EDITORIAL WASTED MILLIONS CITY HALL NEEDS MORE THAN A STUDY TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT FIGHTING GANGS.

CIVIL-rights activist Connie Rice, L.A.'s ubiquitous consultant on civic issues, says Los Angeles needs a new way of thinking about gangs. That's her pitch on a proposal to win a $465,000 contract for creating a new gang-fighting strategic plan for the city.

She is surely correct that the city, which to many Americans is synonymous with street gangs, is in need of a new direction.

After more than a quarter century of trying to stop street gangs from terrorizing the city's neighborhoods, recruiting a new generation of boys and girls and turning our communities into war zones, very little has been accomplished.

Not that we haven't been trying, though in a piecemeal fashion, through a collection of little programs, gang injunctions and law enforcement. All together, the city of Los Angeles spends $26 million a year on various gang prevention and intervention programs.

Despite that investment, the efforts don't appear to have done much to stop or even slow the spread of gang influence or the resulting violence in Los Angeles. For instance, the city has 26 gang injunctions that put severe restrictions on identified gang members in various parts of the city, but not one gang member ever named in the injunctions has managed to meet the terms of renunciation - which suggests there's little follow-up, few successes.

Taxpayers are getting a dreadful return on their investment, yet City Hall keeps funding programs that do very little and demand even less of them.

City Councilman Tony Cardenas, who has been spearheading an effort to evaluate and renovate the city's collective gang efforts, said: ``We've been wasting a lot of money in this city.''

The City Council, on Cardenas' recommendation, is set to approve the contract Friday with Rice and her panel of gang experts at the Advancement Project to create a ``Gang Activity Reduction Strategy.'' Rice said the eventual goal is to create a plan rooted in the community that sets a goal of never losing one more child to gang life.

It's a noble goal. But even the most innovative plan the smartest brains in anti-gang policy-making could come up with will have little hope of success in coming to fruition in the morass of City Hall bureaucracy.

In this city, costly reports are used to generate some headlines for a politician before they are retired to one of City Hall's many dusty shelves.

Hopefully, Rice and her team will do a better job than their predecessors, but it's hard not to be skeptical. The city needs to get tough on the hard-core gangsters and get help to the vast majority of young people who lack educational skills, role models, alternatives and hope.

What the city has lacked until now has been the political will to confront this problem head-on. It's time for real action; Los Angeles can't afford another 25 years of throwing money into the endless money pit of ineffective efforts to get rid of gangs.