Come on, citizens of New Orleans: Sign the recall petition already.

One of the world’s great cities is being eviscerated before your eyes. The least you can do is put on the ballot the question of whether new leadership is warranted.

If enough people sign the petition to force a recall election for Mayor LaToya Cantrell, it doesn’t necessarily evict the mayor from office. Instead, it just forces her to make a public case for remaining in place, and it gives the public a chance to weigh her case and react accordingly.

Cantrell’s own misbehavior, along with what looks like dereliction or incompetence or both, eminently justifies the extraordinary step of subjecting her to a midterm, all-or-nothing job assessment. The city is in bad, bad shape, a condition all the more stark because just recently it seemed to be thriving. Five years ago, crime was down, property values were rising, the economy was solid and New Orleans looked fresh and bustling. After five years with Cantrell at the helm, not so much.

Voters should have a chance to decide whether those reversals are Cantrell’s fault, and whether anyone else would be more likely to set things right.

Not that anyone really needs reminders, but the litany of Cantrell’s transgressions and failures is long. Violent crime, of course, leads the list, with New Orleans becoming the murder capital of the nation in 2022. Yet, aside from creation of yet another committee and the hiring of an outside consultant, there still remains no sense of urgency from the mayor’s office. Provided a blueprint for crime fighting at the beginning of her first term — by her own transition team, no less — she ignored it. Blessed now with the largest coalition of community groups imaginable, all working together, Cantrell has merely taken its recommendations under advisement. And the murders continue.

Meanwhile, lifelong New Orleanians buy property elsewhere and plan their escapes, while others carry guns to ward off attempted carjackings, many of which don’t even get reported, which seem to be daily occurrences. Police response times seem to range from slow to nonexistent.

Yet Cantrell seems to feel a major sense of misplaced entitlement. First-class airplane junkets in Europe. Frequent use of a city-owned Pontalba apartment as if it is her own personal hideaway — an abuse of the space, according to former mayor Marc Morial — and allegedly a love nest, too, with a married police officer no less.

And whatever the two were doing, it looks awfully funny for a mayor and police officer to be spending six and seven hours there, respectively, on successive August Tuesdays, which by ordinary reckoning should be busy workdays. With crime spiraling out of control, why wasn’t the mayor in her office at City Hall, or otherwise engaged in obvious city business, on those midweek workdays?

Questions also abound about Cantrell’s use of campaign funds, a subject reportedly under federal investigation. There also is the debacle of trash rotting in the streets for days, and of course, the roadwork that seems to take so long that new potholes form before old ones are fixed.

Petition organizers said this week they still need 15,000 more signatures by Feb. 22 in order to force a recall election. And that’s probably low-balling their needs, because petition drives inevitably produce at least a small percentage of signatures deemed invalid for one reason or another. With approximately 54,000 names needed to force an election, organizers would be wise to secure at least 60,000 signers, just to be on the safe side.

Opportunities to sign are ample. The downside to doing so is nonexistent. With a city in extremis, the very least citizens should do is give themselves a choice. Apathy can be disastrous. Apathy about a city that is a worldwide treasure should be seen as a mortal sin.

New Orleans native Quin Hillyer is a senior commentary writer and editor for the Washington Examiner, working from the Gulf Coast. He can be reached at Qhillyer@WashingtonExaminer.com. His other columns appear at www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/quin-hillyer.