Let’s be clear about the latest City Council effort to cripple the NYPD: The lawmakers behind it don’t just hate cops — they hate New York.

They hate New Yorkers.

More precisely, they hate those New Yorkers who want only to get up in the morning and take the subway to work without tripping over sprawling addicts or coping with incoherent madmen.

Who wants relatively tranquil public spaces, safe public schools, and reasonable public decorum?

Hey, you know: Who is just trying to get by in a city that’s tough enough when it runs well — never mind when tireless activists labor to make life more difficult, and dangerous than it needs to be?

The progressive council’s latest contribution to civic disorder?

Legislation intended to wrap the NYPD so tightly in red tape that it can’t function in any reasonable way.

The bill would require street cops to keep meticulous, permanent records of every single one of the millions of contacts they have with the public every year — even casual conversations with directions-seeking Times Square tourists.

(Next up, for sure: Claims that the NYPD is spying on the public — including directions-seeking Times Square tourists. Anything to hobble a cop.)

It’s hard to imagine a more effective way to keep patrol officers in their cars — silently and cynically watching the chaos roll by — while leaving New Yorkers on their own to cope with it.

Not that the council hasn’t already imposed unreasonable restrictions on the department.

They range from rules that make crowd control unnecessarily difficult to curbs on widely accepted tactics for taking violent suspects into custody.

The former recklessly jeopardizes public safety generally.

The latter endangers individual officers, sometimes gravely, because aggressive criminals by definition follow no rules.

As a package, the constraints broadcast a profound official distrust of a police department with a distinguished record of public service — a message certain to demoralize serving cops, discourage recruitment, cripple effective police work — and, again, needlessly endanger the public.

Of course, there are blemishes on the NYPD record.

But one would be hard-pressed to find professional lapses over the past 30 years that weren’t provoked by one-off circumstances or were simply the result of individual misjudgment.

Stop-and-frisk, you say?

Well, good cops go where the crime is, and when that tactic was abandoned, crime shot up.

Broken windows? Same thing.

Certainly, there isn’t a faint hint of the systemic abuse that would justify NYPD micromanagement of any sort — let alone what has already been imposed by the City Council.

And now comes more nonsense.

None of this is happening in a vacuum, of course.

Specifically, some of the city council members now hating on the NYPD just showed up for work wearing pro-Hamas t-shirts — vaporizing their credibility on matters of peace, justice, and public safety at any level.

And yet they presume to lead.

The winners: Criminals of all sorts — plus sociopaths, subway slashers, addicts, enablers, organized shoplifters, and, of course, drug-dealing street gangs.

The losers: Again, everybody else.

Need a cop? Call a council member — and see what happens.

Email: [email protected].