Metro

Homeless need a kick, not a boot

This is cruelty gone viral. The Army of the Damned roams city streets. Barefoot, freezing, talking to themselves.

We see them coming, as fast as a speeding Q train. Sometimes, they’re violent. Always, they suffer. And yet we don’t have the courage or the political will to do anything about it except walk away and let these folks drool. Or worse.

Two pitiful cases in a month are the shame of the fuzzy-headed numbskulls who rule the way this city treats the homeless.

With his bare, blistered feet, and screaming at passers-by to hit their wallets, Jeffrey Hillman was on the streets for as long as anyone who roams Times Square can recall. If kindhearted Police Officer Larry DePrimo hadn’t found Hillman one freezing November night, pulling $50 from his own pocket to buy Hillman a pair of warm boots, it’s unlikely we’d ever have learned the poor soul’s name.

As it turns out, Hillman, 54, is homeless by choice. He has an apartment for homeless veterans paid for by you, the taxpayer, that he never uses, and a family in Pennsylvania that would gladly give him shelter and love. But he prefers life on the sidewalk to a roof.

He also never wears the boots so generously provided by Officer DePrimo, saying he fears he’d be robbed. Or, as one letter-writer who’s observed Hillman for years told me, he’s a con man who earns dough by looking pathetic.

“I would say that the Jeffrey Hillman case points out everything wrong with the way we’re trained to think of the homeless,’’ said Brian Stettin, policy director for the Virginia-Based Treatment Advocacy Center, which supports the humane, forced treatment of the homeless and insane.

“They say the homeless are like you except they don’t have any money,’’ he said. “It’s a cruel lie!’’

Stettin fears that a seemingly gentle man like Hillman will face a backlash from folks who’ll now see him as a sponge or, worse, a potential menace.

It doesn’t help him that last week, Naeem Davis, 30, another cog in the homeless machine, was arrested for allegedly killing a family man by hurling him into a speeding subway train.

In a chilling interview at Rikers Island with The Post’s Lorena Mongelli, Davis, who said he was stoned on pot, said voices in his head told him to kill Ki Suk Han, 58, after Han apparently confronted him on a subway platform.

“I heard, ‘Naeem, he’s coming again. He’s coming again. You got to do something,’ ” Davis said. Why was this nut job roaming free?

Four decades have passed since newspaper articles and then-WABC-TV reporter Geraldo Rivera’s hidden camera revealed squalid conditions at Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School for the mentally disabled. It sparked a national movement to close all state institutions.

The real scandal was to follow.

With asylums shut and nowhere to put the desperately insane, we’ve been left with a hodgepodge of community-based programs in which the sick and sometimes violent choose to live on the streets, skipping their meds.

Davis is not the first to act out, cops say. In 2005, 10-month-old Isabella Avins was stabbed by loony-tunes Bernard Derr, who went off his meds despite living in “supportive’’ housing in Washington Heights. The child survived.

In 2010, Manhattan mom Devi Silvia threw her 19-month-old daughter into the Hudson River before jumping in herself. They lived. As she pleaded insanity, a judge warned Sylvia to stay on her medication.

Is this the best we can do?

Kendra’s Law allows a judge to require the demented to stay on their meds, or risk being locked up. But the law has fierce opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Steve Miccio, executive director of PEOPLe, Inc., an agency that’s paid by you to monitor crazy folk from upstate to Brooklyn, once boasted to me that he let a man stay homeless and off his medication for six months. It was “his choice.’’

With no adults willing to take charge, Hillman, sadly, is on his own.

So are we.

De Blasio lesbian ‘Rx’ bogus

Bill de Blasio knows about diversity.

Chirlane McCray, wife of the public advocate and mayoral probable, admitted last week that she once slept exclusively with women. Can you really get over that?

“In the 1970s, I identified as a lesbian and wrote about it,’’ Chirlane McCray said in a statement. This after Politicker.com last week outed McCray, who penned a cover story for Essence magazine in 1979, “I am a Lesbian,” boasting about her lust for the ladies. Awkward!

“In 1991, I met the love of my life, married him and together we’ve raised two amazing kids,” McCray continued.

Lesbians don’t simply get cured, as if homosexuality were a temporary disease. Someone (de Blasio? McCray? Both?) isn’t being honest.

’Tis the season, but it ain’t jolly!

Santa Claus was fired from a mall in Maine for refusing to let a 6-year-old girl sit on his lap after her mom declined to buy a $20 photo. Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee went politically correct, renaming the State House Christmas tree a random “holiday’’ tree.

In New York, an aspiring actor hired by the Salvation Army as a singing sidewalk elf says he was sacked because he wasn’t a hot chick who rakes in the heftiest donations.

“It doesn’t hurt to be cute,” agreed Carolyn Wells, 20, who sings for the charity outside Tiffany’s in Midtown.

Residents of a California seniors’ apartment complex protested an order from management to remove their beloved Christmas tree (Hanukkah menorahs, too) due to a new ban on religious symbols.

From a grumpy Santa and treeless old folks, to a Grinchy governor and sexist Army, holiday spirit is sorely lacking this season.

Bring back the joy!

Not-so-smart Alec ‘bloodies’ Quinn

Hide the women! Alec Baldwin is on a tear.

This time, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn drew the insane ire of The Bloviator. What did Quinn do wrong? Did she ask Alec to shut off his cellphone before boarding a plane? Or cut off his access to Twizzlers?

Nope. Quinn pushed through Mayor Bloomberg’s selfish bid to allow local politicians to serve third terms in office.

“Quinn has that blood on her hands,’’ Alec told Piers Morgan.

If I were you, Chris, I’d consider an order of protection.

Gov’t grave robbing

They’re bleeding us dry. When I wrote about a conference featuring a Halloween ghoul-fest starring actors dressed as flesh-eating zombies, I didn’t know how big and stupid it was.

To teach cops and other first responders from around the country to deal with an apocalypse à la “The Walking Dead,’’ and other real and imaginary threats, the Department of Homeland Security paid $1,000 of taxpayer money to the HALO Corp. for each participant, revealed a report by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

At least citizens are now safe from the undead. Terrorists, I don’t know.