New Yorkers haven’t felt nearly as safe on the subways since the pandemic, and each time public officials try to convince them otherwise the rift widens between the official narrative and numbers on the one hand and popular perception on the other.

Like they say across the pond, “mind the gap.”

That’s the gap between the Adams administration’s messaging about how major felonies in the system remain rare as “we are delivering safety every day” and waves of headlines about nightmarish crimes.

And the gap between the bosses sending surges of additional officers on mandatory overtime to cluster at entrances or on platforms and the people often ignored inside the city’s circulatory system who are plainly suffering and unable to care for themselves along with those — sometimes the same people at different moments — acting erratically and smoking, drinking, ranting, fighting.

The mayor started talking a lot during the week about how officers on his watch have been proactively engaging with people underground who appear severely mentally ill instead of leaving them in a state of supposedly benign neglect.

I don’t think that’s true, but good for him if he can jawbone it into reality.

Adams has been stressing the need for those interactions and interventions quite a lot since I wrote about the issue, not for the first time, last Sunday, in a column that clearly struck a nerve.

It was about the NYPD transit chief and its deputy commissioner for operations telling a pair of stunned morning news hosts — including one who said her producer had seen a woman defecating on her commute hours earlier — that there’s nothing........

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