God sets that kind of feast at a satirist’s table only on rare occasions. : Laurie and the Blues

The tendency here is to jam it to the cops.

Laurie Jean Wood, 29, was arrested, booked and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The weapon was a knife with a three-inch blade.

She carried it for a simple reason. She was terrified.

Last June, a man later identified as the Toluca Lake rapist broke into her apartment and tried to assault a roommate. Their screams drove him off.

He left them scarred by his violence.

The roommate disappeared and Laurie Jean wondered how she would protect herself if the rapist returned.

A divorcee with a young daughter, she hated the very notion of a gun in the house. So she bought a knife with a leather case and strapped it to her thigh.

In subsequent days, news of the raping, killing Night Stalker began saturating Southern California.

Laurie Jean Wood was awfully glad she had the knife.

Then on Aug. 10, at about midnight, she was parked on a Burbank street waiting for a boyfriend to get off work. A police car rolled up.

She says the cop searched her only because she was a woman. The police report says her dress was halfway up her thighs and he spotted the knife when he looked in the car.

He booked her.

God sets that kind of feast at a satirist’s table only on rare occasions. Little Laurie Jean and the Animal in Blue. I could feel my fingers twitch.

I will admit to you that I wrote one hell of a first draft. Jail the victims, save the rapists. Protect the people from 5-foot, 2-inch, 110-pound mothers with ladyfinger knives strapped to their thighs.

I knew the Burbank p.d. was not without sin. A year ago feminist lawyer Gloria Allred nailed them to the wall for strip-searching a woman arrested on a traffic warrant.

“It’s an old cop theory,” I wrote. “Nothing is safer than a naked woman driver.”

Cops, oddly, are easy prey. They’re always out there in the worst of places at the worst of times. And they aren’t always the swiftest of people. Scholars usually don’t become cops. Or journalists.

That’s the thing, you see. I know cops. I’ve known them for 30 years from San Francisco to L.A. We’re alike in some ways. We prowl the city’s underbelly together. We meet at the crime scenes. We share the horror.

What I know about cops is what I know about journalists. We make mistakes. We use bad judgment. Sometimes we kill people, each in our own way.

But great God we’re human.

I thought about that after writing the first draft. Laurie and The Pigs. She thought the cop who had searched her at the scene did so in a manner too personal.

“You never know,” I wrote, “when some broad is going to be hiding a 9-millimeter, semiautomatic Uzi rifle under her breast.”

It pained me to realize I couldn’t use that column.

What did it, I think, was a conversation with Burbank Police Chief Glen Bell.

“The woman had a concealed weapon,” he said. “What does a policeman do when he’s following the law?”

I asked Bell about the search that seemed too personal.

“I’ve known the officer for a long time,” the chief said. “I doubt that he’d do that. Some would, I guess, but not him. At any rate, she ought to come to the source of the problem, and that’s me.”

I sat there thinking.

A woman who takes to carrying a knife with a three-inch blade because she was damn near raped is no criminal. It’s a scary time in the flat, hot Valley.

But the Penal Code makes no provision for terror. It says you can’t carry a concealed weapon. An orderly society functions as much on the restrictions it imposes on the good as the restraints it imposes on the bad.

I’ll never believe that the cop who booked Laurie Jean Wood couldn’t have used his judgment and let her go. She had no priors. Her boyfriend did come to the car when the officer was still there. She sure as hell wasn’t Ma Barker.

But I’ve got to think the cop did the best he could with the perceptions he had. He read the code. He made the arrest.

If his search of Laurie Jean was a romp through a sexual garden, I hope Gloria Allred eats him alive. You’ve got to be able to trust a cop. Game time is over when rights are at stake. There’s nothing funny about psychological rape.

So I come down to this. Urban warfare, like its international counterpart, takes victims among the innocent. Good guys get hurt when bad guys start shooting.

I bleeped the first draft from my computer. It’s floating around out there like electronic fireflies in a cosmic sunset.

No one’s right, no one’s wrong and everyone’s to blame.

Terror does that to a world.