EDITORIAL POLITICS OVER POLICY OUTRAGE METER: 9.

A fleet of high-tech trash trucks with quarter-million-dollar price tags sit idle because of broken throttles.

Hand-held computer devices costing $1,200 are supposed to help police officers comply with the federal consent decree but don't work right, and are bulky and heavy to boot.

A new burglar alarm policy that was a fraud wastes the time of patrol officers responding to false alarms.

When politics set public policy, this is what you get. And little is ever done at Los Angeles City Hall for any other reason than politics.

Bungling important policies and buying lemons by the boatloads seems to be what the nation's costliest municipal government does best. And a series of recent events provides ample proof of that statement.

Originally, the police department wanted to stop responding to unverified burglar alarms - which was 95 percent of them - and focus the small force of police officers on more serious crime. But narrow groups of community activists, council members who pander to them and burglar alarm businesses put a stop to it.

A watered-down policy was crafted that supposedly would fine people for false alarms and cut them off after the third offense Politics won over policy. City leaders knew then and admit now that it was unworkable.

At the same time, Caruso and other commissioners desperately want a new temporary downtown headquarters for LAPD brass, and then a sparkling new building as well, claiming the building has been allowed to rot, presumably through neglect. But city officials knew that when they decided to triple the investment in renovating City Hall to palace standards, when they could have built a police headquarters and fixed their own digs at the same time.

And despite the lack of funds, the city shelled out $1,200 a piece for 1,600 hand-held computers for cops to gather data that is required by the consent decree. But the gizmos apparently have malfunctioned during field tests, just as they did when Mayor James Hahn and Police Chief William Bratton tried to show them off to the public.

If that wasn't enough taxpayer money wasted, city officials confirmed this week that they pulled an entire fleet of 172 environmentally friendly trash trucks out of service. The $250,000-a-piece, diesel-liquefied natural gas trucks had stuck throttles, raising concerns about the kind of damage a trash truck with out-of-control acceleration could do to a city street. So old air-polluting trucks were pulled out of retirement for recent trash pickups, and garbage collectors are running up huge overtime costs working 12-hour days.

Things are clearly breaking down at City Hall. And it will take something more than another boatload of money to fix things. It will take some real leadership from someone not afraid of offending the city's power brokers, while pursuing the best interests of the city and its residents.