Opinion

Raise your sights, Bill

Ex-city Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is aiming too low: He’s talking to likely mayoral contenders about getting his old cop-shop job back after Mike Bloomberg splits — but why should he settle for less than the mayoralty itself?

That’s where the vacuum exists — and where the opportunity lies.

Sure, Bratton boasts a strong law-enforcement CV. He served as the city’s top cop from 1994 to 1996, ran Boston’s Police Department before that and later served as LA’s chief of police.

He’s often credited with having kicked off the historic reversal of New York’s decades-long rise in crime — embracing the “broken windows” theory of policing, introducing the crime-monitoring tool CompStat and overseeing a big boost in the number of city cops.

Those policies were embraced and refined by the Giuliani administration — to spectacularly successful results.

But while smart policing will always be in demand in New York City, smart governance is in even shorter supply. Back in the day, Bratton successfully brought fresh thinking to a particularly stubborn problem — and there’s no reason to believe he couldn’t do so on a broader scale today.

Now, this is by no means an endorsement of Bill Bratton for mayor.

But it is embarrassingly clear that no one among the gaggle of semi-announced pretenders to the mayoralty has had an original thought in decades.

And that won’t change in a hurry.

Indeed, New York is on a back-to-the-future trip to the pre-Giuliani/Bloomberg era — when the unions ran the city solely for the benefit of union members, and elected officials were along merely for the ride.

Does Bratton have the stamina — indeed, the strength of character — necessary to keep things on track? To preserve the hard-fought progress of the past two decades?

Should he become mayor?

Good questions.

None of the others seems to — nor even has the inclination to try.

Run, Bill, run? Why the hell not.