AOC brushes off concerns over surging NYC crime as ‘hysteria’
It’s not like any of the shootings that have New Yorkers panicked are taking place in AOC’s backyard — oh wait, they are.
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sparked outrage Tuesday for dismissing concerns about surging crime as “hysteria.”
The Bronx-Queens congresswoman, a far-left progressive routinely referred to by her initials, AOC, made the remark during a Zoom chat with freshman US Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a fellow proponent of the “Defund the police” movement who represents the Bronx and Westchester.
“We are seeing these headlines about percentage increases,” Ocasio-Cortez said, reducing recent incidents such as a tourist shot in broad daylight in Times Square and kids ducking for cover amid a gang shooting in the Bronx to mere statistics.
“Now I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much. But I also want to make sure that this hysteria, you know, that this doesn’t drive a hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context.”
Bronx City Councilman Ruben Diaz Sr. on Tuesday blasted Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks and said she “is wrong.”
“The crime increase is a crisis,” said Diaz, a fellow Democrat.
“She should talk to the senior citizens in the Bronx who are afraid to come out of their house. She should talk to the mothers whose kids were killed by gun violence.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks also contradicted the results of a recent poll commissioned by The Post that found opposition to defunding the police was strongest in the crime-ridden Bronx, where more than 60 percent of respondents disapproved of last year’s slashing of $1 billion from the NYPD budget.
The National Fraternal Order of Police also said Ocasio-Cortez “said the quiet part out loud: the Narrative Matters More to her than Peoples’ Lives.”
“Dismissing the #CrimeCrisis across the country, saying it’s just ‘hysteria,’ is textbook #Gaslighting,” the group tweeted.
“@AOC, those ‘percentage increases’ are Mothers, Fathers, Sons & Daughters.”
Figures posted by the FOP show massive increases in homicide rates in various cities this year compared to the same period two years ago, including 50 percent in New York City, 66 percent in Philadelphia, 44 percent in Atlanta and 33 percent in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Portland, Ore. — which was wracked by riots following last year’s police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — has seen homicides skyrocket 138 percent since 2019 and 533 percent since last year, according to the FOP.
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments were posted online Sunday, the same day a newlywed US Marine was wounded by a stray bullet in Times Square, marking the second such incident in the past two months.
US Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), who represents Staten Island and Brooklyn, blasted Ocasio-Cortez as a “hypocrite.”
“Easy for AOC to say…she walks around with a security detail while trying to deny her constituents police protection on our streets and our subways,” Malliotakis tweeted.
Other critics included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who noted that Ocasio-Cortez — a proponent of the “Defund the police” movement — “just acted to ensure $2 billion more in spending” on the Capitol Police by voting “present” instead of “no” on a bill that passed the House 213-212 vote last month.
“AOC is mocking ordinary people as ‘hysterical’ who are afraid of violent crime in their neighborhood: people who, unlike her, don’t have reams of private security,” Greenwald tweeted.
