EDITORIAL THEY FAIL; WE PAY.

WHAT excuse could L.A. city leaders have for their apparent failure to get Los Angeles Police Department into compliance with the federal consent decree they created to cover up their failure of leadership?

It's not as though the consent decree were some foreign imposition that they might have a hard time understanding. Just look at its architects:

Mayor James Hahn negotiated the decree back when he was city attorney to conceal his failure to use his authority to stop the LAPD's excesses.

At that time, Gerald Chaleff, who now heads the LAPD's Consent Decree Bureau, was Police Commission chairman.

And before becoming LAPD chief, William Bratton served as a consultant in helping to write the terms of the consent decree that is costing $50 million this year alone - which is why the public is facing higher taxes and lower services.

Thus, three of the people directly responsible for obeying the consent decree also played an instrumental role in putting it together. They were well aware of their obligations, their responsibilities and the decree's time frame.

So what's gone wrong?

According to Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton, the department has fallen so hopelessly behind in complying with the decree that it now has little chance of being in compliance for two full years before 2006 - the benchmark for getting the federal government out of the LAPD's business.

At stake is more than just local control. The LAPD spends $50 million a year trying to keep up with the consent decree. That's an awful lot of money for a city that has a busted budget and an undermanned police force.

There are many ways the city could put that money to better use - and no one should understand that better than Hahn, Chaleff and Bratton.

But in typical, bureaucratic fashion at City Hall, officials lag on doing what they've said they will. The primary cause, according to Deaton associate Barb Garrett, is that the written orders instructing the LAPD's 9,000 officers on how to work within the decree have taken up to a year to be drafted, reviewed and approved.

While City Hall dawdles, taxpayer millions are frittered away.

Of course, that's nothing new.

The consent decree is the result of failure by past mayors, past councils, past commissions, past city attorneys and past police chiefs to rein in abuses within the LAPD. Their failure produced the Rampart scandal, which is costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now the failures of current city leadership seem likely to prolong the decree's life unnecessarily - at what could easily amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on how long it eventually takes to get into compliance.

They fail; we pay.

We pay through our tax dollars. We pay through streets made less safe by a police force dividing its time between patrolling and appeasing federal regulators. We pay through the avalanche of pay raises and benefit hikes that continue to rain on city leaders and bureaucrats despite decades of mismanagement.

For all we pay, we should at least be able to get some city leaders who honor the accords they themselves engineered.

For all we pay, we shouldn't be stuck with lame excuses for inexcusable derelictions of duty.