Say it ain’t so, Janno.

MTA honcho Janno Lieber pooh-poohed subway crime as being “in people’s heads” Monday following the launch of congestion pricing — which is forcing more New Yorkers into the plagued public transit system.

Lieber, during a Monday morning interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance,” touted a 12.5% reduction in transit crime last year from 2019, the last full year before the coronavirus pandemic.

He argued, similarly to Mayor Eric Adams, that a rash of recent horrifying attacks are distracting from the city’s successes in making the subways safer.

“Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe,” he said.

“The overall stats are positive.”

But Lieber’s rosy view of transit crime – which Adams and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch largely echoed during a news conference later that day – was undercut by a closer look at NYPD data, which shows significant violence is either staying level or rising.

Besides a 25-year high of 10 subway murders last year, there were 579 felony assaults recorded by the NYPD’s transit bureau – slightly higher than 2023’s numbers, preliminary data shows. 

Major crime in the transit system did drop 5.4% overall compared to 2023, largely driven by a nearly 18% decline in robberies, the data shows.

Last year, however, there were still 455 robberies in the transit system, according to the statistics.

Lieber’s cherry-picking didn’t sit well with the Transport Workers Union, which slammed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO as a “fraudster” in a post on X.

“Total BS. This @MTA fraudster ignores the fact that violent crime is soaring. Felony assaults were up 51.6% and murders were up 233% last year compared to 2019 (January through 12/29). Such # are published in the MTA’s own committee books. Fire this GOBSHITE!,” the union wrote.

The labor group’s head, John Samuelsen, added in his own post that: “If CEO Janno Lieber was routinely assaulted like hundreds of @transportworker members have been under his tenure, or shoved in front of an oncoming train, or lit on fire by a crazed lunatic, he’d be far less snarky and indifferent to the tribulations of working New Yorkers.”

The senseless random violence alluded to by Lieber included the shocking attack on 57-year-old Debrina Kawam, who was torched to death on a Brooklyn F train in plain view of horrified commuters.

There were at least five attacks in the days after Kawam’s death, including the Jan. 2 stabbing of an MTA staffer heading to work in The Bronx in the Pelham Parkway station.

The alleged madman, Jamar Banks, 52, behind the attack on the MTA worker is also accused of stabbing a 31-year-old man on a 2 train at 14th Street and Seventh Avenue on New Year’s Day.

The violence didn’t just come at the end of a knife.

Last Tuesday, music programmer Joseph Lynskey, 45, was pushed at random in front of a 1 train in Manhattan — and miraculously survived the horrendous and apparently random attack.

Follow along with The Post's coverage of Manhattan's new congestion pricing

• New York became the most expensive city to drive in when its congestion pricing began Sunday. New Yorkers now must pay $9 to drive below 60th Street during peak hours.
• Some drivers have begun concealing their plates in an effort to avoid the toll. Some residents of the area are saddled with the cost whenever they want to take their car out.

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• Businesses, like funeral homes, have begun shifting the cost to customers. Rideshare app Lyft raised its CitiBike prices for New Yorkers hoping to avoid taking a car. The FDNY union and EMT union claim that congestion pricing will slow down their response times, as well.
• Many New Yorkers are skeptical about congestion pricing’s effects, especially after multiple publicized crimes on the subway in recent weeks. Drivers are expected to dump their cars above the zone, making parking more difficult uptown.

Violence continued to seep into New York City subways over the weekend when a 38-year-old man was stabbed in the arm inside the Third Avenue and 138th Street No. 6 express station in Mott Haven. The victim was taken to the hospital in stable condition.

The transit chaos prompted the Guardian Angels, the red-bereted volunteer vigilante watchdog group, to resume patrols in the subways for the first time since 2020 — and at levels not seen since their inception in the late 1970s.

Beyond cops and vigilantes, the bloodshed prompted many concerned New Yorkers to revive calls for the MTA to install guardrails or platform barriers similar to those in other mass transit systems in London or Tokyo.

When asked about putting up guardrails, Lieber said the MTA was focused first on fare evasion post-COVID and that walls for added safety would come later.

“We put a billion dollars in our new capital program since fare evasion and this whole phenomenon has definitely accelerated post-COVID,” he said. “So, we are going to start to replace all these turnstiles, which worked when I was a kid, but clearly are ineffective now for in the era that we’re living in.”

The MTA boss’ focus on fare evasion received a withering review from one transit cop.

“$1 billion on preventing fare beaters sounds like a lot of money,” the cop told The Post. “Also, if it is such a problem, why doesn’t he put pressure on the district attorneys to process these criminals instead of asking hard-working people to pay an extra tax that will definitely be misspent.”

A Brooklyn cop worried that congestion pricing – which is designed to make more motorists consider taking public transit – could end up fueling more crime.

“If more people take the train that just means there will be more possible victims,” the cop said. “People are getting slashed too many times even if they say crime is going down.”

Tisch, meanwhile, called the subways the “bellwether” for New Yorkers’ perception of public safety, and pledged to deploy 200 cops onto trains and more officers onto platforms. 

“We still must do more because people don’t feel safe in our subways,” she said. 

The NYPD boss also teased that further subway deployments will be announced “soon.”

“This is just the beginning,” she said. “This month, we’ll roll out substantial additional improvements to our transit deployments to be even more responsive to the terrifying acts of random violence we have seen recently.”

– Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Carl Campanile