Better safe than sorry

Holy cow, New York did it again — drove crime to lows never seen in the more than two decades since the NYPD started comprehensively keeping tabs. Across the five boroughs, across all major crimes, even in besieged public housing projects — just about everywhere save the subways — the first three months of 2017 were the safest first quarter ever measured by Compstat, with murders, robberies and shootings down by double digits over last year’s start.

The running total for declines in major crimes since 1990, a time when New York City’s population was substantially smaller than it is today: an astonishing 81%.

Look no further for confirmation that New York City’s police department is doing something, in fact a lot of things, very, very right, in the face of increasingly stiff pressure to back down.

Pressure from President Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to hand over undocumented immigrants — demands that if complied with absent discretion would terrify witnesses to crimes into hiding.

Pressure from the police-reform flank and immigrant advocates to back off broken-windows policing, an essential ingredient in establishing a climate where the disorder that invites escalating lawlessness has no place.

And, as of the past week, pressure from Mayor de Blasio’s newfound commitment to close Rikers Island — contingent on sharply reducing the number of criminal defendants held and shortterm sentences imposed.

At this precipitous moment, it’s as important as ever to not mess with success — and for Police Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill and the mayor to remain steadfast in resistance to forces determined to wreck hard-won progress.

These days, those forces also muster within city government. A facile report last year from NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure equated a rapid decline in quality-of-life summonses with proof that such enforcement bore no relation to crime rates.

Meanwhile, the City Council, having last year rendered low-level quality-of-life crimes under certain circumstances into civil matters in order to head off criminal records, now considers nixing arrests for subway fare-beating, to inoculate against alerting ICE to undocumented immigrants and reduce the Rikers population to allow for the island jails’ closure.

Fare-beating, of all things — arrests for which routinely surface outstanding warrants for criminals at large.

New York City is safer than in memory, and kinder in its policing thanks to well-considered rollbacks of stop-and-frisks and excessive issuing of summonses. Let all the players at this highstakes table remember to quit while we’re ahead.