Public Safety, Political Safety : Officeholders and candidates can’t go wrong advocating more cops on the street. But experience shows that there are more effective ways to confront crime.

Pete Wilson’s got a cure for his sagging poll numbers: crime. Richard Riordan’s 3,500 cops keep us quietly distracted.

Ask any politician: Public safety is far and away the single most important issue in the minds of voters in the San Fernando Valley.

It is so pervasive that you find little disagreement among these politicians--regardless of party affiliation--over what to do about it.

Valley voters’ outspoken demands for greater police protection guided the last mayoral campaign. Reflecting that message, Valley politicians with virtually a single voice have called for more police officers.

Of course, the same crime-dazed constituents (while cringing before L.A.’s 1,000-plus annual homicides) have also regularly rejected attempts to pay for more protection by raising property taxes an average of a few dollars a month. Even a measure allowing the use of airport revenues for police, fire and paramedic service had tough sledding in the tightfisted northwest Valley.

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Unanimity among elected officials also ends when it comes to paying for 1,000 more officers, the Administration’s goal. The Valley’s Zev Yaroslavsky and Laura Chick, staunch yes-on-cops council members, are among those daring to ask the source of the necessary hundreds of millions of dollars.

But if the road to the peaceable kingdom leads through a dark wood, there seems to be no widespread doubt that the Safe City will contain 3,500 additional sworn officers who are, in the inevitable words, “on the streets.”

Lost amid the pandering is the unfortunate fact that there is no reason to believe that more police officers on the streets will reduce crime at all.

The consensus among many experts, foremost among them James Q. Wilson of Harvard, is that more uniformed officers “on the street” do not, in the long run, reduce crime.

Studies across the nation conducted by law-enforcement experts have found that when police presence has been substantially increased in a given area, crimes against businesses like burglaries and vandalism go down for a while, then return to the pre-increase level. There is little or no impact on violent crime.

Think about it. Los Angeles has about 7,600 police officers; New York, about 26,000. Does anyone seriously think New York is safer than Los Angeles?

So when Councilman Hal Bernson shamelessly grandstands by suggesting we cannibalize other vital city services to provide more police, he is doing us all a great disservice. Playing on our fears, he offers false solutions. This opiate not only will not make our streets safer, it will worsen other very real problems confronting our neighborhoods.

Given the non-deterrent quality of black-and-whites, the place more police officers would do some good is in detective work, actually catching criminals after they have committed crimes. Anyone who has been robbed or burglarized (as I have recently) has experienced the frustration of reporting it to a police officer while knowing the possessions are gone forever and probably the burglar as well.

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This, however, is hardly the resounding rallying cry that pandering politicians produce. It’s hard to get voters riled up about more detectives behind desks or in the field. No Adam-12, no dice.

(For instance, the burglar who broke into more than 200 homes in the Valley was obviously not deterred by police patrols. He was, however, identified by good detective work.)

We do need to increase the number of police--not for the reasons Gov. Wilson, Mayor Riordan and Councilman Bernson have laid out, but to ensure that there are always enough officers to respond to emergencies. And, as the Christopher Commission pointed out, excessive overtime can lead to high stress among officers. We’d be better served by paying our officers more and not pushing so much overtime on them.

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But let’s not let the politicians delude us into thinking that armed strength alone will make a quick dent in the problem. That way lies quick disillusionment, and we mustn’t allow ourselves to start thinking that crime-prone parts of the city can be “pacified” by a massive show of force.

The problems of society cannot be addressed by law enforcement alone. Instead of buying into the more-cops rhetoric, we need to confront our problems head-on. Money spent making us “feel safer” would be more wisely invested in our schools and neighborhoods. Then we truly would be safer.