PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — The City of Brotherly Love lived up to its name this week, thanks in part to a group of people the Democratic Party couldn’t quite bring itself to thank properly: the men and women of law enforcement.
Police were everywhere — on street corners and in subways, on bicycles and on Independence Mall. They were consistently friendly, augmented by a small army of local volunteers who helped steer visitors to and from the Democratic National Convention safely.
But the convention struggled to acknowledge police at all. As former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani noted, there were no uniformed law enforcement personnel seen on the floor of the Wells Fargo Arena, likely out of fear that left-wing delegates — many of whom wore “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts, pins and paraphernalia — would protest.
Indeed, that is exactly what happened on the last day of the convention, when the Democratic Party finally held a moment of silence to remember fallen officers — and Black Lives Matter activists interrupted it.
The convention had passed up the opportunity to honor the officers two days before, when it had the “Mothers of the Movement,” women who lost sons or relatives in confrontations with police, onstage. Democrats made no such effort to honor the widows of officers recently killed by Black Lives Matter-inspired radicals.
Instead of offering a profound moment of national reconciliation, they decided, as usual, to tell only one side of the story.
Meanwhile, officers did their jobs faithfully, if quietly. They kept a mass, unexpected walkout of Bernie Sanders delegates, which became a sit-in inside the media tent, from becoming confrontational.
At the many protests around the city, they kept violence to a minimum. Once again, just as in Cleveland, the only notable injury was to a radical who set himself on fire trying to burn the American flag. And yet they received little thanks from the Democrats they had been assigned to protect.
Breitbart News asked Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, one of his party’s few outspoken defenders of police, what he thought of the situation. He noted that there had been police on the stage. That was true enough, but in the arena itself, this reporter only saw uniformed officers backstage. Some were cordoned off behind blue curtains, apparently so they would not be seen.
Like the American flags belatedly trucked in, the police were an afterthought. But they did their duty, and deserved better.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.