Lawlessness rampant in AOC's home district captured in disturbing video

Constituents in the New York City district represented by Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have increasingly voiced discontent with the lawmaker's seeming disinterest in their needs, and a recent police incident in the heart of the area illustrates the reason for their frustration.

As Fox News reports, while filming the goings on in AOC's home district recently, including the aftermath of a police raid, a video crew captured a prime example of the seedy lawlessness that has overtaken the area the firebrand “Squad” member was elected to serve.

Shades of Bangkok in Big Apple

The outlet explained that a lengthy strip of commercial properties in the aforementioned congressional district has become so overrun by prostitution and other illegal conduct that no amount of law enforcement intervention seems to ameliorate the problem for very long.

Indeed, despite a police raid of a particularly noticeable brothel, the business was back up and running just one day later, as the Fox News footage revealed, a scenario one local activist said was more like a red-light district in Thailand than New York City.

The location on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens was at one point in time a beauty salon, and even though metal shutter doors were installed over the front of the building, a makeshift entry had been fashioned by enterprising lawbreakers.

The NYPD indicated that arrests had been made at the site during a Sept. 18 raid, but by the time the Fox News crew were on the scene for reporting purposes, the world's oldest profession was once again being conducted there for all to see.

Though the district attorney's office in Queens claimed that it is working to permanently close the operation and noted that the NYPD is seeking a “nuisance abatement order,” residents remain skeptical that any meaningful improvement will take place in the immediate future.

Where criminality and squalor reign

According to local activist Ramses Frias, the prostitution is bad enough, but the area also suffers from the scourge of large, unregulated open-air vendors who sell all manner of goods and food with little to no health and safety regulation or oversight, leading to trash-filled streets and vermin infestations.

“This area has been run rampant with prostitution. It's just been out of control and the lawlessness continues to happen. This doesn't feel like my home. I've been here my whole life, and this feels like I'm a tourist in a Third World country,” he said.

Though there is plenty of blame to go around at the local level for the appalling conditions in their district, Frias and Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa believe that AOC has not done her part to tend to the needs of those who elected her.

Stating that the congresswoman has not been seen since an August 2023 rally, Frias added, “She does not visit this area; this is actually an area where she campaigned the hardest and a lot of people went out [to vote] for her, and she doesn't come over here. She has totally neglected us,”

Those sentiments have been echoed by former policeman and Bronx Community Board Member Anthony Vitaliano, who said of AOC as far back as 2019, “Her district is everywhere else in the U.S. Her heart is not in the Bronx,” and from the sound of things, not much has changed in the intervening years, and just how bad things will be allowed to get, only time will tell.