Some day, a remake of “Dragnet” may...

Some day, a remake of “Dragnet” may begin with the narrator intoning:

“My name’s Joe Friday. I’m a cop. I’m armed with a 9-millimeter automatic pistol and a laptop computer. . . .”

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, acknowledging complaints about the way his troops wield their pens, said Monday that the department plans to install computers in about 50 cars in the Hollywood Division over the next six months.

Gates hopes that the two-year program, financed by a $246,000 grant from the federal government’s National Institute of Justice, will lead to the permanent installation of computers for the entire force. The electronic weapons are already carried by police in Wichita, Kan., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I cannot tell you the number of times judges and prosecutors complain about the handwritten reports of our police officers,” Gates said. “Judges and prosecuting attorneys are going to be ecstatic.”

Officers will be able to plug the machines into telephones and instantly send reports to a main computer. Detectives inside the police station can then make printouts.

Inasmuch as an estimated 20% of patrol officers’ time is spent writing reports and bringing them into the station, the machines will be great time-savers (except, of course, when the computers go down).

Six in 10 affluent Angelenos say they’d be hard-pressed to get through the day without a microwave oven, half say they couldn’t go on without an answering machine and 20% couldn’t face life without deluxe hotel reservations when traveling.

Such are the results of a Roper Organization poll of “Life-Style Necessities of the Rich”--households with incomes in excess of $100,000.

Other must-haves were answering machines (required by 53% of those polled), home computers (47%), a maid or housekeeper (28%), car phones (15%) and health club memberships (15%).

Only 8% ranked swimming pools as necessities. But, then, maybe the other 92% consider swimming pools a natural part of the landscape.

Woody Allen is saying nasty things about Southern California again. You may recall that in the movie “Annie Hall,” he dismissed Los Angeles as “a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” (Obviously, he didn’t know about the brassiere museum on Hollywood Boulevard.)

In the current “New York Stories,” he tells a voodoo priestess living in a small apartment in Gotham that she should move out here.

“By now,” he explains, “you’d have a swimming pool and your own church.”

An 1892 property tax receipt on display in the lobby of the County Administration Building shows that attitudes about paying such bills haven’t changed much over the years.

The resident, Vicente Perez, was living on property in San Pedro that had been appraised at $56. He was taxed 67 cents for the land, plus 8 cents for a “special school tax.”

But Perez shrewdly elected to pay an installment of 38 cents in November and another 37 cents the following June. Why pay the whole thing in November and let the county collect the extra interest on the 37 cents?