Back in September, The New York Times promoted Bill de Blasio’s mayoral candidacy with an editorial titled, “Don’t Fear the Squeegee Man.” The editorial informed readers that crime wouldn’t get worse under de Blasio because “policing is far better than it used to be,thanks to innovations by Mayor David Dinkins.” (Emphasis added — the Times was not being sarcastic.)

Under the policing “innovations” of Mayor Dinkins, the annual murder rate in New York City rose to an all-time high of 2,245 in Dinkins’ first year in office. After four years of hard work, the murder rate had dropped by about 10 percent, to a merely astronomical 1,995 per year.

In Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s very first year in office, the murder rate fell 20 percent. The Times acknowledged the dramatic drop in crime with an article titled, “New York City Crime Falls But Just Why Is a Mystery.” By Giuliani’s last year in office, there were only 714 murders in the entire city, a drop of 64 percent from Dinkins’ personal best. By continuing Giuliani’s aggressive crime policies, Mayor Michael Bloomberg got the murder rate for 2012 down to 419 in a city of 8 million people.

But at the Times, they think we’ve been living in hell since Giuliani’s election, and the most urgent priority for the next mayor is to get back to Dinkins’ New York.

They’re not alone. (Thus de Blasio’s election.) In 2001, Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice announced on MSNBC’S “Hardball,” “I feel less safe today in New York City than I did 20 years ago.” This was a position Goldstein developed after taking a vow to never leave his apartment, allow visitors, read a newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio.

A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran another item downplaying the coming crime surge under Mayor de Blasio. Former hedge fund manager Neil Barsky wrote a column mocking his fellow 1-percenters for fretting about the new mayor with this advice: “Calm down.” (I find few balms as soothing as being told to “calm down.”)

Reluctantly, Barsky admitted (17 times) that he is a very rich man. As he explained, he, too, enjoys the city having been turned into a “a millionaires’ playground” and having a mayor who is “one of us.” (Bloomberg’s not one of me, buster.) He sniffed that he found “this affluent angst more than a bit overwrought.”