 2020

Seriously, these people were kneeling down to people who want to "abolish the police" because they claim that America is such a hopelessly racist society.  File under "unclear on the concept."  And where are their resignations, since they're literally kneeling to the idea of abolishing the police?

The very idea of taking a knee, coming from the example of millionaire NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, is problematic in itself.  After all, Kaepernick's purpose in cooking up the knee gesture was to declare that America is so hopelessly racist that its flag and the country it represents are unworthy of even minimal respect.

That absurd narrative has a funny way of colliding with the mission of being a police officer.

After all, if America's such a bad place, who'd want to die for it?  That is what the city that employs these cops is asking these men to do, but if they do, they'll be doing it for a racist hellhole, which is a sucker's mission.  Who wants to die to defend that?  If the country and flag and its derivative cities are unworthy of respect, as these leaders are demonstrating with their knee thing, it makes no sense at all to die for the place.

More to the point, the narrative is a lie.  Ask most (legal) immigrants, and the Hallandale area, situated between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, has a lot of them — it's just these leaders who in the middle of all this are claiming that the U.S. isn't worth any respect.

And not respecting the U.S., its rule of law, or anything about it, it's no surprise they don't have the SWAT team members' backs.  No loyalty to them, no respect for the rule of law they represent — just a convenient whipping boy for political purposes, and now the SWAT team has just said no.

Even dictators in socialist hellholes know they've got to keep the SWAT teams protecting them happy.

Not these clowns.

When an ambitious politician, such as Vice Mayor Sabrina Javellana (her big-lipstick photo signals that she's an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez imitator), literally lies about the SWAT team, to advance her police-are-evil narrative, as the SWAT team members allege in their complaint, and then calls for their firing based on her own mendacious story, it's pretty obvious that anything the SWAT team does in the name of public safety is going to be used against it.  The cops also say they've been underfunded and undertrained, and the safety of dogs is prioritized over the safety of team members, which doesn't sound like a reason to stay.

Well, now the Hallandale police and politicians can get themselves a new SWAT team, the SWAT team has gone Galt, and these officials ought to be just a little embarrassed.  They've effectively castrated themselves of the men backing them with force of arms, implicitly reducing their own prestige and power, imagining that everyone from here on out will now gladly follow their hollow diktats with no muscle of state behind them.  Not an impressive look.

The cops are having the last laugh, too, in that they've all returned to regular police duty without the risks of SWAT duty. With the message gotten that their public safety work has no value in the current woke society, they'll now resume twiddling their thumbs, seeing nothing, and waiting for their pensions.

Nice work, leftist eunuchs.

Wayne Dupree has more commentary here.