There are too many TV and radio station helicopters hovering over too many densely populated areas for not enough good reasons.

Late last month over central Phoenix, a city where slightly more than 1.5 million people reside, one police helicopter was joined by five local news helicopters – that’s right, five – in pursuit of a crime suspect trying to make a getaway in a truck.

Two of the helicopters collided, both hit the ground in a flaming heap. The four people in the helicopters – a pilot and a cameraman in each – were killed.

This should’ve and would’ve been a much larger and longer story if not for the fortunate fact that both helicopters landed in a park, just a few yards from a housing development. No one on the ground was injured. Only four people died.

But the next one – and there will be a next one – will almost surely be worse. And for what? To show a car chase? To show another car chase?

Over New York City, five days a week, TV news choppers make speculative flights in search of news that often once barely made for stoop gossip beyond the block on which it occurred.

Helicopters carrying TV cameras will hover over such relatively small stories as warehouse fires or overturned 18-wheelers that has spilled heads of lettuce onto a roadway.

Yep, even if the population above and below is put at needless risk, you don’t want to get beat to such breaking news.

Thus, the TV stations’ helicopter mandate often has less to do about news than it does with proving to the viewers that the station does, in fact, have its own news copter to provide live reports and pictures just for the sake of providing live reports and pictures from a helicopter.

Helicopters, however, are a lot like motorcycles. One small failing of man and/or machine can become an enormous one, lethal to pilot, passenger and the residents of the city below. Helicopters are not very forgiving machines.

What happened the other week in Phoenix will happen again. It’s therefore time for NYC to diminish the likelihood of it happening here.

For starters, the NYPD and local news-gathering, helicopter-enriched entities must meet and make shared-concern and shared-cost changes. News and traffic choppers should operate from a shared pool.

For example, if helicopters must hover above the scene of a just-ended car chase, make it two helicopters – the police copter and the news pool copter – instead of six. Let all the cooperating TV stations share the live feed and the cost.

There’s just no good reason to put hundreds of people at risk for no good reason.

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The very notion that TV networks absolve themselves of accountability by issuing “not responsible” disclaimers before highly dubious infomercials is as ugly as the ugliest scam found in the sells.

The network accepts money in exchange for half-hour blocks of ad time – ads often designed to rip-off the station’s viewers – and then the network wants us to believe that it has nothing to do with it?

An infomercial lately seen here, there and everywhere pitches a good-for-what-ails-ya concoction called, “Rice ‘n Shine.” Its inventor, a Patty McPeak, repeatedly swears to its incredible uses. For example:

“[Using Rice ‘n Nice] is how you prevent yourself from getting sick. You give your body the nutrient tools to heal itself.”

Sounds fabulous. But if you stick it through to the end – and that’s after the time has run out to call for the special deal – the following graphic appears:

“These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

In other words, everything claimed in the infomercial that the product can and will do, it actually can’t.