EDITORIAL CHANGING RULES EXTENSION OF LAPD DECREE IS NOT IN BEST INTEREST OF PUBLIC SAFETY.

IT'S been tough enough for the understaffed Los Angeles Police Department to absorb all the documentation and auditing rules that are required by the totally unnecessary federal consent decree.

It's been expensive too, with the department spending about $30 million or more each of the three years so far under the decree, with hundreds of officers tied up to make sure all of the nearly 200 provisions are being met.

But what makes it nearly impossible for the department to reach compliance is that the rules keep changing.

The five-year consent decree was the result of an agreement between the city of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Justice in the wake of the Rampart corruption scandal, in which officers were accused of shooting suspects, manipulating evidence and other illegal acts.

Except for the political ambitions of then City Attorney James Hahn and the anti-cop mentality of many of the city's movers and shakers, the city never would have surrendered control of the LAPD to the federal courts. Real leaders simply would have fixed what was broken.

Now the city faces the prospect of the consent decree becoming more or less permanent. To get out from it, the LAPD needs to have two full years of ``substantial'' compliance under its belt, which means achieving 95 percent of all its demands. That hasn't happened yet, and with only two years to go as of June 15, it leaves little time to spare.

Like Sisyphus, who was condemned by the ancient Greek gods to push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down to the bottom, LAPD officers have faced the unsettling challenge of seeing the rules change every time the consent decree gets nearly in compliance. The nitpicking by the independent monitor, Police Commission and top brass goes on and on.

``It seems that the rules keep changing and changing, and we're auditing and doing more auditing,'' said one division captain who had to take four officers away from crime fighting to work on compliance full time.

That these minor changes could extend the consent decree for even more years is a travesty, and likely to do more harm to the safety of Los Angeles than even gang violence. For example, the more than $30 million budgeted into the current fiscal year to pay for costs related to compliance with the consent decree could have been used to hire an entire squad of officers to fight crime.

Not surprisingly, the only one who benefits from a possible extension is the rule maker itself - the independent monitor, Kroll Associates. The consulting company, for which LAPD Chief William Bratton worked before getting hired by the city, is being paid $2 million a year to keep tabs on how well compliance is going. If the decree extended, guess who keeps its job?

Even Bratton now admits the consent decree is interfering with the business of making L.A. safer. Maybe he can persuade the mayor to show some backbone and fight any extension of the decree.