‘I’m Going To Be Praying For Police, Not A Teacher’: NY Subway Victim Blasts AOC For Slamming Police

A woman who was violently beaten in a New York City subway and lost vision in one eye as a result slammed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) after the congresswoman criticized New York City mayor Eric Adams for approving the first pay raise for the NYPD in over six years.

“We are now at a point where officially, most officers are paid more than a teacher with a master’s degree serving these same kids involved in these same incidents,” Ocasio-Cortez declared. “We are defunding safety, defunding our public schools, defunding our public pools, defending our parks [and] defunding our libraries. … We are taking all of those resources and demanding that every single department except the militarized one be cut. We are sending a message about who and what we care about.”

Elizabeth Gomes, who suffered the loss of one eye in a September 2022 attack that became a viral video, responded to Ocasio-Cortez, snapping, “If a man is running me down I cannot call a teacher. I’m going to have to call the police. I’m gonna be praying for police, not a teacher.”

“From the attack, I lost vision in my right eye,” she said on Fox & Friends. “From lack of police officers being in the subway station at the time, of them being defunded at that time, there was no one there to help.”

“He was a convicted felon; he was in jail multiple times,” she said of her assailant. “He killed his foster grandmother at 14.  … The only thing I was really thinking about was somebody helping me.”

Gomes acknowledged that teachers needed to be supported as well as the police, but added, “If you don’t make these children safe in school, how would you make them want to go to school? … You want to fix all these community places like pools and parks, but how will people want to go if there’s no safety? Safety comes with police officers.”

“They wouldn’t feel scared to go to school; they wouldn’t be scared to go to a public pool; they wouldn’t be scared to go to a train station to go to work,” she added. “At that moment when I was running up the train station I wasn’t thinking about calling a teacher or calling a lifeguard for a pool, I was thinking about calling the police.”