The city stinks at telling people to pick up their dog’s poop

Enforcement of the city’s pooper scooper law is pretty crappy.

The number of violations issued to dog owners who fail to pick up after their pooches has plummeted.

The NYPD issued 360 violations in 2016, down 45 percent from 2012. And only 137 violations were doled out in the first half of 2017.

Meanwhile, the Sanitation Department, despite sending out undercover investigators, slapped only eight Manhattan dog walkers with summonses for “failure to remove canine waste” in the 2017 fiscal year, according to Sanitation Department statistics.

Citywide, the total number of Sanitation violations hit 159 in 2017, up from 99 issued a year earlier, which was a five-year low. But the larger number was thanks mostly to the 124 summonses issued in The Bronx.

The violation comes with a $250 fine.

Despite the paltry pile of poop tickets, New Yorkers complained by the thousands last year about dogs fouling their sidewalks.

The city’s 311 hotline received 2,472 complaints, up from 2,442 a year earlier. The most complaints — 697 — came from The Bronx.

Mayor de Blasio has admitted there is a canine crime spree.

“There’s too many people who don’t clean up after their dogs. It’s really insensitive and unfair to other New Yorkers,” de Blasio said in response to a caller griping about lax oversight on WNYC radio in May.

New York became a national model when state lawmakers passed the pooper-scooper law, which took effect in 1978. The $100 fine was considered a hefty sum at the time.

When the first sign warning dog owners to clean up was erected on 68th Street and Central Park West, it attracted worldwide media attention.

Concerns about the law’s enforcement were raised even before the first pet owners stooped to scoop. Mayor Ed Koch was said to have wanted the law to include a provision that dog walkers carry a clean-up device with them.

Instead, dog owners became used to carrying plastic bags. And the city Department of Transportation decided a few years ago that the pooper-scooper signs had passed their prime and removed more than 1,000 from city streets.

But law-breaking dog owners still abound.

“Ed Koch (under whose administration the pooper scooper law was enacted — and vigorously enforced) has got to be rolling in his grave, which will likely be covered soon with you-know-what,” an Upper West Side resident commented last month on the West Side Rag blog.

“We are as aggressive as we can be given the millions of dogs that there are in the city of New York,” said Vito Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman.