EDITORIAL MORE COPS NOW COUNCILMAN SMITH OFFERS A QUICK FIX FOR MAKING L.A. SAFER.

LOS Angeles City Councilman Greig Smith has come up with a stunningly simple short-term solution to a rather complex problem -- how to cut crime when we can't hire enough cops to keep our streets safe.

Do more with the cops we have now. It's easier than it might sound at first.

Last year, the City Council jacked up trash fees to hire more cops. But the beleaguered reputation of the Los Angeles Police Department -- and a high demand for officers elsewhere -- is making that difficult. The city is unable to hire new cops faster than old ones retire or quit, leaving a huge pot of refuse-fee cash unspent.

Enter Smith. The Valley councilman has proposed using those funds to pay cops to work overtime. Every time one officer calls in sick, another would work extra hours to cover his or her shift. That way, every shift and every patrol would be fully staffed.

This is the same sort of overtime-based system that the Los Angeles Fire Department uses, and it only makes sense to extend it to the LAPD. After all, we should be no less worried about the violence in our streets than the prospect of brush fire or our homes burning down.

And the LAPD, as currently structured, is perfectly organized for this kind of arrangement.

Thanks to a political deal former Mayor James Hahn cut with the Police Protective League in 2001, some 70 percent of L.A. cops work a compressed workweek -- meaning they have plenty of spare time to come in and do overtime shifts.

About one-third of the city's sworn officers hold permits to work a second job, and undoubtedly many others do so without permits. So if they're going to moonlight, they might as well be moonlighting for the people of Los Angeles.

Smith's colleague, Councilman Bernard Parks, objects with the fair complaint that the compressed workweek is, in fact, a big part of the problem. It complicates schedule-making in such a way that leaves shifts unfilled. Even without implementing Smith's proposal, Parks says, the compressed workweek compels the department to rely too heavily on overtime.

As a former L.A. police chief, Parks would know. And he's right: In a perfect world, scrapping the compressed workweek would be a more obvious, cost-effective way to leverage the LAPD's manpower.

But this isn't a perfect world, and the compressed workweek isn't going anywhere for now. It's become a standard part of L.A. cops' benefit package, and the only way the city could get rid of it would be to give up much, much more at the collective-bargaining table.

Smith is working within the realm of what's realistic. And reality is that we can't afford to dawdle on the city's crime problems. We need to act, now.

Step one is to bring our policing efforts up to speed, and Smith has offered an immediately available way to do just that. It's the best -- and, for that matter, the only -- plan anyone's put on the table so far.