#New York officials are the gang that just can’t fib right

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NYPD officer ignores an assault on an 11-year-old girl at 125th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Harlem, after a basketball game.
G.N.Miller/NYPost

New York officials think they can just make up facts to rebut criticism, yet hard evidence keeps proving them wrong.

Take The Post’s story citing a photographer who saw cops remain in the car while a teen was beaten. The NYPD denied the story, tweeting that cops “were met by a large crowd that hurled projectiles” and had to retreat. The tweet included a video of cops backing away as bottles are thrown.

Yet as The Post noted Thursday, the video wasn’t time-stamped, appears to have been taken well before the beating and shows officers “retreating” toward where the teen was. In other words, it was no rebuttal at all.

That misleading footage is part of the NYPD’s response to reports that cops are waging a “slowdown” after a rash of anti-police “reforms.” Officials also dispute a Post story about a dip in traffic tickets.

On Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio insisted there’s been an “increase” in arrests, even as the NYPD’s own stats show the opposite: Arrests are down 40 percent this year.

Meanwhile, few people ever bought claims by Gov. Cuomo and health czar Howard Zucker that “only” 6,400 New York nursing-home residents died of COVID-19. It’s been obvious that their decision to stop counting those moved to hospitals before they died was meant to keep the official death rate low, after they foolishly ordered homes to accept COVID-positive patients.

This week, the Associated Press cited federal figures suggesting the New York number might be as much as 65 percent higher — or 10,000 deaths in total.

There’s more: Zucker claims hospitals had enough personal protective equipment, despite reports of shortages: “Just because something is reported doesn’t mean those are the facts,” he said.

Ha! In March, as featured on the front page of The Post, three nurses at Mount Sinai West hospital posed in large, black plastic trash bags fashioned into makeshift protective garb — for lack of actual PPE.

Memo to Blas, Cuomo, Zucker et al.: If you’re going to fib, at least make sure there’s no evidence to prove you wrong.