EDITORIAL : SEEING RED; SETTLING COP'S OVERTIME SUIT IS APPALLING.

SIX years later, the city of Los Angeles has yet to finish paying for the 1992 riots.

Nearly 6,300 police officers on patrol during those violent days claim they were paid their overtime later than permitted under a federal law, and now they want the city to pay them a collective $70 million in penalties.

The City Council, as it usually does when faced with a massive lawsuit stemming from a problem that never should have occurred, has decided to throw money at the cops.

The council has agreed to offer them $21 million - $3 million of which will go to their lawyers and nearly $500,000 to automate the inefficient payroll system that caused the pay delay in the first place.

Before the council gives away the public's money with such alacrity, we call on our earnest public servants to come out of the closed-session closet and discuss how such incompetence and mismanagement occurred, who was responsible and how they have been dealt with. Our bet is that everyone responsible has gotten pay raises, including Chief Administrative Officer Keith Comrie and the council itself, all of whom bear ultimate responsibility.

What's outrageous about the officers' lawsuit is that they have the audacity to ask for more money. Remember, they got their overtime pay. And remember that the city was having financial problems as the state was in the throes of a horrific recession.

We know it wasn't a walk in the woods, but the background to the riots was the vicious beating inflicted on Rodney King by LAPD officers and the acquittal of those officers (who had the full support of the department) in state court. Then of course, there's the flawed performance of the LAPD in the critical first hours after the verdict, when command breakdowns allowed a disturbance to escalate into a riot.

To leaders like Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, any deal that puts more money into the pockets of city employees is a good deal. But for whom? That money comes out of the taxpayers' pockets. It could be better spent on paving roads or new police facilities, to name just a few.

It's deplorable that the money will go instead to pay city employees who already were paid.