What mass incarceration?

The time approaches ever closer to send the weary phrase “mass incarceration” into retirement, at least in New York City, where stunningly rapid shifts in policing are remaking criminal justice before our eyes. New numbers from the criminal courts show 434,045 cases filed in the five boroughs last year — nothing close to the more than 809,000 just five years ago. This while cases in New York State’s other counties barely budged.

Declining crime doesn’t come close to explaining the shift. A prime driver is that the City Council has moved a number of quality-of-life offenses — public urination, drinking from open containers and so on — from the criminal column into the civil one, and the NYPD has simultaneously brought more sensitive new strategies online.

Though cops still may still issue criminal summonses, which can later lead to arrest warrants, when they deem someone a public safety threat, civil tickets are increasingly taking their place; criminal citations have plunged by half in four years, to 165,000.

These are the new facts. Yet reform advocates cling to old talking points about how broken-windows policing, which they revile, is leaving countless lives in wreckage.

It is true that a lower arrest total for smaller offenses is coinciding with continued declines in felonies — weakening the logic that the former is a prerequisite for the latter.

And police must stay on guard to ensure that disorder itself does not surge even as criminal enforcement lets up.

But by and large, cops are managing to strike a smart balance, responding to quality-of-life complaints, even as they dole out consequences that are less likely to land perpetrators in jail.

Credit Mayor de Blasio, in partnership first with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and now Jimmy O’Neill, for adapting tactics even as they refuse to ignore policing quality-of-life infractions.

Bratton took a victory lap three years ago by celebrating what he called the “peace dividend,” a decline by half between 2011 and 2014 in the combined annual number of arrests, summonses and stop, question and frisk incidents.

These fraught contacts have since halved again, to around 416,000 in 2017.

City jails today hold so few charged with misdemeanors they would fit into a single subway car. It’s a bad omen for those who claim shrinking and then closing Rikers will be a cinch. For the rest of us in this safer city, including the men and women of the NYPD, it’s called progress.