It’s not the crime that’s driving well-heeled Manhattanites up the wall — it’s all the other crap.
Literally.
Upper East Side residents are being inundated with poop left behind by inconsiderate dog owners and the “s–t” is hitting the fan.
“The Upper East Side is supposedly a good neighborhood — but it’s full of s–t,” retired dentist Frank DeGaetano fumed Tuesday after dodging a disgusting smear of canine waste on an East 74th Street sidewalk.
“I’ve gotta keep looking down. You gotta watch where you’re going. It’s like a maze. You gotta step around or over it.”
DeGaetano, 81, lives on Staten Island but says he has to contend with the dog droppings when he visits friends on the Upper East Side “once or twice a week.”
He also blamed the mess on former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“It’s gotten terrible. Worse and worse,” he said. “When [Rudy] Giuliani was mayor, it got cleaned up. It went downhill the day after de Blasio was elected.”
Tatiana Shames, 51, of Brooklyn, works for a neighborhood family and said the proliferation of poop was “very upsetting.”
“I walk around a lot during the day and dog poop is everywhere,” she said. “You know how many times I have to clean dog poop off the stroller? Three times at least this winter. I try and watch for it but sometimes you’re — how do you say? — in the s- -t.”.
Shames added: “And one time it was on my shoe. I had to scrape it off with a stick. It was really upsetting.”
Even neighborhood dog owner Kevin Vincent, 43, said he was worried about the situation as his Australian shepherd, Oliver, sniffed at a mound of feces dropped onto a garden bed in John Jay Park.
“It is concerning how much dog poo there is around because there’s kids around,” he said. “Dogs want soil and trees but there are lots of kids that play in and touch the soil and trees.”
Vincent added: “I pick up after my dog.”
Things have gotten so bad that Councilwoman Julie Menin (D-Upper East Side) on Monday announced a “Curb Your Dog” contest for a poster that will be displayed around her district.
“When I’m walking my 4-year-old daughter to school, we are literally jumping over feces that are all over the street in the East 80s,” Menin told The Post.
“I personally, over the year have received hundreds of complaints at every community board meeting and we are hearing a lot from school parents. It’s nonstop.”
The maximum penalty for not cleaning up a dog’s droppings is a $250 fine but enforcement is left to the city Sanitation Department, which said it only employs about 270 “civilian or uniformed enforcement staff” to conduct inspections.
The Big Apple’s dog population, meanwhile, has been estimated as high as 600,000 by the city’s Economic Development Corp.
During a City Council hearing earlier this month, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch frankly acknowledged, “We don’t have an effective strategy.”
“The enforcement is not as productive as it could be because oftentimes when our enforcement agents stop people for not cleaning up after their dogs, they say that they don’t have their ID,” she said. “And we don’t want to lock people up for it because I feel like that would be inappropriate. But it is a conundrum. Because it’s a big problem.”
