Twenty-three arrests: Deranged street-sleeper Niser Cekic racked up that many before he stabbed a Queens fruit vendor multiple times. 

The vendor asked him to move, and Cekic flew into a violent rage on being awakened from his asphalt nap.

By some miracle, the victim of this heinous assault is still alive. 

But let’s be clear: That’s only by pure chance. This story could have ended with yet another grisly murder. 

As with so many of these incidents, the question is: Why?

Why on earth was Cekic, who seems almost certainly to suffer from severe mental illness, allowed to rack up close to two dozen arrests?

It must have been clear to everyone — the cops who booked him, the judges and prosecutors who ultimately let him stay on the streets — that the man was a time bomb waiting to go off. 

He’s been arrested for petit larceny, trespass, criminal possession and bail jumping.

And now he’s made the customary move among New York’s (often mentally ill) criminal class and graduated to attempted murder and assault. 

Again, the “attempted” part is only good luck. 

His story echoes that of Monique Fort, another member of the long-rap-sheet club. 

Fort notched 14 prior arrests before she assaulted a woman and robbed her child in the Bronx, and was incredibly let go again after her latest crime. 

Keep watching this space. 

Thanks to New York’s insane policies around crime and around mental illness, Fort’s name is all but guaranteed to appear here after she commits some new atrocity. 

That’s what happens when progressives first refuse to recognize that some people are just too sick in the head to be left walking free — and then hamstring police, prevent judges from detaining dangerous defendants pre-trial, institute insanely burdensome paperwork requirements on prosecutors and in general try to legalize crime. 

They put a match to the long fuses of people like Cekic and Fort. 

And when the explosion comes?

No sympathy. No accountability. And, above all, no shame.