NYC machete attack exposes the cruelty of ‘criminal-justice reformers’

Proactive law enforcement, the kind New York enjoyed for decades, prevents crime. The law-enforcement system we have now . . . not so much: Witness the tale of Deashe Calhoun.

Calhoun, 20, allegedly slashed Hubert Meulens, 82, with a machete in lower Manhattan the other morning. He wound up with “just” a fractured skull and 11 stitches — but, as he told The Post from his hospital bed, “Even with just one blow, I could have passed away.”

Now she’s being held on $500,000 bail. Yet she had been arrested seven times since March for carrying first knives and then the machete, with some incidents reportedly involving threats to harm others and even pepper-spraying one victim. But she kept getting released — until blood finally flowed. Part of it, without question, is the no-bail law: The Brooklyn DA’s Office says that’s why she got sprung after two arrests in that borough, and while the Manhattan DA’s Office declined comment, it surely faced the same barrier.

But another part is New York’s so-dysfunctional approach to the dangerously mentally ill: We hope the courts ordered a psych evaluation of a woman wandering the streets menacing people with a machete — but the system plainly failed to get her any treatment, let alone require it.

And an innocent man — black, incidentally, and still hard-working at 82 — pays the price.

The “reformers” who’ve given us these lunatic law-enforcement and mental-health systems claim to speak for the powerless.

But the fact is that proactive policing brought a huge decrease in New York’s prison and jail populations, because preventing crime means people don’t become criminals and so never need locking up. Whereas the fast-rising crime rates that “reform” has brought already have the Rikers population growing, and will likely pack the prisons soon enough.

And we have to think that a mental-health system that focused on helping the grievously ill, rather than processing them, would prove far more humane as well.

It’s far more cruel to keep on neglecting public safety in the name of ideology.