The thieves at JFK Airport have a friend in Port Authority police brass.

When laptops and suitcases are reported stolen by travelers, officers are routinely ordered to downgrade the incidents from thefts to merely lost luggage — to keep the airport’s crime stats down and their bosses looking good, sources told the Post.

“Their position is that if a [victim] does not see his property being taken, then he does not have knowledge of a theft and hence, it’s a ‘lost property,’ ” said one police source.

The alleged fudging of statistics has caused dozens of thefts — including of wallets, cash and suitcases — to go uninvestigated, according to internal reports and interviews with airport cops, crime victims and union officials.

Sources accused at least one top PAPD captain of slapping Post-it notes on underlings’ reports demanding that they be rewritten to transform apparent criminal offenses into non-criminal “lost property” incidents. One officer dubbed the Post-its “Nasty Grams.”

John Kelly, a Port Authority spokesman, insisted that no PAPD police supervisor has asked for any legitimate crime report to be improperly changed, insisting, “Every criminal complaint made to the PAPD receives a careful investigation.”

“As part of each investigation, our police officers are responsible for gathering the information from the complainant and clearly articulating the incident in the complaint report, which is then subject to supervisor approval,” he said.

But The Post reviewed about a dozen police reports with Post-its slapped on them ordering them to be reclassified as “lost property” incidents.

In one instance June 14, a cop filed paperwork stating that a 42-year-old man from Ocala, Fla., was a victim of a petit larceny after his $700 Dell laptop was “taken while he was checking in for his flight” at Cathay Pacific Airlines. But a handwritten Post-it attached to the report read: “Although we can assume the laptop was stolen, probable cause is not articulated [on the form] to sustain a larceny. Make this a lost property. — Capt.”

Other instances also included cops being taken to task for failing to establish “probable cause” — even though probable cause is a legal requirement normally associated with a search warrant, not filing a police report.

“The Port Authority PBA has been concerned, after reviewing complaints from our members, that the command staff [at JFK] has embarked on a policy of reclassifying certain crimes as non-criminal incidents,” said union chief Paul Nunziato.

Some travelers said they had been victims of the practice.

Kaya Tileu, 26, a resident of the Upper East Side who works on Wall Street, filed a theft report Feb. 22 alleging that his $200 wallet, $300 in cash and credit cards were swiped from inside a JFK McDonald’s.

The original paperwork listed Tileu as a grand-larceny victim. But a Post-it note attached to his police report advised the cop who filed it, “This is a lost property. — Capt.”

(Source: NY Post / YWN-4705)