New York has forgotten ‘Never Forget’

OPINION:

Twenty-five years ago, “Never Forget” was not just a bumper-sticker slogan. It was a moral obligation.

It meant innocent life had value, that evil existed and deserved to be confronted without apology or euphemism. It meant that the firefighters and police officers who ran into the burning towers were heroes, not oppressors.

It meant that the passengers on Flight 93 who fought back, the people who chose to jump from the towers rather than burn alive and the first responders crushed in the rubble would not be forgotten or explained away.

New York City has forgotten.

Socialist and abolitionist candidates are winning elections on platforms built around “Abolish the Police,” “Abolish ICE” and “Free Palestine.” Victory parties — filled with foul language, chants and open celebration of dismantling the institutions that protect innocent people — sound more like last call at a bar than serious political gatherings.

One politician, Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-backed winner in New York’s 13th Congressional District, repeatedly refused to answer whether someone convicted of murder should be incarcerated. She is a self-described prison abolitionist.

I am not shocked. I saw the same philosophy years earlier inside the institutions meant to protect the vulnerable.

At 22, I covered 9/11 as a newspaper reporter. I watched the country respond with remarkable moral clarity about good and evil. I later spent 14½ years as a pretrial bail investigator in the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, criminal justice system, assessing risk in violent criminal cases.

Halfway through my career, grant-funded “reform” changed the mission.

Allegheny County accepted millions of dollars through initiatives supported by organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Heinz Endowments. My office adopted the Arnold Public Safety Assessment, and the recommendations changed dramatically as a result.

Defendants charged with violent crimes — including rape, attempted homicide and vehicular homicide — were recommended for cashless bond. From where I sat, decisions became driven more by financial priorities than by the facts of the case or the dangers posed to the community.

The hypocrisy was impossible to ignore. The same supervisors who pushed cashless bonds for dangerous offenders would call our office and demand that we seek a high monetary bond because a first-time DUI defendant in the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program had allegedly been disrespectful to a staff member.

Violent offenders received the benefit of the doubt. A first-time offender accused of mouthing off faced the full weight of the system. Accountability depended less on the danger someone posed than on who had been offended.

I walked away. It cost me my salary, career, pension and what had become my identity, but I could no longer reconcile the recommendations I was expected to make with the reason I entered public service in the first place.

I returned to school to become a mental health counselor, hoping to spend the rest of my career helping people heal. Instead, I found myself sitting in graduate classrooms where students told me America deserved 9/11. Many had been toddlers — or not yet born — when the attacks occurred.

When I challenged those statements, I was told, “That’s enough, Kelly.” I walked through anti-Jewish rallies on campus just to get to class. The moral corruption I thought I had left behind at the Allegheny County Jail had simply taken a different form. It did not stay in the classroom. It spread into institutions and public policy, and now it is winning elections.

Today, I work with grieving children and families after deaths caused by violence, overdoses and suicide. Many of those children remind me of the child I once was, carrying trauma that never fully leaves.

To them, public safety is not an abstract political debate. It is an empty chair at the dinner table, a parent who never comes home, a future forever altered by tragedy.

“Never Forget” was never meant to be an annual slogan. It was a promise that innocent life mattered, that evil existed and that courage would be honored rather than explained away.

New York’s recent primary suggests that promise is fading.

We must remember.

Because forgetting has consequences, and innocent people always pay the price.

• Kelly Rae Robertson is a criminal justice whistleblower, former criminal court investigator, victim advocate and nationally certified counselor.