NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill on Tuesday defended the promotion of a commanding officer who ran afoul of Mayor de Blasio earlier this year for downplaying a spike in sex attacks in his Brooklyn precinct.

Veteran cop Peter Rose was elevated from captain to deputy inspector during a morning ceremony at NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

“Pete has been a precinct commander for almost 2 1/2 years. This past year he’s had an 18 percent crime decrease in the 94 Precinct,” O’Neill said afterward.

“He misspoke last year. He apologized for it. As I’ve said before with other people being promoted, I look at their whole body of work.”

“Pete continues to keep the people of the city safe,” he added.

In January, Rose sparked outrage when he said cops weren’t alarmed by a 62 percent increase in precinct rapes because the vast majority weren’t “total-abomination rapes where strangers are being dragged off the streets.”

“Some of them were Tinder, some of them were hookup sites, some of theme were actually co​-​workers,” Rose told the since-shuttered DNAinfo Web site.

A mayoral spokesman blasted the remarks at the time, saying: “Rape is rape, in New York City and everywhere else.”

“The crime merits no moral qualification and does not involve shades of criminality or degrees of danger,” de Blasio press secretary Eric Phillips added.

Following Rose’s promotion, another de Blasio spokesman, Austin Finan, said: “The mayor doesn’t get involved in the promotion process and certainly wasn’t involved in this one.”