EDITORIAL FALSE ALARMS CITY HALL IS OBLIVIOUS TO THE REAL CRISIS IN L.A. POLICING.

IGNORE all the complaining you hear among members of the Los Angeles Police Commission about why the Police Department can no longer afford to respond to home-security systems.

It's all a false alarm.

The problem isn't that security systems are failing the city, but that city government is failing the public - yet again.

Under current city policy, the LAPD answers home or business burglar alarms only after the alarm company puts in a call to the owner. If no one answers the call, the company assumes there's an emergency, and the LAPD responds as time permits, usually after 45 minutes or so.

Complaining that the LAPD is wasting too much precious time responding to false alarms - which account for 95 percent of alarm soundings - the Police Commission plans to scrap its current alarm policy in January. In its place, the commission would institute a policy that can best be described as benign neglect:

Unless presented with hard evidence of a real emergency, the cops will assume the situation is benign, then neglect it entirely.

The effect of such a policy would be not only to declare open season for burglars in Los Angeles, but also to render immediately obsolete the burglar alarms in which many families and business have invested extensively. To get their money back, alarm owners would need to contract with a private security force.

In other words, they would need to pay a private corporation to perform a service that their tax dollars should already be covering.

It's not as though burglar alarms are a pure drain on city resources. False-alarm fees bring in more than $2.4 million each year, and alarm-permit fees bring in $3.1 million. If City Hall would clamp down on the 160,000 alarm owners who aren't paying fees at all, revenues could be even higher.

But the issue is less about money than about police availability. The LAPD remains about 1,000 officers below its authorized force of 10,000, a shortage that's exacerbated by officers' three- or four-day work schedule and the 1,000 officers on sick or disability leave. There simply aren't enough officers to go around, and undermanned cops are too busy answering calls to patrol the streets.

It's not that L.A. has too many false alarms, but too few cops.

That leaves the LAPD with little choice but to make hard decisions, and to cut services that, for some, could mean the difference between life and death.

This is a recurring theme in L.A. city government these days: Taxes are high and fees are climbing, but the quality and quantity of government services are going down.

There's a crisis in Los Angeles, but our leaders' response is to double- talk the problems and neglect to seek real solutions.

It says a lot about the state of the city that if you want adequate police protection, you have to buy it from private security firms.