#If de Blasio can’t even lie about the crime wave right, how’s he going to end it?

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Mayor Bill de Blasio claims that he never blamed the crime spike on closed courts due to COVID-19.
Albin Lohr-Jones/Sipa USA

When it comes to explaining New York’s crime spike, Mayor Bill de Blasio can’t even keep his excuses straight. So why should anyone think he’ll be able to do anything to curb the violence?

This week, Hizzoner tried to claim that he hadn’t blamed New York City’s out-of-control violence on the courts being closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic — a patently pathetic (and false) cop-out.

“I never blamed them,” he said during his daily press briefing.

Sorry, but Post reporters Julia Marsh, Craig McCarthy and Lia Eustachewich were able to cite several instances where Hizzoner did, in fact, link the crime wave to limited-capacity courts.

On July 20, he said: “An important piece of this equation is [that] the criminal-justice system is not functioning the way it normally does. That is just a factual statement.”

On July 17, he pleaded with the Office of Court Administration to fully open the courts.

On July 6, following the July 4 weekend crime explosion, de Blasio insisted “the court system’s not working, the economy’s not working, people have been pent up for months and months — so many issues underlying this challenge.”

Meanwhile, the violence rages on. On Thursday, a 21-year-old died in a drive-by shooting in Queens; his 19-year-old pal was shot in the arm. That followed a spate of shootings over the preceding 24 hours.

Over July, the city suffered through 244 gunfire incidents, a 177 percent jump over the 88 it saw during July last year, according to NYPD data. Murders leapt 59 percent over July 2019.

De Blasio’s flip-flop on his blame-the-courts mantra — and his failure to even acknowledge it — is strong evidence he’s covering up for the real factors fueling the violence: namely, the “perfect storm” of officials refusing to arrest, charge, jail (and keep locked up) those who commit crimes.

Over the years, pols rammed through a rash of anti-cop, pro-criminal “reforms” — with de Blasio leading the way. If he and his fellow pols won’t even acknowledge their mistakes, don’t expect them to fix them.