The first thing for Mayor Bloomberg to do when he gets into work today after his trip to Israel, Ireland, and London is to lay in some support for his police commissioner. It’s not that he’s let any light show between himself and Raymond Kelly since the shooting that killed Sean Bell. But the tragedy in Queens has touched off what is now becoming a concerted effort by critics of the police to bracket the commissioner.

This took an appalling turn in the City Council, when Mr. Kelly was invited in for two hours of testimony, only to be kept waiting while the council members and the speaker ambled in late. The speaker left early, leaving the commissioner to sit through three hours of demagoguery. The New York Times piled on over the weekend, publishing a dirge about the increase in the practice of police stopping and frisking suspects.

These stops, the NYPD reported, have soared to 508,540 in 2006 from 97,296 in 2002. No doubt part of this reflects the fact that the NYPD is making a good faith effort to report all such stops. Much is being made by the Times and Mr. Kelly’s other critics of the fact that 55% of those stopped and frisked are black. The Reverend Al Sharpton is now talking about using the statistics to file a class-action lawsuit against the police department. This is not a situation in which the mayor wants to let Mr. Kelly fend for himself, though we’re sure the commissioner is capable of doing so.

The fact is that no attack on Mr. Kelly can be made without it being an attack on the mayor, and this is a mayoral moment. What needs to be illuminated at the highest level is the link between the stop-and-frisk policy and the plunge in crime — down 29% since January 2001 — that has taken place on the Bloomberg-Kelly watch. The retreat of crime is one of the greatest achievements of this administration, one the mayor stressed during the campaign that won him reelection in a landslide. Now it is time for the mayor to talk to the city about the logic of tactics and strategy.

He needs to defend what Mr. Kelly and his officers have been doing. The deputy commissioner of police, Paul Browne, has been doing yeoman’s service explaining that most crime is perpetrated against minority victims and that blacks account for 68% of all suspects described by victims of or witnesses to crimes. No one could have imagined a decade ago that crime in this city could be further reduced so sharply from the drops recorded in the Giuliani years, but it’s creeping back up in some neighborhoods. This is a moment for the mayor to talk about the never-ending struggle and to defend the commissioner and officers on the front line.