Did you catch this NYPost editorial yesterday? The leak-dependent elite media have no shame:

The 2004 Republican National Convention presented New York City with an age-of-terror public-safety challenge of unprecedented scope – and the NYPD, with characteristic brisk efficiency, did Gotham proud.

Not to hear The New York Times tell it, though. The paper’s campaign to smear the NYPD’s policing of the event is rising to new levels of absurdity – and now it’s enlisted the Civilian Complaint Review Board into the effort.

The paper yesterday published excepts from a CCRB letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly – a document leaked to the paper before it was even delivered to the commissioner.

Chairman Hector Gonzalez and Executive Director Florence Finkle blasted cops for “tactics” used during the event. They demand that “the department review the training it provides” for policing demonstrations.

What did the cops do wrong?

Twice, the agency says, they failed to use a bullhorn to issue commands. And once, a cop failed to make clear whether his order to “clear the streets” included sidewalks.

Huh?

As Kelly notes in his justifiably outraged response (which appears on the opposite page), the cops accommodated an enormously complex event – involving a million protesters and, on Aug. 29, the largest rally in the history of American political conventions.

Radicals vowed to shut down the event. They planned – at the very least – to provoke arrests. And, if they got lucky, they might goad cops into overt acts of videotaped violence.

And the NYPD couldn’t forget that demonstrators at other recent events, in other cities, had indeed attacked police.

All of this was to take place just months after terrorist bombings in Madrid made it necessary to regard every seemingly harmless backpack in the city as a potentially deadly bomb.

Indeed, an aggressive NYPD anti-terrorism effort managed to foil a Herald Square subway attack.

Yet the convention proceeded smoothly. Scores upon scores of protests, rallies and street-theater events gave every kook this side of Berkeley a chance to rail to his heart’s content.

(What chutzpah they have to claim that cops stymied their free-speech rights when they themselves admit to trying, unlawfully, to prevent convention-goers from exercising their rights.)

The fact is, with a million protesters – many bent on breaking the law – it’s simply stunning that only 63 complaints were filed. Of which only three – that’s right, three – were substantiated.

And this, despite the CCRB’s best efforts before the event to gin up business.

No joke: The agency’s letter to Kelly was hardly its first move to smear cops. Long before the convention, the board reached out to some 700 protest groups, encouraging them to file grievances.

So the fact that it would leak a letter and hype ridiculous, trumped-up indiscretions isn’t surprising.

Just as it isn’t at all surprising that the Times bit; the paper hasn’t missed an opportunity to slander the NYPD since before the convention even ended.

The NYTimes: All the news that’s fit to smear.