New York City has another husband-and-wife team helping to run the city with the disclosure that Rikki Klieman, the wife of Police Chief Bill Bratton, plans to go to community meetings with him and will use her connections through her appearance on CBS as a legal analyst to his advantage.

The husband and wife duo, reported by The New York Daily News, follows the Bill and Chirlane act of Mayor Bill deBlasio, formerly known as William Wilhelm Jr. and later as Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm. His wife Chirlane McCray wants her own office inside City Hall , complete with her own staff.

Police Chief Bratton’s wife is a former trial lawyer and insists her connections will help Bratton’s attempts to improve relations with the city’s black community.

The family of murdered Brooklyn landlord Menachem Stark has contributed $50,000 to what is now a total reward to $72,000 for information leading to the killer of the Satmar Hasidic real estate developer. The New York Police offered $20,000 and the NYPD Crime Stoppers program pitched in with $2,000.

“We have increased the reward in the hopes that anyone and everyone who knows anything comes forward,” Rabbi David Niederman, executive director of United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, the central planning and social service agency for more than 200 organizations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said in a statement, “There are seven orphans in Brooklyn, and a loving grieving wife – and we hope and pray there will be justice. We thank the law enforcement community for their hard work, and echo Commissioner Bratton’s call for the public’s assistance in solving this case.”

Stark’s body was found last Friday on suburban Long Island some 16 miles away from his office in the heavily Satmar section of Williamsburg, from where he was kidnapped the previous evening. He reportedly was suffocated before his body was placed in the dumpster outside a Great Neck gas station and burned, according to police.

Video footage taken from his office showed Stark being taken into a van after a struggle outside his office.

Police on Wednesday released a surveillance video showing a suspect in the kidnapping and believe Stark may have been squashed to death when kidnappers sat on his chest to subdue him after he was abducted.

Police also believe Stark, 39, was already dead when his body was set alight in a dumpster.

New York City police have arrested two local Muslim citizens for allegedly trying to buy equipment to help Taliban terrorists “cut U.S. soldiers to pieces.”

The arrests follow a two-year investigation, leaving unanswered questions why it took so long to arrest the men and why federal authorities did not intervene.

The men, Humayoun Nabi, 27, and Ismail Alsarabbi, 32, each are being held on $550,000 on charges of conspiracy and seeking to aid terrorists. There were hauled into Queens Criminal Court on Tuesday but the announcement of the arrest was delayed until Thursday because law enforcement officials wanted  to protect their undercover sources and look for additional suspects.

Authorities said the men were not involved with any plots to terrorize New York City but that their scheme, if carried out, would have been a “game changer,” court records revealed.

Nabi is a college-trained renovator with no criminal record and was a victim of police undercover agents’ tricks to arrest him for innocent actions, such as agreeing to “to send shows and coats to Afghanistan,” according to Nabi’s attorney Kenneth Finkelman.

He added, “For 18 months, for two years, the NYPD was trying to convince a guy with a wife and a child to send shoes and coats to Afghanistan. It’s totally entrapment.”

The charge sheet  states that Nabi and Alsarabbi plotted to send military equipment, including boots, to Taliban terrorists.

Alsarabbi’s attorney Sean McNicholas called the prosecution “outrageous” and accused the government of using a “a very common tactic…where they play on our fears and…use a confidential informant.”

The investigation began two years ago after Nabi met a police informant through a mutual acquaintance and talked about his hatred for the United States, Jews and American soldiers.

“The source of the Americans’ strength is their equipment, specifically good jackets, good goggles, good GPS,” Nabi told an undercover agent in December 2011. In another conversation, two weeks after U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden, Nabi allegedly said, “We are sitting here breathing in peace, eating chicken and roasts and our brothers, they are dying.”

Nabi  allegedly admitted to police he planned to provide clothes and boots to terrorists in Afghanistan to “level the playing field” in battles with U.S. soldiers. He was reported as saying he wanted to build “ a small army.”

He  also told agents he ultimately wanted to provide persons to Taliban terrorists but for the time being concentrated on funding clothing and electronics.

The police informant gave Nabi a $3,900 check, and Alsarabbi allegedly told his cohort to send the money to Nabi’s father in Pakistan.

The New York Police Department several years investigated Kahane Chai, a militant Jewish group, for threats against Rabbi Shmuley Boteach but never told him, according to internal NYPD documents obtained by the Tablet website.

The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) asked the NYPD’s intelligence division to monitor the group in the late 2000s after anti-Boteach comments were posted on Kahane.org,

“He commits incessant chilluley hashem and for that imho deserves death,” a website moderator on Kahane.org wrote in 2007, using the online name Doom777. “Someone shoot Shmuley Boteach,” the individual wrote a year later.

