EDITORIAL UNTYING COPS' HANDS SMALL POLICY CHANGE MAKES BIG DIFFERENCE FOR LAPD'S CRIME-FIGHTING ABILITY.

IMAGINE one night you wake up to the sound of glass breaking. You think maybe a robber is trying to break in to your home. You call the police. Then you wait.

Fifteen long, nail-biting minutes later, the cops haven't arrived ...

That scenario has become all too common in Los Angeles. There are too few police officers, and the city's elected officials have lacked the will over the last decade to do anything about it. Judging by the way the mayor and City Council have handled their newest budget, that isn't going to change anytime soon.

But Los Angeles Police Department officials have given residents some hope that if they call for help in an emergency, they can at least expect officers to pull out all the stops to respond.

Because of a two-tiered system of ranking emergency calls at the LAPD, that hasn't been happening all the time. For some emergency calls, known as Code 2, officers weren't allowed to use lights and sirens - and had to obey the traffic rules, like all other motorists - when responding to a call.

It's ridiculous and self-defeating to split hairs on what constitutes a regular emergency and a really, super-duper urgent emergency. LAPD officials wisely recognized the folly of the policy, and abolished it last week. In effect, this unties the hands of officers so they can do a better job of keeping the public safe.

In just a week, patrol officers are saying they're able to get to emergency calls faster.

This is a key reform in a city where response times had become intolerably long. In the San Fernando Valley, which is the most spread-out area of the city, average response times for police calls increased from 9.8 minutes in 2001 to 11.2 minutes last year. In some areas, typical response times take even higher.

But as much as the reform helps, there won't be significant improvement in response times until more cops are hired or some of the hundreds of officers tied up by the federal court consent decree are freed up to get back to police work - instead of policing police officers.

The decree is the result of an agreement between the city and the U.S. Department of Justice after a scandal uncovered crimes by some gang officers in the city's Rampart division.

It's already cost the city about $100 million, and now the LAPD faces missing an important court-required deadline next week, which would keep the restrictive decree in effect even longer.

Micromanaging the officers on the street doesn't make for better policing. As the lights and sirens policy points out, the LAPD needs fewer restrictive policies - not more.