Perverse Priorities

Last month, cops fatally shot Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill Brooklyn man who’d been menacing passersby with an object that looked like a gun. This month, City Hall is rushing to find $4 million for a program that trains social-service workers at 15 nonprofits to recognize signs of mental stress and refer clients to the appropriate services.

You read that right — mental stress. Such is the low priority Team de Blasio places on getting help for the seriously mentally ill.

The scramble for the $4 million comes after the feds, setting their own priorities amid budget cuts, pulled the plug on an ongoing grant for the Connections to Care program after three years and “just” $6 million.

Cynthia Olson of The Mayor’s Fund to Advance NYC insists, “Connections to Care is not being reduced or delayed.” The federal cut doesn’t hit for months; the city will find other funding first.

No doubt it will: This is part of First Lady Chirlane McCray’s ThriveNYC initiative — with its overall funding of more than $850 million over four years starting back in 2015.

If only City Hall were as diligent in devoting time, energy and money to programs that target serious mental-health issues — which drive homelessness, create publicsafety problems and often end in tragedy.

As city mental-health chief Gary Belkin admitted last year, only $165 million in ThriveNYC funds have been allocated to combat serious mental illness.

Yes, Mayor de Blasio’s NYC Safe program does put $22 million a year toward serving that population. All in all, though, as City Journal’s DJ Jaffe notes, de Blasio’s “misallocation of mental-health spending has made police officers the first responders to incidents of acute mental illness, putting cops in the precarious position of negotiating with unstable individuals who may be violent and irrational.”

And the Vassell tragedy is but one example of the result.