Opinion

Police Commissioner Sharpton

We started this week asking who was in charge of crime-fighting in New York City: Bill Bratton or Al Sharpton.

The answer grows more urgent now that Mayor de Blasio gave the Rev. Sharpton City Hall as a platform to advance his views on how our police should be policing.

Sharpton used it to throw down the gauntlet — mostly at the commissioner, but also at the mayor himself. Naturally he again insisted race is part of the equation.

“If Dante wasn’t your son,” Sharpton told the mayor in his opening remarks, “he’d be a candidate for a chokehold.”

In short, Sharpton used his city-provided platform to make clear he doesn’t like Commissioner Bratton’s policies, including the continued crackdown on quality-of-life crimes.

And he rejected Bratton’s idea that re-training will resolve some of the problems:

“The best way to make police stop using illegal chokeholds is to perp-walk one of them that did. When they understand that they’ve got to pay the price like anybody else that breaks the law, it will send a lesson that 10 training lessons will not give.”

The mayor did voice support for his commissioner, calling Bratton “the finest police leader in the United States of America, period.” But the event itself suggested a different story, with the mayor seated between the reverend and the commissioner — and introduced as “the man who put an end to stop-and-frisk.”

Sharpton is demanding the mayor choose between letting Bratton police in a way that has brought violent crime to record lows — and letting the activists such as himself decide what the cops can and cannot do.

“If we’re going to just play spin games,” he said, “I’ll be the worst enemy.”

We too want de Blasio to choose.

Certainly police need to know they’ll be held accountable if they cross the line. But cops need an equally strong reassurance that their mayor sees them first and foremost as New York’s protectors — not its perps.