What with all of the robberies, shootings, gang violence, and crazy people pushing subway riders onto the tracks, you might imagine that the NYPD wouldn’t be paying much attention to something like prostitution. And you would be correct. For a number of reasons, the world’s oldest profession has been “deprioritized” as a crime on the streets of New York. But that’s not because prostitution has gone away. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Roosevelt Avenue in the Corona neighborhood of Queens has turned into a mecca for brothels and the johns looking to patronize them. The situation has spiraled out of control to the point where prostitutes are displaying their wares in the middle of the day in front of other ostensibly more respectable businesses. The trade is drawing in children and has attracted the interest of human traffickers. The prostitution paradise is so brazen that they advertise on YouTube in multiple languages. And the locals are not at all happy about it. (NY Post)

A street in Corona, Queens has turned into the city’s boldest open-air market for sex — one so popular with pervs that it’s advertised on YouTube.

As police enforcement wanes and immigration surges, nearly a dozen brothels have set up shop along Roosevelt Avenue near Junction Boulevard.

On a recent weekday in broad daylight, scores of scantily-clad streetwalkers brazenly solicited passersby — including a Post reporter — as sidewalks teemed with kids and legitimate shoppers and merchants.

The brothels operate out of massage parlors and other businesses, in alleys, and sometimes just in the customers’ cars. They are offering discount prices, with “happy endings” going for as little as $40. (Apparently, Joe Biden’s economy hasn’t driven the price of everything out of reach.) The competition is so fierce that almost nobody of either gender can walk through the area without being propositioned, including the Post reporter sent down there to cover the story.

Not all of the women working the streets are there by choice. The ongoing migrant crisis is impacting this situation as well. Many of the women are illegal migrants who arrived in New York without a support network and were lured into the brothels after they were unable to find other work. Vans with women in them and reportedly driven by cartel human traffickers have been seen unloading on Roosevelt Ave. Underage girls have been observed also.

The fact that the NYPD is doing little or nothing about this is somewhat understandable. (Across the two police precincts covering this area, a total of six arrests for prostitution have been made this year, and zero arrests for sex trafficking.) As already noted, the cops have their hands full in New York these days. And even if they had the time and the manpower, the local district attorneys stopped prosecuting prostitution cases in 2021. There is little point in arresting them when they will simply be released immediately anyway.

I don’t know how many times this needs to be repeated, but we’ll do it anyway. When you remove the disincentive for illegal activity, more of that activity will take place. If that rule isn’t somewhere in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, it really should be. The same applies to open-air illegal drug usage, shoplifting, or public defecation, or urination. When you stop enforcing the rules, someone will come along to break those rules. And New York is home to tens of millions of people. It won’t take long for those people to show up.

But even if the DAs reversed course and said they would prosecute prostitutes, that wouldn’t solve the problem anyway. There is an endless supply of migrant women and girls coming over the border every day and many of them head to New York. If you actually wanted to put a dent in this problem, you would track down and lock up the pimps and human traffickers who organize and profit from all of this. But apparently, that’s no longer “a priority” either.