A special fleet of cop cars that routinely blankets Manhattan landmarks to scare off terrorists is being diverted to the city’s roughest neighborhoods to try to stem spiking crime rates there, police sources said.

Beginning today, dozens of the police cars are expected to be reassigned from the counter-terrorism Critical Response Vehicle program back to their home boroughs for enhanced crime patrols.

“This is a direct response to the increase in crime, murders, shootings that have been reported in the media,” a high-ranking NYPD supervisor told The Post. “If that report wasn’t made, this never would have happened.”

As The Post reported last week, murders have skyrocketed more than 22 percent, from 89 to 109, so far this year when compared to the same period in 2009. Meanwhile, the number of shootings is up 19 percent, to 267.

Since 2002, most of the NYPD’s 76 precincts — each of which uses between three and 12 police cars per eight-hour shift — have contributed one or two vehicles a day to the Critical Response Vehicle program.

The special anti-terror team, which then had about 60 cruisers in total, would rotate daily en masse between possible terrorist targets from Times Square to Madison Square Garden to synagogues and hotels.

Each day, the NYPD’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau has selected the site for the show of force.

But starting today, three of the department’s eight borough commanders overseeing the precincts are expected to be able to keep their cars — about six to nine apiece — to patrol their high-crime areas.

The program, conceived by the new chief of patrol, James Hall, expands upon a 2-month-old policy of flooding each high-crime area with up to 75 extra uniformed officers one day a week, usually on a weekend.

By allowing the borough commanders to send reinforcements into the crime-plagued neighborhoods, Hall hopes to cut down the rising crime rate.

But one critic in the NYPD worried that it was the wrong time to lose focus on terrorism in the wake of last week’s subway bombings in Moscow.

“Why are they doing it now at this time? There was just a bombing in Moscow. You would think they’d be increasing terror programs,” the source said.

larry.celona@nypost.com

