ack in the day, when the New York City Police Department was about as ethnically diverse as a Mormon family picnic, our police officers were among the highest paid in the nation. Today — as Academy class after Academy class boast enrollments of more than 50 percent non-whites and as the department’s diversity quotient stands at 54.5 percent white, 16.4 percent African-American, 24.7 percent Latino, 4.2 percent Asian-American and 0.1 percent other — we are among the lowest paid in the nation.

Whether this is a coincidence or not is subject to debate, an argument I won’t go into here. But the bottom line is unmistakably this: As the NYPD gets more ethnically diverse than its police department neighbors, its compensation gets worse in comparison. As an oft-expressed sentiment goes: Don’t tell me what you stand for; just show me what you do and I’ll tell you what you stand for.

And what I see are city leaders who visit cops’ emergency rooms or funerals and hold press conferences about the dangerous world our police officers protect against and then take actions and positions in contract negotiations that don’t match their rhetoric.

Adding insult to injury, they use their media platforms to peddle the notion that cops “aren’t that special” or rely on their editorial-page buddies to attack the PBA, blaming us for the recruitment and retention crisis that we’ve been warning the city about for years. What the mayor and his media sycophants fail to understand is that our membership is not fooled by their antics. I guess they were hoping that what Goebbels said about repeating lies long enough was true.

We have stated our position unequivocally, and our members have heard it loud and clear, and agree: We are special. The demands of our unique vocation can lead to many of us being injured and some of us killed. Damn right, we’re special.

The city sticks to the same old script — it’s the union’s fault. Well, let’s see if its argument holds water. The PBA is asking for a salary competitive with neighboring departments like the Port Authority, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and even Newark, Yonkers, Jersey City, etc. The city’s response has been that it must stick to the so-called pattern. The increases in benefits that we asked for were met with, “Pay for it, yourselves” if it’s above the pattern — in other words, rob Peter to pay Paul.

Other requests, like education pay, were dismissed out of hand. Why pay for it when we already get it for free, the city negotiators reason. You get the idea — you want a raise, pay for it yourselves by taking it out of another pocket. How is this respect for the men and women of the NYPD?

The facts are strongly on our side, yet every request we’ve made to fix the problems affecting our membership have been met equally with a city response that does not fix the problem. Attitudes like these infest the city’s approach to bargaining with its police officers, a process that has reached its low-point. No wonder the city can’t attract qualified recruits nor retain the experience they need in these perilous times.

So, coincidence or not, these wrong-headed attitudes on the part of the city powers-that-be have resulted in the most diverse NYPD in history being populated by the lowest paid big-city police officers in the nation. It’s a problem the city must fix. Here is a color-blind solution: Pay New York City police officers a salary that is among the tops in the nation.