The NYPD launched a Terrorism Enterprise Investigation into the postings, enabling it to use informants and undercover officers to monitor Kahane Chai, which the State Department designated as a terrorist group in 1994. The NYPD’s investigation appears to have focused on web postings and online forums rather than infiltration of Kahanist groups, Tablet reported.

Boteach, a celebrity rabbi who wrote “Kosher Sex” and ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year from New Jersey, told Tablet that he was never informed of the threats.

Nobody appears to have been charged in connection with the online postings, according to the documents.

Police have arrested New York City Comptroller Kristin Davis, a former madam who supplied prostitutes through an escort service, on charges of selling prescription pills containing controlled substances.

Davis, 38, is accused of selling hundreds of pills, as recently as this past April, with the intent to distribute a controlled substance. She was charged with four counts of distributing, and she could be convicted for up to 20 years in jail on each count.

Davis has said that former governor and current comptroller candidate Eliot Spitzer was one of her clients.

Two drastically different laws recently passed the New York City Council. One will make the New York City Police Department a better agency; the other may open it up to endless lawsuits and could hurt the NYPD’s ability to police effectively. That’s why I voted for the first law and voted against the second one.

The first law, which I proudly supported, creates the position of inspector general to oversee the police department and make sure its policies and procedures are effective. This is a very important piece of legislation. I have always stood for greater transparency, accountability and openness in all aspects of government, whether it’s the annual budget process where I invite every organization to apply for funding or when I demand transparency from agencies like the MTA. The people of this city deserve to know exactly how their money is being spent and how our laws are being enforced.

This legislation simply creates independent oversight similar to what is in place in the next five largest American cities. The model works so well that our nation’s finest law enforcement agencies, including the CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security, all have inspectors general. Even the IRS has an inspector general and thanks to its work we now know that the IRS was targeting conservative and pro-Israel groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for non-profit status. Simply put, the more powerful the agency, the greater the need for oversight to ensure that our citizens’ rights are being protected.

The inspector general would review NYPD policies and procedures and then make nonbinding recommendations to the mayor and City Council. It would ultimately create a safer New York by protecting citizens against illegal police practices, improving police-community relations, fostering more accountability at the NYPD and bringing greater efficiency to the department by eliminating waste. What will emerge is a stronger NYPD that’s more responsive to New Yorkers.

On the other hand, the last thing I want to do is make our police officers’ jobs more difficult and our city less safe. That’s why I voted against the second law – known as the stop and frisk legislation. This legislation expands the definition of what is considered bias-based profiling by preventing police officers from using characteristics such as age, gender, race or national origin as the reason for conducting stop, question and frisks in New York City. Even worse, it opens up police officers to individual lawsuits if any person they stop believes they were stopped for the wrong reason.

I firmly believe in an open, tolerant, bias-free New York City where we are not judged on the basis of the different characteristics that make each of us unique. However, I am concerned that this legislation will impact one of the most fundamental aspects of policing – the ability for an officer to act on information he receives from a crime victim regarding the suspect’s race, age, or other factors that will help in identifying and then questioning a suspect.

It is already illegal to conduct bias-based profiling, and there is no need for legislation that will make the job of police officers that much harder and open up individual police officers, who are simply doing their jobs, to endless lawsuits from aggrieved individuals.

Much of the basis for this legislation is the legitimate debate over the NYPD’s use of its stop, question and frisk program to prevent crime and get guns off our streets. While there are some important questions about the overuse of this tactic, no one denies that stop, question and frisk is one of the tools that has lowered crime in New York City. I am all for debate over how this practice is used or whether it is overused, but to pass a law that would force individual police officers to go to court to defend a routine part of their jobs seems excessive.

One of my top priorities – and greatest responsibilities – as a City Council member is to make sure the NYPD has the ability to keep every New Yorker safe. Nothing is more important than knowing my constituents can safely walk down their streets without fearing for their lives or personal safety.

When I grew up in the city it was not an uncommon occurrence for people to get mugged or to have their cars stolen or their homes broken into. Happily, those days are long gone. The NYPD is doing an incredible job of keeping crime at record lows and increasing safety in our neighborhoods. We can always do better, which is why I am proud to support the creation of the position of inspector general to improve policing here in New York City and why I voted against stop and frisk legislation that may prevent ordinary cops from doing their jobs.

After all, my job as a councilman is to represent my constituents, but it’s also to look after the city’s employees – in this case our police officers who put their lives on the line for us every day. My votes on the two bills will make New Yorkers safer while protecting the cops on the beat.

Bard College student Samantha Rosenbaum is suing the New York Police Department for carrying out an immodest search while she was walking on a Williamsburg street on  the way from the post office back to her place of work at a store last year.

The suit, reported Thursday by The New York Post, comes amid controversy over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s charge that the police are carrying out a disproportionate number of frisks on white people. A New York Daily News survey published today revealed that the mayor is wrong, but more troubling is the reason for frisks, whether on blacks or whites.

