Metro

De Blasio flip-flop: NYPD doing great

A mayoral candidate said Friday he thinks the NYPD is “the best-trained police force on earth” — and praised its accomplishments under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

He also lauded the “incredible job” it’s done to bolster safety.

But the candidate wasn’t Republican Joe Lhota.

It was Democrat Bill de Blasio, who spent months blasting the Police Department and Commissioner Ray Kelly over the stop-and-frisk strategy.

On Friday, he became the ­department’s biggest booster.

“We’ve done an incredible job as a city getting safer and safer,” de Blasio said in a WCBS radio interview.

His remarks came a day after Lhota released a stinging TV commercial that warned a de Blasio victory could bring back the high-crime days of old.

During his radio appearance, de Blasio responded that Lhota was distorting his positions.

“What my opponent has done is fear mongering; it’s simplistic,” said de Blasio.

“[The ad] misses 20 years of progress we’ve made across a number of different mayors and police commissioners.”

That time frame would cover the administrations of Giuliani and Bloomberg, both of whom were Republicans. Bloomberg in 2007 became an Independent.

Lhota told The Post that his opponent was trying to have it both ways — running against the NYPD and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in the Democratic primary, but allying with the cops for the general election.

“No one is going to buy his empty praise after spending months bashing the NYPD and the policies that saved lives,” Lhota said.

Asked about his Friday comments, the de Blasio campaign pointed to a speech in March where the candidate also cited the “extraordinary, 20-year turnaround” in public safety.

“We’ve gone from living in one of the most violent cities in the country — with 2,245 murders in 1990 — to one of the safest,” he said then, in an unflattering allusion to the administration of David Dinkins.

It was an odd comment coming from de Blasio, who was a volunteer in Dinkins’ 1989 mayoral ­campaign, and was later hired as a City Hall aide.

De Blasio’s campaign maintains he has always recognized the NYPD’s professionalism and success in fighting terror and reducing crime, even while criticizing its stop-and-frisk strategy.

But voters would have to be listening closely to draw the distinction.

In May, for example, de Blasio’s campaign released an ad during the Democratic primary that proclaimed: “We can’t afford four more years like the last 12 … To truly reform stop-and-frisk, we need a fresh start.”

Yet in one of the sharpest exchanges of their first televised debate, de Blasio said, “Mr. Lhota has said he would want Ray Kelly to stay as police commissioner, even though Ray Kelly has been the architect of the overuse of stop-and-frisk that has had such a negative effect on the relationship between police and . . . many communities of color.”

On Friday, Lhota said de Blasio made NYPD-bashing “a central theme of his campaign, and now all of a sudden he’s changing his tune because he knows New Yorkers will reject his reckless policies that will make us less safe.”