Roosevelt Avenue in Queens has recently seen a sharp rise in the numbers and visibility of women openly offering sex for money in the shadow of the elevated 7 train.
East New York’s “Penn Track” section has also emerged as a seedy open-sex market, as nearly naked women offer themselves to men in cars, supervised by pimps who use brutality to manage those who are essentially their slaves.
These scenes were familiar sights in the city three decades ago, when prostitutes freely roamed the streets near the Lincoln Tunnel or pursued the hotel trade on Sixth Avenue near Central Park.
The era of “broken windows” policing and the rise of online “escort” advertising mostly eliminated the plague of open sex for sale.
But in recent years, state and city “reforms,” an abandonment of quality-of-life policing and the migrant influx has led to a return of the seedy cityscapes.
The good news?
Mayor Eric Adams is having cops crack down on areas like Roosevelt Avenue, and new Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is again emphasizing quality-of-life issues, like prostitution plaguing neighborhoods — with plans to hold cops accountable for addressing them.
Still, eliminating the scourge completely will be difficult, thanks to opposition from the left and the handcuffs they’ve put on cops.
Over the years, reformers have insisted that many prostitutes were victims of coercion and violence.
This prompted New York to divert many of those arrested in the sex trade to special courts aimed at providing services to women now treated as victims rather than criminals.
The courts link women arrested for prostitution “to tailored counseling and case management services, which range from shelter and health care to immigration assistance, drug treatment, and counseling.”
Cops also began focusing on johns rather the hookers themselves, an approach backed by some feminist groups but opposed by organizations such as the ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which favor complete decriminalization of the sex industry.
At the same time, the internet drove much of the trade indoors and off the streets.
The result: The city’s annual prostitution-related arrests have trended down, falling from tens of thousands in the 1980s to just over 100 by 2022.
Yet, recently, amid a broader collapse in proactive policing, the decriminalization of public drinking and urination, the elimination of cash bail for almost all crimes and the influx of migrants, street hookers have begun to reappear.
And pro-hooker radicals, dissatisfied with what they see as the slow pace of reform, continue to push for total decriminalization.
Their cause took a step forward in 2021, when New York state actually repealed a 1976 law criminalizing “loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution.”
Dubbed the “walking while trans” law, it was supposedly abused by police as a pretext for harassing people identifying as transgender.
The NYPD, however, claims that the loitering statute was generally employed as a response to community quality-of-life complaints, and champions of repeal offer no data substantiating the contention that the law was enforced mostly against those who identified as trans.
The drive for total decriminalization boasts prominent supporters: Socialist state Sen. Julia Salazar, who represents parts of Brooklyn with high levels of loitering arrests, is among the most radical New York advocates for hookers’ rights.
“I think that the goal should be decriminalization,” she said at a 2018 meeting of activists.
Her Senate colleague — and 2025 mayoral candidate — Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district includes a stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where the NYPD claims to have spotted suspected prostitutes alongside members of the vicious Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, said the loitering law was “no different than terrible policing policies, like Stop and Frisk, and only targets the most vulnerable populations in my district.”
She’s right that it was like other policing policies though wrong that those policies were “terrible.”
Indeed, laws against loitering for prostitution are useful tools for disrupting antisocial behavior, just as stop-and-frisk was a useful tool for police to get guns off the street.
Removing these tactics from the crime-prevention arsenal has predictably resulted in more gunshot deaths and the spread of human trafficking across New York City.
In the name of protecting “vulnerable populations,” the left has made New Yorkers more vulnerable to crime and disorder.
Seth Barron’s next book, “Weaponized,” will be published in 2025. Adapted from City Journal.
