Hand it to Jumaane Williams: His latest Public Advocate report is polite as can be about ripping first lady Chirlane McCray’s ThriveNYC mental health initiative as a vast failure.

He even managed not to mention McCray or Thrive, even as he slammed several of Thrive’s component programs.

To be fair, the 21-page report aimed wider, citing the failings of the city’s entire approach to “the mental-health crisis.”

Thing is, Thrive was supposed to be a big part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s answer on that front. It’s gone through $850 million since its 2015 rollout, with another $1 billion set to go out the door over the next four years — even though it has few concrete successes to point to.

Most important, as we’ve long warned, Thrive focused more on mild illness than the severe cases who most need help. As Williams notes, “We do not have enough systems in place to help prevent New Yorkers with mental-health issues from experiencing crisis, and when these crises do occur, we respond to them punitively.”

By “punitively,” he was referring to the 15 shooting deaths of mentally ill persons by police over the last three years. Behind that is the fact that the rest of city government shirks its duties, so the NYPD gets stuck handling crises. Calls for emergencies involving emotionally distressed persons nearly doubled from 2009 to 2018, Williams noted.

Williams has his own gentle “solutions” for the crisis, including mental health urgent-care centers and more centers to support the homeless. We’re not remotely convinced that approach will do enough, but it’d be a less clueless use of the cash going down the Thrive black hole.