Opinion

All the news that’s fit to bury

With even the NYPD-bashing New York Times finally acknowledging what we’ve been saying all along about the ongoing stop-and-frisk trial, Judge Shira Scheindlin may be the only one left who still doesn’t get it. That is — that plaintiffs have no case.

Everyone knows that the Times would love to bury the NYPD, not to praise it. But the paper did both Thursday in a story that came clean about the trial.

The Times reported that witnesses for the plaintiffs, who claim that stop-and-frisk unconstitutionally targets minorities, admitted in court that cops had reasonable grounds to stop and question them.

The paper said testimony from witnesses “recruited by civil rights lawyers” has “undermined the plaintiffs’ efforts.” Not even these cherry-picked witnesses could provide “conclusive accounts of unconstitutional police stops.” Which is exactly what we said last Monday: The lawsuit is “doing the city a service — by proving, with each passing day of the trial, that critics have no valid legal claim against it.”

One witness, Clive Lino, for example, was stopped because he was wearing a red-leather Pelle-Pelle brand jacket similar to one a murder suspect was said to be wearing. Another, Nicholas Peart, had on blue shorts and was with two pals when cops approached hunting three suspects planning a robbery — one wearing blue shorts.

The Times’ reporting of all this (at last) is a switch from its previous coverage, which essentially convicted the cops for doing their job. Indeed, so eager to smear them has the paper been that it has lent its most valuable real estate — Page 1 — to the campaign: Last month it used that space to declare the cops had been proved racist.

Of course, its more recent story admitting the truth — that there is no legitimate legal case against the cops — was interred all the way back on Page A25, behind an account of Brooklyn art students who got to play with horses and draw pretty pictures of them.

Still, for the Times, this is progress.

Maybe there’s hope for Scheindlin yet.