Bring back the vice squad

So hookers have little kids handing out business cards on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, even as Albany considers legalizing prostitution.

Could 2023 be the year New York finally goes nuts?

Well, to be fair, that probably happened years ago — when the Legislature decided that the problem with crime was punishment, not perps, and everything went to hell.

Not that things can’t get worse. They always can.

Take Roosevelt Avenue, for example.

It has always had a prostitution problem, particularly with transexual hookers, but then the local district attorney quit prosecuting the girls (or whatever) and the trade really blossomed.

Now, as this newspaper reported over the weekend, there’s a Roosevelt Avenue sex-for-sale channel on YouTube, and children are being paid to lure customers with semi-pornographic business cards.

Next up: pre-teen pimpery?

“How do they have this going on in broad daylight?” one cop asked — and then answered the question: “They’re not allowed to arrest prostitutes anymore.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Kathy Hochul last week dipped a toe into the legalized-prostitution (cess)pool — announcing a pair of state-funded pilot programs providing free health care for what she termed “sex workers.”

Two thoughts here:

• Euphemism is a sure sign of a guilty conscience.When an official press release identifies prostitutes as “sex workers,” the real issue is being ignored. (Nobody calls johns “sex employers,” right?)

• If you want more of something, subsidize it.

Really. What came first: that huge jump in junkies shooting up (and overdosing) in public parks or taxpayer-funded free-needle vending machines?

So what makes Hochul think no-cost health care won’t be a hooker magnet? (Not that she’s much given to thinking, of course.)

Let’s be clear: They call prostitution the oldest profession for a reason — it has always been with us, and it always will be. And, arguably, one can make a theoretical case for legalization.

But this also is true: Stigma attaches to the practice for a reason. Rare indeed are the parents who would have their own children in the trade — and, anyway, powerful people are never OK with streetwalkers on their own block.

Roosevelt Avenue, fine — Sutton Place, not at all!

Why? Because, putting time-tested moral cautions aside, open prostitution goes hand in hand with violent street crime, a vigorous illegal narcotics trade, sexually transmitted diseases, general social disorder and — perhaps most egregiously — the often-lethal exploitation of minors and vulnerable young women.

It’s a prime ingredient in a toxic mix that’s certain to further degrade struggling neighborhoods — and then, in short order, the city itself.

But for two years now, legalization legislation has been introduced in Albany; it almost certainly will be again in January — and the smart money will be on passage sometime soon.

In part that’s because New Yorkers in general — and their politicians in particular — have lost the courage to be judgmental about anything.

Roosevelt Avenue brothels are magic-mushroom merchants in Washington Square Park are dirt-bike cavalcades on major boulevards are vagrant encampments under the FDR Drive — it’s all the same, don’t you know, and que sera sera.

Plus there’s a hard-left, pro-crime cabal in Albany that views law-enforcement as generally racist, or otherwise discriminatory, and therefore illegitimate — and never mind the calamitous consequences of such an approach on already-hard-pressed communities.

So if legal prostitution helps spread the pain, that’s fine with those folks.

(Their no-bail handiwork just turned a knife-wielding, Times Square tourist-stalking maniac loose, so a hooker influx sure isn’t going to bother them.)

And then there is this: If you think Albany’s clown-car legalization of weed has been a fiasco, just wait until there’s a “sex-worker” emporium on every corner in every neighborhood of every borough in New York City. (Except Sutton Place, of course.)

Really. There is absolutely no reason to believe the Legislature could ever get the nuts and bolts of legalization right — and many, many reasons to believe it can’t.

It’s Albany, Jake. Never forget that.

Let’s be real: Roosevelt Avenue’s problem is not that prostitution is illegal.

It’s that nobody is enforcing existing law, and the dysfunction is becoming too obvious to ignore.

So here’s a novel idea: Bring back the vice squad.

It may not be the whole answer, but it would be a useful first step.

Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc