It sure must be hard for Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to admit ex-top cop Ray Kelly was right.

Yet they in effect did just that with their plan to restore about 50 police officers to Times Square to deal with the aggressive Elmos and all.

Under Kelly, the NYPD had as many as 130 cops patrolling Times Square’s tourist-filled plazas. It was still at least 100 as recently as a few months ago, but then Bratton’s braintrust cut the number to just 47 — even as the scourge of Cookie Monsters, bare-breasted “models” and so on exploded.

“What happened was that for years we had the ‘Impact Cops’ in Times Square,” a source told The Post. “But that was a Kelly thing, so a few months ago, they transferred half of the officers there to other commands.”

Restoring the squad is no cure-all, of course. Officers can’t take action unless they see someone breaking the law — and current law permits both toplessness and panhandling, as long as it’s not aggressive.

Still, the move offers more hope than de Blasio’s “task force” to find ways to fix the Times Square mess.

Better yet, the de facto admission that Ray Kelly knew what he was doing on one front just might prompt the mayor and police commissioner to look at other Kelly policies they’ve tossed out.

We can hope, anyway.