A Big Win — for Lawyers

Here we go again: The city just caved on another big lawsuit against the NYPD. And it’s hard to miss the politics at play. The suit claimed the department pushed cops to wrongly issue hundreds of thousands of criminal summonses for minor offenses from 2007 to 2015. Monday, the city said it agreed to pay up to $75 million, and to officially remind personnel of its anti-quota policy, to settle the suit.

Yet in the settlement, the city explicitly denies that it enforced a quota or told cops to hand out summonses “regardless of whether any crime or violation” had taken place, as plaintiffs charge.

And the accusers never produced strong evidence to back up that absurd claim. But they had a friend on the bench: Judge Robert Sweet, 94, just assumed summonses tossed out for “legal insufficiency” lacked “probable cause” — and thus were wrongly issued.

What a leap: As the city argued, a sum- mons can be “legally insufficient” merely because the cop did a poor job of writing it up, omitting key details.

The city notes that it lost one appeal of Sweet’s outrageous motion, but it should have fought on. Instead, it chose to settle.

That fits a pattern: Mayor de Blasio also settled the stop-and-frisk case, and the one that accused the NYPD of spying on Muslims. Of course, de Blasio won his job with a campaign slamming the police as racist.

With most of these summonses issued in the Bloomberg era under Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, settling this case fits with Hizzoner’s I’ve ended the injustice mantra.

It’s a gift to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, too: They snag $18.5 million — while each supposed “victim” gets $150, max.

It’s hard to see much justice in that — but easy to see why the lawyers will be back with some new case, hoping for another windfall from smearing the NYPD.