COP STOPS KNIT BLACKS IN ANGER.

Byline: SHARON WOODSON-BRYANT Local View

YOU won't find me in the LAPD's recently released racial profiling statistics.

I am not a young, African-American male. But I have been stopped. I do not look like a gangbanger. But I have been humiliated. I have had that unconscious bond of trust shattered by racial profiling.

Required by a federal consent decree in response to allegations that the Los Angeles Police Department had a pattern of abusing the civil rights of minorities, the study found that Latino and African-American drivers were stopped and ordered from their cars twice as frequently as whites.

But no one talks about encounters like mine. I wasn't arrested or given any kind of ticket. Yet, I was abruptly evicted from my status as an American citizen to that of a one-dimensional black.

I don't fit into the study because this didn't all happen in Los Angeles and it didn't all happen last month. Nor can my being stopped and searched by the police be a result of what the study termed ``a perceived threat attributable to the unique history of gang activity in Los Angeles.''

I was pulled over in the early 1970s while driving my red Corvair convertible in Topeka, Kan. I was college student home visiting for the weekend and had just left a friend's apartment around 10 p.m. The red lights came suddenly from behind, and when I stopped, the white officer looked at me and said, ``Get out and open your trunk.''

He and his partner searched my car, as I stood by frightened, not understanding why this was happening to me. They never explained, and in a hateful tone, the policemen just said I could leave.

No, I wasn't physically harmed. But psychologically, I was injured. It was like a scuff mark I can never polish out of my mind. Driving home, the almost-forgotten memory of police dogs chasing me and my friends as we were leaving a ``Jack and Jill'' party downtown almost a decade earlier resurfaced. Thirty little junior high kids running for our lives because we were black. Afterwards my parents explained that ``police aren't used to seeing that many black kids downtown and they figured we were doing something wrong.''

But this is my reality as an African-American female who has lived 50 years in this country. During my junior year at the University of Kansas, two Lawrence cops burst into my apartment and interrogated my roommates and myself because someone had a tape deck stolen from their car and we were prime suspects. Why? Because we were the only blacks in the complex.

My experiences are rich with consequences. I resent being obsessively cataloged, labeled and judged by my dark skin. But racial profiling is a powerful equalizing and unifying force. It cuts across all socioeconomic levels and education. It clumsily advertises the vulnerability of all blacks. It diminishes our sense of justice and self.

And it unites us in anger.

In the last several years I have been stopped in Los Angeles, where I live now, for what may or may not have been racial profiling. One officer banged on my rear window as he came around my car and yelled that I had cut him off on the San Diego Freeway. Another time I was stopped in Burbank only a block away from home because my rear brake light was out.

But I didn't get any tickets, and I can't possibly know if my blackness had anything to do with the cops' decisions to stop me. Nor could the detailed analysis of the data from the city study determine why black and Latino drivers are more likely to be searched during police stops.

No, this is not a color-blind America, and racial profiling is the great reminder for those blacks who may have gone deep cover into the white world. It can be a reality check that strikes unexpectedly like a cancer.

Even if it hasn't happened to some people yet, having money, a good job, a little prestige or even holding an elected position does not make them immune. It is a vast web catching the innocent and well as the guilty. It is the African-American's moment of truth.