COUNCILMAN'S GRIPE TOO FEW SPEEDING TICKETS.

Byline: Patrick McGreevy Daily News Staff Writer

Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez wants for his central city district what the San Fernando Valley gets - more speeding tickets.

At Wednesday's council meeting, Hernandez cited a report that showed Los Angeles Police Department officers wrote just 74 speeding tickets in the Central Division in September - compared to 906 in the Van Nuys Division, 698 in the West Valley Division and 1,555 in the Devonshire Division.

Hernandez said he wants to ensure that public safety is promoted equally.

"To me that's not a consistent policy and that's why I think in the inner city we need more safety measures," said Hernandez, whose district extends from the Westlake District west of downtown to northeast Los Angeles.

Hernandez said he was not trying to make the issue into one dividing the city along geographical lines.

"Maybe this is a situation where we need policies to try to bring us together to be one city," he said. "I do know not to speed out in the Valley because I'll get a ticket - and I wish people knew the same thing in the inner city."

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg agreed, calling the disparity "unbelievable." She supported Hernandez's call for a review of the deployment of traffic officers.

Hernandez also noted that the situation appears to be reversed for jaywalking. The LAPD wrote 400 pedestrian tickets in the Central Division in September, and just 43 pedestrian tickets in the West Valley.

"I want to understand that discrepancy," Hernandez said. "I have a problem if we're giving more respect to an automobile in the inner city than we do pedestrians and more respect to pedestrians in the suburbs than we do automobiles."

Lt. Tim McBride, an LAPD spokesman, said there were 282 major accidents in the Central Bureau and 557 in the Valley Bureau.

The department uses accident rates as a factor in deciding where to deploy traffic officers, he said.

He said the LAPD likely is targeting pedestrians in the inner-city areas because there is a higher incidence of accidents involving pedestrians there.

Councilwoman Laura Chick said she supports the review but warned that the issue should not be turned into another geographical argument over resources.

"I think we need to be careful in how we look at the cause of the things," she said. "One of the things that is of great concern to me is 100 people lost their lives to traffic accidents in the San Fernando Valley in 1995. More people died in the Valley from speeding than from crime."

The high number of fatal accidents convinced the LAPD last year to mount a crackdown on speeders, which may be partly responsible for the higher Valley numbers, officials say.

Hernandez raised the issue as part of a discussion of a report on the city's de-emphasis on the use of painted crosswalks in some neighborhoods.

The council shelved the report, which said the Department of Transportation has not been repainting crosswalks automatically when it resurfaces streets because painted crosswalks give pedestrians a false sense of security and subject the city to liability when accidents occur.

Next week, the council is expected to vote on a motion to review traffic enforcement and the role crosswalks play in accidents involving pedestrians.