<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Trading Cards Are Helping Officers to Be Good Sports

The last thing you want when you’re pulled over by a cop is a ticket. Now, more and more law enforcement agencies in California are handing out trading cards that include photographs of officers and, on the back, brief biographical information.

No, not like how many arrests they made in the ’92 season.

More personal stuff: How long they’ve been with the department, their specialty, how they like to spend their free time, and their favorite anti-crime message.

Sport Shots, a Rancho Cucamonga company, has produced the cards for about 1,000 officers in 15 departments and agencies around the state; the most recent entry: the Inland Empire Division of the California Highway Patrol.

The Campbell Police Department, near San Jose, was one of the first to buy into the trading cards in a big way. The idea was to promote friendly relations between beat cops and children in a neighborhood of recent Southeast Asian immigrants--kids who, through their cultural upbringing, were distrustful of law enforcement.

“We ordered 10,000 cards and promoted them through the local school. We told the kids, ‘Collect all 20!’ In a matter of weeks, they were all gone and collectors were calling us, wanting to buy them,” said Campbell Police Chief Jim Cost. “We made enough money to order 50,000 more to give away.”

Now, when an officer drives through the neighborhood, “kids are running up to them, asking for cards. Talk about opening doors,” Cost said.

Even Cost has discarded business cards in favor of trading cards. “An irate citizen will come into my office,” the chief said, “and I’ll hand him a trading card with my picture on it, and he can’t help but smile.”

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Udder Protest: Petaluma dairy owner Dan Benedetti enjoys depicting his mascot, Clo the Cow, in various caricatures on area billboards. There’s Wolfgang Amadeus Moo-zart, Moo-na Lisa and Christopher Cow-lumbus.

You get the idea.

His latest effort was Clo as snorkel diver. Meet Jacques Cowsteau.

Ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau was not, uh, amoosed. He has filed a defamation of character lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco.

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Shopping Fever

As holiday shoppers race to hit the local malls, it’s interesting to note that five of the nation’s 25 largest malls are located in Southern California. The nation’s biggest mall is in Bloomington, Minn., home to the Mall of America, which has 4.2 million square feet. Here are the Southland’s top five:

MALL SQUARE FEET NATIONAL RANK Del Amo Fashion Center, Torrance 3,000,000 Second South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa 2,600,000 Third Lakewood Center Mall 2,498,000 Fourth Panorama Mall, Panorama City 1,750,000 16th Northridge Fashion Center 1,545,000 25th

Source: International Council of Shopping Centers, New York

Compiled by Times researcher TRACY THOMAS

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Leaping Lizards!: Three scientists set out into the Monterey County woods to study how leaves and twigs on the forest floor are recycled to promote vegetation growth. But when they found their specimen buckets filling with lizards who could only have fallen, not crawled, into the containers, their research took a different direction. Up.

“We figured it was free knowledge that we might as well take advantage of,” said William Schlesinger, a professor at Duke University. So for the next 31 months, they distributed and monitored their buckets, tagged the trophies and, in this week’s journal Ecology, estimated that about 12,000 lizards fell from trees in a two-acre area of California woodland.

Which is why you want to wear a hat in the woods.

The scientists wondered if this phenomenon has anything to do with the evolution of mammal flight, but clearly there will be no advancements in this generation.

“One particularly clumsy individual was captured five times in four different collectors,” the group reported.

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Street Justice: Because it’s nice when the bad guys are caught--especially when it involves the help of bystanders who dared to get involved--we bring you word of two robberies:

In San Francisco, a shoeshine man chased down a mugger who snatched $300 from a man at an automated teller machine. As scores of people watched the midmorning robbery in the Financial district, 28-year-old Wardell Finscher chased the suspect, then pointed him out to police after they caught up.

And in San Diego, two gunmen burst into a San Diego Trust & Savings branch, fired a shot, grabbed about $4,000 cash and took off in their car.

But not too far. An elderly, unidentified motorist spotted the attempted getaway and rammed the suspects’ vehicle. “Well, I guess we got them,” she told the pursuing officer as the dust settled.

Even without her help, authorities would have had a good lead. Before the robbers entered the bank, they cleverly donned their ski masks in front of the ATM security camera outside.

EXIT LINE

“I hope that people who are hurting will call in and . . . I can maybe, somehow through my experience, help them get up that day, put on makeup, shave, brush their teeth and get out and not just stay hovered in the house.”

--The former Tammy Faye Bakker, who explained to ABC-TV’s “Prime Time Live”--in full makeup--why she is setting up a 900-telephone help line for despondent people. The ex-wife of imprisoned televangelist Jim Bakker is now remarried and hovering about her hometown of Rancho Mirage.