Metro

NYPD Daily Blotter

Queens

* Police are looking for this suspected thief (pictured), who they say looted a cab parked in Woodhaven.

He targeted the vehicle on 97th Avenue near 81st Street at 3 a.m. last Wednesday, when his photo was snapped by the car’s surveillance camera as he allegedly stole credit cards, a radio and a GPS.

Manhattan

* A Bronx woman is dead and her niece under arrest after they accidentally sparked a fire while smoking an unidentified narcotic in an East Harlem building apartment, police said yesterday.

Hilda Santiago, 38, and Krystle Ortiz, 26, allegedly slipped into a sixth-floor unit on East 117th Street near Madison Avenue at about 4 p.m. Sunday.

When Santiago stepped back into the hallway and lit a match, she inadvertently set herself on fire, cops said. She died at Cornell Medical Center.

Ortiz, charged with criminal trespass, was treated for minor injuries.

* Despite having been banned from the store in August 2010, a serial shoplifter returned and tried to swipe 30 bottles of Fierce cologne — worth $1,900 — from the South Street Seaport Abercrombie & Fitch, authorities said. A security guard at the Water Street store caught Keith Andrews, 52, in the act at 7:05 p.m. Thursday, according to court papers.

He is charged with grand larceny, burglary and criminal possession of stolen property.

* A man stole a motorist’s cellphone and then his car — only to be collared for reckless driving, cops said.

The motorist was in his 1997 Dodge Caravan on East 193rd Street and Bainbridge Avenue at 5:50 p.m. on Jan. 9 when Enrique Sanchez-Hernandez, 28, approached and asked to use his phone, court papers say.

The car owner offered up the mobile, and Sanchez-Hernandez used it but then became enraged when the man asked for it back, the cops said.

Instead of returning the phone, Sanchez-Hernandez allegedly ripped the man out of the minivan, tossed him to the ground, got behind the wheel and sped off.

When cops stopped him a bit later, they quickly determined that the car had been stolen.

Brooklyn

***

Police arrested nearly 200 people in a four-day, citywide prostitution sting.

The raids, which started Thursday and ended Sunday, had cops hitting 27 precincts, resulting in the arrests of 10 prostitutes and 186 johns. Cops also seized 56 vehicles.

Undercover cops pose as hookers and collar those johns looking for a prostitute, sources said.

The sting was part of an initiative run by the NYPD’s civil-enforcement unit, dubbed “Operation Losing Proposition.”

The Brownsville section of Brooklyn saw the most arrests, with three prostitutes and 16 johns.

***

Not only did an admitted pothead speed the wrong way on the Gowanus Expressway, but he further endangered his freedom by smashing into a squad car and injuring a cop, authorities said.

An off-duty sergeant said he espied William Parente, 22, zooming down the highway, against the flow of traffic, in a black four-door sedan at about 12:50 a.m. on Jan. 10.

He said he followed the vehicle and watched as it mounted the sidewalk at Second Avenue and 49th Street in Park Slope.

As backup units responded, Parente allegedly tried to escape but hit one of the police cars, which hit an officer standing beside it.

The cop was treated for nonlife-threatening injuries at Lutheran Medical Center.

Parente, who allegedly went on to hit several more cars, confessed to smoking marijuana earlier in the day, investigators said.

* A Sheepshead Bay man claims his landlord — a police officer assigned to the 68th Precinct — took down the mezuza he’d put on his door frame, authorities said.

The 41-year-old tenant called 911 at about 2 p.m. on Jan. 9 to report the theft and said he and his landlord were engaged in an ongoing squabble.

He said he last saw the prayer parchment in October but wasn’t sure when it disappeared. He noticed it missing, he explained, while packing in preparation for moving to Texas.

The cop/landlord denied taking the religious item, but both Internal Affairs and the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force said they were investigating.

The Bronx

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A pair of burglary suspects are wanted for boosting two flatscreen TVs from a building in Wakefield, cops said.

The thieves, believed to be in their early 20s, committed the caper sometime on Jan. 13 when they slipped into an apartment on Carpenter Avenue near East 229th Street.