Guest writer Kelly Rae Robertson spent more than 14 years working inside Allegheny County's criminal justice system as a pretrial investigator. She is a writer and political commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, Law Enforcement Today, The American Spectator, and American Thinker.
It's no wonder socialists like Hasan Piker and the growing socialist wing of the Democratic Party want to abolish the police and empty the prisons. The rhetoric they use — open hostility, dehumanization, and statements that would get ordinary people charged with terroristic threats — is treated as bravery, protected political speech when it comes from the right people.
Figures such as Piker, members of the Squad, and rising stars like Zohran Mamdani have spent years framing law enforcement as the problem rather than the thin line holding chaos at bay.
My question is simple: How long before this new wave of socialists taking power in major cities helps create the conditions for another mass, targeted ambush of police officers?
We have seen it before. Sadly, more than once. But one stands out to me.
On July 7, 2016, five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas during what the media repeatedly called a "peaceful" Black Lives Matter protest.
Five cops dead during a "peaceful" protest. Say that sentence out loud. Slowly. Then tell me if it still sounds peaceful.
The day after the Dallas shooting, I arrived at the Allegheny County Jail for my 2 p.m. shift. I entered through the municipal court building, scanned through two side doors, and walked straight into the middle of a circle of Pittsburgh police officers suiting up in full SWAT gear. I looked up and realized I was completely surrounded.
They towered over me, pulling on vests and securing their equipment. I quickly got out of their way. That's when I stopped and looked around. The entire floor was packed shoulder to shoulder with cops.
A few hours later, around 5 p.m., I came out of my office and ran into a friend who worked as a deputy with the Allegheny County Sheriff's Office. He was like a big brother to me. Whenever I saw him, I hugged him hard and held on. But no matter how tightly I squeezed, I always seemed to feel more vest than him. It was a stark reminder of what he did for a living, and it scared me.
To the community, they were cops. To me, they were family.
I hugged him like I always did, then looked around at the floor packed with officers and asked him what the hell was going on.
The night before, the media had replayed the gunfire and the video of the murderer hunting officers. During my 14 and a half years in the system, I had become close with a lot of Pittsburgh cops and deputies. I knew the men and women behind the badge. Any officer killed in the line of duty disturbed me. But the thought of it being someone I personally knew hit differently.
Outside the court building, police cars were double-parked on both sides of the road. Officers stood beside their vehicles with their K9s. Cars were pulling in and out at high speed, four officers to a car instead of the usual two. I had never seen anything like it.
Then my friend told me why. Intelligence had gone out to several cities warning of possible copycat attacks.
Pittsburgh was on the list.
My stomach turned. I looked at him as he watched the sea of officers around us, and all I could think was that he could be next. Any one of my friends could be next. I had said it for years: if one of them was ever killed in the line of duty, I was done with the job and done with the field.
I eventually walked away anyway. The progressive, grant-fueled agenda that accelerated around the same time as the Dallas ambush left me feeling like if an officer got hurt, there would be blood on my hands — even as I spent every shift fighting my own bosses to keep violent people from walking out the door. We were told these new policies were reducing recidivism.
But I was sitting inside the jail processing the same defendants over and over again. I knew what recidivism looked like because I watched it come through my office every night. The claim was a lie.
These socialists have thrived on hate. They hate the same police who protect them every time they walk down the street. It is the same hypocrisy on display when politicians like Zohran Mamdani stage photos sitting on the subway like regular men of the people, while the reflection in the glass reveals the security detail surrounding them.
They demand abolition in public and armed protection in private. Hasan Piker and others in that orbit traffic in the same contempt while living in a world still held together by the officers they despise.
But it is the officers who live with the consequences of that hatred. The five men murdered in Dallas certainly did, while the cameras kept calling the protest peaceful.
Rhetoric has consequences. When you spend years telling a generation that police are the enemy and that locking up dangerous people is oppression, you should not act surprised when someone eventually acts on that message. The people pushing it today are not abstract ideologues shouting from the fringe. They have names. They have platforms. And increasingly, they have political power.
The question is how long the rest of us will keep pretending the danger is imaginary before another ambush forces us to face it.
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