Deny, Deny, Deny

It’s a recurring pattern: The Post breaks a story that Mayor de Blasio doesn’t want to hear, and he responds by denying everything and arrogantly dismissing it as “fake news.” Then his police commissioner quietly admits that, well, The Post got it right. The mayor sometimes goes along, eventually — but sometimes he doesn’t.

On Tuesday, de Blasio flatly rejected The Post’s report of a surge in aggression by the costumed characters and foul-mouthed desnudas infesting Times Square.

But then Commissioner James O’Neill noted that NYPD summonses to the panhandlers who are supposed to remain inside their Designated Activity Zone — but usually don’t — are up 21 percent this year. Sure sounds like a resurgence to us. O’Neill on Tuesday also admitted the truth of another Post report that the mayor had lambasted: that cops swept homeless people from two subway stations in advance of de Blasio’s media event.

Actually, he’d conceded the truth of that several days ago. Now he admits that an e-mail ordering the sweep — which City Hall at first claimed did not exist — was real.

O’Neill said it should have been phrased differently, and it was all about mayoral security, not optics — but yes, the directive was legitimate.

It was simply a cop “trying his best to do his job,” the commissioner noted. But he refused to say whether, as The Post also reported, the e-mail was sent on orders from higher-ups.

The mayor? He has yet to update his memorable response: “Read my lips. I don’t care.”

Many New Yorkers do care. As they cared two years ago when The Post began reporting on soaring trouble with homeless in the streets and in encampments across the city.

De Blasio spent weeks denying that, too — even as then-Commissioner Bill Bratton effectively conceded the point by launching crackdowns on the encampments.

In the end, even the mayor had to retract his denials, albeit without ever saying The

Post was right.

The year after that, he stonewalled rather than admit the many deadly problems at the Administration for Children’s Services — and then suddenly tried to take credit for bringing in an outside monitor that was actually forced on him by the state.

All he truly cares about is his own image.