Lenore Skenazy might think it's well and good for her son to ride solo on public transportation in Manhattan, but the top cop in Minneapolis emphatically urges local parents to not try this at home.

"Even here in town, on light rail or the bus," said Police Chief Tim Dolan. "If that kid gets off at the wrong spot, at the wrong place, he's in a lot of trouble."

Dolan was an investigator in the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling, the 11-year-old boy from St. Joseph, Minn., who was taken at gunpoint while bicycling in rural Stearns County with his brother and a friend. Dolan advises the parents of young boys, who are most at risk, to err on the side of caution.

Dolan, 54, has reason to be wary. He was attacked as a child not once, but twice. The oldest of four boys, Dolan said that when he was about 12, a boy who was about five years older came to his house and asked him to go fishing. The family knew the older teenager, and his mother, who was home at the time, said yes.

"I went with him, and he took me down to the [Mississippi] River and trapped me under the Lowry Bridge. It was very clear what he wanted. He finally let me go, after a very tearful plea. But if he hadn't, I couldn't have escaped. There are these big rooms under the Lowry Bridge and there's no way out."

The second incident also happened in the mid-'60s, when Dolan was a paperboy.

"It was 5 a.m. and I was delivering my route, and a guy grabbed me and dragged me between two houses and threw me on the ground. I screamed, and people came, and he let me go, but it was a terrible experience."

Because of those chilling memories, the 6-foot Dolan, who went to DeLaSalle High School, didn't take the bus alone from his North Side home to school until he was 15. He does concede the media can whip already fearful parents into irrational frenzy, "but it doesn't matter what the statistics say about attack and abduction by a stranger being more remote than being struck by lightning, or it being unlikely by a zillion-to-one odds.

"I experienced it twice -- once by someone I knew, but also once by a stranger -- in this city, and not so long ago."

KATE MCCARTHY