#Just the app New York needs to keep pols honest

An informed public is an ­energized public, and that’s a good thing. Right?

So say hello to Citizen app, free public-safety software for your smartphone that keeps you in real-time touch with your neighborhood — one “shots-fired” incident at a time.

The app is a digital-age version of an old-timey cop-radio scanner, logging police activity as it happens and sending it on to smartphones and tablets as instant updates or pushed email-notifications.

If you hear sirens in the night, all you need to do is flick the Citizen icon and there you go: You’re as well-informed as One Police Plaza — and as Mayor de Blasio, not that Hizzoner cares about any of this.

As time-wasters go, the app is as entertaining as Twitter; it gives a real-time buzz, it permits sometimes snarky subscriber commentary and it even allows eye-witnesses to events to upload text and video and sometimes get “reporter” credit.

Great fun, no?

Here’s how it differs from Twitter, though: While the latter effectively corrodes the public debate — all too often defaming, demoralizing and banishing common sense from civic affairs — the Citizen app provides critically important information, largely without commentary, but aggregated to give users an important leg up on daily life.

What this means for Gotham is obvious enough. The app has been around for a couple of years, but largely as a curiosity. Crime was said to be on the increase, but not critically so, and people took comfort in that.

The situation has changed: ­New York’s “reform” campaign to shield criminals from the consequences of their choices has produced deadly results — for example, a 21 percent increase in homicide compared to the first six months of 2019. But while de Blasio and others disingenuously speak of an “uptick” in violence, the Citizen app chronicles the carnage — in detail.

Each report gets a separate, color-coded dot on a zoomable digital overlay of a city map: white dots for less serious events, red for confirmed reports of blood in the streets.

Zoom in for a neighborhood peek: “man with a machete at 72nd and Broadway,” last Thursday evening. Zoom out for an overview — “shots fired” all over the city, with red dots for shooting victims, a total of 10 of the latter by early Friday morning.

Does this sort of reporting create distortions? Sure. The white dots on the computer screen sometimes look like a blizzard, the red dots ominous accents, but New York is a city of almost 9 million often-fractious individuals. Shouldn’t murderous violence be expected?

Actually, no. Or rather, it hasn’t been for the past 25 years or so, anyway.

And that coin has two sides. If de Blasio, the City Council, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature had their way, nobody would be hearing any of this. They basically began defunding the police — with “bail reform,” an end to minor-crime enforcement, the abolition of the NYPD’s anti-crime units — long before that movement achieved its inglorious moment in the sun.

Now the flowers have bloomed. Too bad for the pols that New Yorkers now have access to the details.

And to some forewarning.

Scant hours after City Hall without warning shipped busloads of vagrants — addicted or addled or both but also threatening and aggressive — to two boutique hotels on the Upper West Side, the fruits of the move first appeared on Citizen app.

Reports of fighting, harassment and weapons — that “man with a machete,” maybe? — filled both the app’s device screens and its chat spaces. It may be too late for the immediate neighborhood, but those ­upstream from the chaos have fair warning. Want to bet that they organize?

Want to bet further that the advocates, their elected allies and sympathetic media resent it — and that together they’ll do their best to throw a blanket over the reaction?

Citizen will make that much more difficult to do. Because, again, an energized public is a potentially potent force — and nothing energizes the public like timely, specific, user-friendly information.

For a while there it seemed as if #DefundthePolice was going to carry America’s public-safety debate, and it may well.

But people have had the time, and the necessary information, to consider that insane proposal. And guess what? The Gallup Poll reports that almost 90 percent of Americans — including 80 percent of African-Americans — want nothing to do with it. Go figure.

So while the Citizen app certainly won’t arrest New York City’s slide back into the abyss all by itself, it stands to help. And that’s a very good thing, indeed.