Give us back Sgt. Friday

WHAT A tempting week it’s been for a columnist. So many choices, so few words. In reverse order, to jack up the suspense, here are the runners-up for column topics:

A California state Senate bill to declare Zinfandel the official state wine, and the prospect of infuriated Pinot Noir lovers storming the Capitol brandishing antique corkscrews.

Helpful hints for Californians to show their support for the Danes’ free speech: Visit Solvang! Visit Legoland! If you don’t have the time for that -- unlike Muslim rioters who seem to have plenty of free time -- buy Danish butter cookies and copies of “Hamlet.” (Just so you know, Copenhagen chewing tobacco is not made in Copenhagen.)

But the winning topic, as always, is ... terrorism!

President Bush tried to put a new spin on old news when he announced that his G-men had foiled a plot against the tallest building in L.A., which he flubbingly called the Liberty Tower. (There’s no such building; there is a 73-story edifice that everyone I know calls the Library Tower.) It’s an understandable slip; Bush has been using the word “liberty” a lot lately, except when it’s preceded by the word “civil.”’

L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was ticked off that he wasn’t told about Bush’s remarks before he made them, and that’s understandable too. The White House, which has been downright chatty with the mayors of New York and Chicago, has been ducking him since he took office.

The foiled 4-year-old Library Tower conspiracy was hardly news, in part because it’s just so obvious a target. So is Los Angeles International Airport, and a very real plot to bomb it was thwarted in 1999 when a U.S. Customs agent at the Canadian border stopped an Algerian man on his way here with a trunk full of explosives. It’s also old news that the feds and Los Angeles have never been best buds, and things have only gotten frostier since California went blue in the last four presidential elections.

The new news was Villaraigosa’s announcement that four LAPD cops will be assigned to a terrorism “intelligence fusion center,” joining local, state and fed folks.

I’m all for coordination. It took unconscionable years -- after the 1992 riots, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the deadly lessons of 9/11 -- just for city and county law enforcement to get “radio interoperability” so they can talk on the same frequency in a crisis.

But then Villaraigosa added that the city has found the money to assign 83 cops and firefighters to an antiterrorism detail.

I am way not OK with that.

Why is Los Angeles going into the antiterrorism business when it can’t even keep up with the anti-crime business? Every single elected official in this town -- and a lot of unelected ones -- endlessly carp about the cop shortage. And suddenly we can spare a few dozen to do the federal government’s job?

L.A. doesn’t have the manpower to send police to an accident unless there are severed limbs blocking traffic lanes. And property crimes? Does the phrase “do it yourself” ring a bell?

After a friend’s house was broken into and ransacked recently, the LAPD showed up, looked around for a while and left a document pointing out: “Significant decreases in personnel have made it impossible for detectives to personally discuss each and every case with all crime victims.”

Police Chief Bill Bratton’s name is synonymous with the “broken windows” theory -- the eminently sound principle that cracking down on small crimes nips bigger offenses in the bud. It’s one reason he keeps asking for more cops.

But most of the broken windows in L.A. are smashed by burglars, not Al Qaeda.

Terrorism is, at its core, a federal responsibility. That’s why it’s called homeland security, not hometown security.

California is already getting short-pocketed: The figures aren’t that much better now than they were in 2002, when California got $1.33 per capita and Wyoming -- Dick Cheney’s home state, where the biggest target of opportunity must be Old Faithful -- got $9.78 per capita.

Now L.A. is going to stretch its thin blue line even thinner? Villaraigosa was right about this: The city, like the state, should get back more of the bucks this prosperous “donor state” so generously sends off to D.C.

I don’t have a smidgen of doubt that working an antiterrorism detail is way sexier than tracking B&Es; in Devonshire Division, but that’s what the job is about.

Officers, please, don’t try to be Kiefer Sutherland in “24” when we really need you to be Jack Webb in “Dragnet.”