It looks like it’s time yet again to start thinking about the possibility that the former police commissioner of New York, Raymond Kelly, could run for mayor. That’s what I took from the story that ran in Tuesday’s Post under the headline “Ray hints at a run for mayor” and quoted the ex-police commissioner as saying, “Never say never.”

That’s the best political news of the week, and Mr. Kelly confirmed the point when I spoke with him Wednesday. He was “somewhat open to it” is the way he put it. He doesn’t have even an embryonic campaign going yet, but he’s clearly thinking about it.

That’s a turnaround from several years ago, when I last asked Mr. Kelly about the mayoralty. Back then he insisted that electioneering is not, as he put it, “in my DNA.” But I left that lunch table unconvinced. He’s too smart, too engaged and too emblematic a New Yorker.

With each passing year, it’s clearer that we need someone to make sure New York doesn’t return to the bad old days of the 1970s. Part of that is a growth-oriented economic agenda and part is making sure we don’t retreat in the war on crime.

That has been a fear since the city lost the stop-question-and-frisk case, and Mayor de Blasio refused to defend either the city or the NYPD. To this day Mr. Kelly is the only major figure to mount a real defense of The Finest (which he did in his just-published memoir, “Vigilance”).

Mr. De Blasio won office with but a tiny percentage of the voters, and he seems out of his depth and, more importantly, way to the left of even this gloriously liberal and diverse city. Mr. Kelly could be just what the doctor ordered.

I asked him whether, if he were to run, it would be as a Democrat or Republican. It turns out he’s neither, but rather an independent, and his inclination is that the voters would favor such independence. Which may be why he lasted through 12 years under Mayor Bloomberg, a Democrat who ran as a Republican and ended up as an independent himself.

Yet Mr. Kelly is a far more grounded New Yorker than Mr. Bloomberg (for whom Mr. Kelly has voiced great admiration). The ex-commissioner, after all, was raised in a walkup on the Upper West Side. He served in the Marines, became an officer, served in combat in Vietnam, earned a law degree and came up through the NYPD ranks. His first tour as commissioner was under Mayor David Dinkins.

One of my favorite Kelly stories has to do with his uncanny street sense. As rebuilding of Ground Zero got under way, he became worried about the placement of what would become the Freedom Tower too close to the corner of Vesey and West streets. When he presented his arguments, the tallest building in the city got moved away from the curb and redesigned. Mr. Kelly gives credit to the sagacity of his intelligence staff. But it’s hard to imagine any other commissioner getting listened to like that.

My guess is that Kelly would run a centrist fiscal policy as mayor. Editors dining with him over the years didn’t hear a lot about economic theory, though I’ve heard him speak with some liveliness about the way government wastes money.

What editors do hear is extraordinary savvy about the nitty gritty of the city and about the law and the Constitution. The amount of both that the average NYPD officer needs to know nowadays is astounding. The commissioner needs to be practically a constitutional sage.

Is Mr. Kelly too old? He’ll be 76 come November 2017, when the next mayoral election is due. My guess is that any younger candidates would have trouble keeping up with him and that age would be less of an issue for Mr. Kelly than it was for, say, Ronald Reagan.

The big fear in New York is that Mr. de Blasio has turned the city back toward the ’70s. It hasn’t become irreversible, but the fear is that it could do so. Mr. Kelly’s great gift, even if he credits others, is the safeness of the city today. The logic of a Kelly campaign would be to make sure it stays that way.

A version of this column first appeared in the New York Post.