Crime surge in NYC? Ocasio-Cortez can explain

FPI / July 15, 2020

In news footage and video posted to social media of the recent rioting and looting in New York City, criminals were seen carrying away all kinds of high-end merchandise. Lots of booze was also spirited away.

Few, if any, showed participants carrying away loaves of bread.

Yet, that is precisely what socialist Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says is driving the current crime wave in New York City.

“So why is this uptick in crime happening?” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday in a chat on Zoom. “Well, let’s think about it. Do we think this has to do with the fact there’s record unemployment in the United States right now? The fact that people are at a level of economic desperation that we have not seen since the Great Recession? Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent, and so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don’t have money so you maybe have to, they’re put in a position where they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night.”

AOC's bread-stealers may also be heavily armed. Shootings in New York City have soared by more than 200 percent in the weeks since the NYPD disbanded its anti-crime unit of plainclothes cops.

During the final two weeks of June, three times as many shootings occurred in New York City as there were during the same period in 2019, according to the New York Post.

Between June 15 and July 2, there were 116 shootings in the city, compared to just 38 during the same two-week period last year. A total of 157 New Yorkers were wounded in gunfire this year, compared to just 57 wounded in the period in 2019.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee called Ocasio-Cortez's comments “astonishing.”

“There’s a big difference between shoplifting and cold-blooded murder and for her not to know the difference is frankly astonishing,” Huckabee told Fox News.

Host John Roberts brought up the fact that a 1-year-old was shot and killed and three other people were injured late Sunday night at a family cookout in a Brooklyn park, according to authorities.

“Her saying, ‘people are hungry so they’re going out and lifting bread,’ no, they are going out and killing people randomly,” Huckabee said. “You don't kill a 1-year-old because you need some bread, that doesn’t put bread on your table and that's why the absurdity of her [Ocasio-Cortez’s] remarks have to be called out.”

Huckabee added: “She needs to be held accountable for this. She needs to walk it back and recognize that violent crime has nothing to do with people's lifting some bread.”

But AOC did not walk back her comments. In fact, she doubled down on them.

“Republicans are all upset that I’m connecting the dots between poverty and crime,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “I know most of them haven’t experienced or seen these issues first hand, but I have. This may be hard for them to admit, but poverty and crime are highly linked, both violent & nonviolent alike.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday night blasted Ocasio-Cortez after she told viewers during a recent virtual town hall that a community without police would look "like a suburb," reaffirming her support of the "defund the police" movement.

"Here’s something you probably didn’t know," Carlson said. "Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the voice of the street, actually grew up in an idyllic town 45 miles north of New York City. It’s called Yorktown Heights. You'd never know it from listening to her recent race-baiting but the population of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's home is over 90 percent white.

"It’s not Queens," Carlson continued. "It’s a nice place. Yorktown Heights is so affluent and so peaceful, in fact, it doesn’t need its own police department. Instead, it relies on the 59-man force that protects the larger town [Yorktown] around it. This is the hood that spawned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the country’s most privileged revolutionaries.

"She called herself Sandy Cortez back then. She imagined that every place could be just like Yorktown Heights if only we got rid of the police. Apparently, she still believes that."

Carlson continued: "It looks like a suburb ... unfortunately not everyone lives in a suburb as placid and protected the one Sandy Cortez grew up in. We know very well how it will end. More poor children will die. It will not affect [New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio, though. His family will remain protected by armed security paid for by taxpayers. So will Sandy Cortez. So will Barack Obama. So will the rest of the politicians calling for taking away our protection. They will never suffer the consequences. That’s why they are for it."

Other critics asked when exactly Ocasio-Cortez "experienced" poverty and crime "first hand."

Reports have noted that Ocasio-Cortez was 2-years-old when her father, Sergio Ocasio-Roman, bought a home in Yorktown for $150,000. The family lived in the Parkchester section of the Bronx at the time and moved to the house in Yorktown a few years later.

Ocasio-Cortez graduated from Yorktown High School in upscale Westchester County in 2007.

Her father died in September 2008, just as she was starting her sophomore year at Boston University. The house was deeded to her mother, the executor of her father’s will, in 2012.

Westchester County land records show that Ocasio-Cortez was living there with her mother and brother in 2016 when they sold the home for $355,000.

In an interview with Stephen Colbert on TV’s “The Late Show,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to a question about how she’d deal with President Donald Trump, who was born in Queens, by saying “I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx.”

The Daily Mail called into question her Bronx bona fides. Conservative talk-show host John Cardillo tweeted out a photo of the family home she grew up in.

“A far cry from the Bronx hood upbringing she’s selling,” the tweet said.



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