“A person stealing steak is not national news,” grouses New York Times historical fiction author Nikole Hannah-Jones.

She was upset that The Post’s coverage of the Hamburglar — a guy who brazenly walked out of a New York City Trader Joe’s with 10 shoplifted steaks — managed to go viral, even prompting Al Sharpton to say things were getting out of control.

“There have always been thefts from stores,” Hannah-Jones continues. “This is how you legitimize the carceral state.”

Well, yes, there have always been thefts, but that’s not the point of the story. Mass shoplifting is a crisis nationwide, driven at least partly by the fact that district attorneys in places like San Francisco are giving such thieves a slap on the wrist.

“We have experienced a 300% increase in retail theft from our stores since the pandemic began,” CVS spokesman Michael DeAngelis told Axios. In the Bay Area, authorities busted a crime ring that sold $8 million in merchandise from CVS, Walgreens and others.

This isn’t Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread. These are large-scale thefts, and the goods end up being sold online or from the backs of trucks. Sharpton wasn’t even reacting to the Hamburglar per se — he was upset they locked up the toothpaste in his local drug store. They’re not putting the Crest under lock and key because of one guy.

But what’s particularly galling about Hannah-Jones’ complaint is not necessarily her casual disregard of crime, but her hypocrisy. She claims this is a crisis of anecdote, that one sirloin purloiner does not a national issue make.

Yet liberal activists like Hannah-Jones have done the same thing for the past two years, with far worse results. They have taken local anecdotes and turned them into national policy. One terrible, deadly arrest in Minnesota led to riots where all cops were tarred as being racists. “Defund the police” was the call for everyone, everywhere, with no regard whether it was right for that community.

What happened to George Floyd was horrific, but it was not the norm. Heather Mac Donald notes that in the year 2019, there were 7,484 black victims of homicide. Nine were listed as unarmed men killed by police. Setting aside that some of those could be justified depending on the circumstances, that’s 0.1% of the total. The vast majority of black homicides were committed by other black civilians.

To Hannah-Jones’ “carceral” comment, advocates like to pluck the most sympathetic person they can to argue that our jails are full of victims punished by an unfair justice system. But as Nicole Gelinas pointed out in The Post, of the 5,400 people inside Rikers in November of 2021, 72% were facing a violent felony charge. Another 13% were charged with another kind of serious felony, while many of the misdemeanor offenders were also parole violators. Most are locked up for a good reason.

Despite the clear statistical evidence in both policing and incarceration, however, the politics of the past two years has been driven by anecdote. Get rid of all bail. Don’t prosecute gang members. Downgrade all charges. Pack our legislative halls with politicians who call cops “pigs” and “bastards” or worse.

And what has been the result? Skyrocketing murder rates. Hundreds more black men dead. Children dead by bullets shot through cars in Chicago and Atlanta. An 11-month-old struck in the face in New York City, the victim of a gang shootout.

But that’s all right. These are just anecdotes. They’re not national news.