When it comes to effective policing, New York is very much a victim of its own success.

After more than a quarter-century of declining street crime — and more than two decades since the attacks of September 11, 2001 — relative peace has left many New Yorkers unwilling to return to the often aggressive policing approaches once used to keep the city safe.

And so nearly a decade after former Mayor Bill DeBlasio committed the NYPD to less-proactive law enforcement strategies, the city’s police force is operating at half-speed.

But last week’s terror in Israel demonstrates why complacency is not just unwise, it can also be deadly. 

Few things are more jarring than realizing that a city is woefully unprepared for—if not extremely vulnerable to— an attack that no longer seems as remote as it did just days ago.

But as the horrors in Israel — and the raging protests they’ve provoked here at home — reaffirm, New York remains a prime terror target at a time when it’s more vulnerable than at any period over the past two decades. 

The problem is primarily one of numbers.

Since the City Council’s 2020 decision to defund the NYPD to the tune of $1 billion, thousands fewer police officers are protecting our streets.

Canceled Police Academy classes in the wake of the George Floyd murder are partially to blame.

Other officers have simply retired and resigned, realizing that many Big Apple residents don’t want them around.

Bail reform, lax prosecution and rules-of-engagement overhauls have only made matters worse. 

The results of this misguided project were entirely predictable — and have come to pass just as the world enters a chilling era of uncertainty.

High-quality recruits are in short supply — along with the veteran operators, investigators and patrolmen needed for everything from routine street patrols to terrorism prevention. 

The NYPD has shrunk significantly in recent years. In 2010, the force counted more than 40,000 uniformed officers.

Such numbers came in handy as the Department nimbly shifted resources to meet its post-9/11 counterterrorism demands.

Those numbers allowed the force to do so without compromising its ability to control crime, which continued to decline through 2017. 

Today, the NYPD has just over 33,500 uniformed members.

And that thin blue line of defense against crime, disorder, and, yes, terrorism, will likely become even thinner as the Department struggles further with recruitment and retention.

An NYPD official at One Police Plaza, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, told me that on just one day this week, more than two-dozen officers left for nearby suburban departments.

The effects of this shortage are evident.

According to the city’s own analytics site, NYPD response times for critical calls have risen nearly 38% (or by more than two and a half minutes) since October 2019. The wait is now nearly 10 minutes.

For serious calls, the wait time increased more than 43%, to nearly 14 minutes; and the response time for non-critical calls has risen 52% to more than 27 minutes. 

The officer shortage has also meant that to deal with the more than six million 911 calls fielded by the NYPD each year, Department brass has had to repurpose members of its crucial Strategic Response Group (SRG) and Critical Response Command (CRC) units. Both are “down hundreds” of officers, according to both an NYPD official and former police commissioner Bill Bratton.

The timing couldn’t be more worrisome, considering the CRC is “one of the Department’s first lines of defense against a terrorist-related attack,” according to its own website.

Reports this week that CRC numbers could be slashed by an additional 75% to compensate for staff shortages will make a bad situation far worse.

The SRG was formed to respond “to citywide mobilizations, civil disorders, and major events with highly trained personnel and specialized equipment,” according to the NYPD’s Special Operations department.

They’re operations like the massive post-Gaza protests that have descended upon the city. Which raises the question of whether it’s time to dispense with the games New York’s far-left democrats have been playing and get serious about reinforcing the city’s front-line forces.

What happened in Israel should remind us that we remain highly vulnerable to Islamic terror — and the city is not nearly as well-positioned as it once was to deal with it.

We have those activists and pols to thank for that: Such as NYC Council police abolitionists Tiffany Cabán and Kristin Richardson Jordan, two members of the group behind the pro-Palestinian rally held in Times Square after last Saturday’s attacks.

Many of those same activists have also agitated in support of the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS)” movement on CUNY campuses, which have been roiled by student groups expressing their support for Hamas — along with anti-police causes.

The activists have shown us exactly who they really are in the last week. I

t’s now up to more reasonable New Yorkers to decide just how much longer we let those activists remain at the helm of our ship. A ship they may very well soon run aground.

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What The Push For Decarceration And Depolicing Gets Wrong And Who It Hurts Most.