Rosenbaum, age 22 and from Essex, New Jersey, told the newspaper that she loves animals and stopped to pet a cat she noticed in an alley. The plainclothed police, sitting in an unmarked car, apparently did not look at it that way.

“Hey, stop!” a man yelled from his parked car. “He was really aggressive,” Rosenbaum recalled. “I had no idea who he was, [so] I just kept walking.”

That was the obvious tip-off for the two police officers that she was a criminal, and they ran after Rosenbaum and threw her against the car, asking her if she had drugs.

“This whole time, I didn’t know who these people are,” she told the Post. “Finally, after a few minutes, they tell me they are police. My face and stomach were on the hood. I don’t think anyone, no matter what color you are, deserves to be treated like that.

“I offered to show them the cat. They had two people on top of me, and my arm was really hurting.”

Her lawyer Michael Goldstein added,  “She thought she was getting kidnapped. This is a very nice young lady. This was a false arrest and imprisonment. It’s assault.”

The suit alleges that a policewoman who was part of the search-and-frisk team opened her clothing and peeked underneath at private parts of her body.

According to Rosenbaum, the police finally let her go when she started crying after they threatened several times to haul her off to the police station and charge her with a crime,

“They told me they didn’t want me to have a bad impression of cops so they were going to let me go,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.

Why would anyone even think of such a thing?

There are plenty who would think so.

The New York Civil Liberties Union found in a survey two years ago, quoted by Slate, “Only 11 percent of stops in 2011 were based on a description of a violent crime suspect.” The rest of them were carried out at random, and most of the victim was found to be innocent.

The numbers are astonishing. Hundreds of thousands of people are stopped every year for frisks that turn out to be needless but which the police justify when they file forms after each search. All a police officer has to write is that a person was “carrying a suspicious object” or “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime,” or was wearing “inappropriate attire for season.”

Or, “The suspect was petting a cat.”

Following the latest social media problems within the Bill de Blasio campaign, with the resignation of two staffers who tweeted anti NYPD, racist and antisemitic tweets, the campaign is now cracking down on the remaining staffers.

Mr. de Blasio’s wife is African American.

“If Bill de Blasio is the company he keeps, his mayoral campaign could be in serious trouble,” Lauren Evans wrote last month in the Gothamist. “Only a few weeks after one of his campaign aids was caught bashing the police and NAACP on Twitter, another staffer was revealed today to have similarly poor judgment when it comes to “Things Not to Say on the Internet… Naturally, the mayoral hopeful was quick to denounce tweets, saying that “nothing can excuse” the remarks. Still, unless he does something about the unruly social media tendencies of his staffers, de Blasio’s prospects for Gracie Mansion are at risk of vanishing faster than a deleted tweet. Maybe the NYPD was on to something with that social media crackdown after all.”

According to information this reporter has gathered, a few weeks ago, Mr. de Blasio’s staffers at the Public Advocate’s office were asked to review their Twitter timelines and previous tweets to accommodate with the campaign’s need to overcome recent controversies and avoid such stories coming out in the future.

During the internal meeting, the staffers, who volunteer for the mayoral campaign, were told to reduce their presence on twitter and hold of from commenting on issues that might come back to haunt the campaign.

After a brief review of the Twitter feed of several staffer in the Public Advocate’s office, their presence on Twitter has been reduced to minimum over the past few weeks.

Last week, Sal Albanese, a former city councilman and a Democratic candidate for mayor, accused two of his rivals, Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker, and Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, of having hired political operatives at taxpayer expense as they readied their own campaigns.

“From bribery-by-paper-bag to straw donor schemes, taxpayers feel like they are drowning in a sea of corruption this year. But while we are focused on the sensational scandals, another kind of corruption is casually occurring every day in this building behind me,” said Albanese while standing outside of the Public Advocate’s office at 1 Centre Street in Manhattan. “For the past year and a half, Bill de Blasio has been fleecing the taxpayers by putting his campaign operatives on the public payroll.”

According to Albanese, the Public Advocate has hired at least nine staffers whose previous positions were primarily as campaign operatives. In total, their salaries cost New York City taxpayers $576,000 per year. All of the hires occurred within the last 18 months, concurrent with the building of de Blasio’s campaign infrastructure.

“Many of these folks are smart young people with bright futures,” Albanese pointed out. “Unfortunately, they are being used just to further Bill’s career.”

Albanese, who spent fifteen years as the City Council’s top reformer, called for a hiring freeze for elected officials seeking citywide office. His proposal would bar officials like the Public Advocate, Comptroller, and City Council Speaker from adding new positions to their payrolls during the 18 months preceding a primary election. Officials would still be allowed to replace employees to maintain the integrity and workload of the office.

“Padding a government payroll like this is an intolerable abuse of power,” declared Albanese. “It forces taxpayers to foot the bill for an employee whose job is to advance their boss’s political ambitions, not help the public.”