A KIRO Team 7 Investigation shows you how police may be skirting racial profiling laws and getting away with it.

Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne founds it's as easy as filling in the wrong box.

RACIAL PROFILING Racial Profiling is the subject of a public hearing Thursday night. The hearing will be held at 7 p.m. at Mount Zion Baptist Church, which is at 1634 19th Ave. in Seattle. Get more details at the State Patrol Website

Your drivers license doesn't list your race, so when you get pulled over, the cops get to choose. If I got a ticket, there is no question a "W" would get filled into this box.

But a KIRO Team 7 Investigation discovered that if you're black, Hispanic or mixed race, you might also get labeled as white.

TEAM 7 INVESTIGATIONS If you have a story you'd like to report to Team 7 Investigators e-mail us.

Consola Dill admits the color of her skin had nothing to do with her getting pulled over by a Washington State Trooper. She was driving too fast.

However, while looking at her ticket, she noticed the "race" box was marked white, clearly not correct.

Dill at first complained just to her family. They were not surprised.

"I have a brother; He was white on his ticket. He has two African-American friends. After he brought it up to them, 'I'm white on my ticket', they looked on their tickets and they were white also," Dill said.

Dill contacted an attorney and went to court, asking a judge to change the race labeling on her ticket.

"Then I started thinking 'Yeah. Maybe there calling the minorities white now so it doesn't look like they are doing a racial profile,'" she said.

Since 1999, the Washington State Patrol has been keeping meticulous "race" records of each and every traffic stop. Overall, the statistics look fair, but...

"The study was based on the assumption the troopers were accurately recording the ethnic background of the people they were stopping," said David Heller, an attorney.

KIRO Team 7 Investigators discovered there is an incentive for some police officers to misclassify race on a ticket. The State Patrol, for example, targets certain troopers for "retraining" if their race statistics are outside the norm. Marking traffic stops like Consola Dill as white could prevent troopers who are racial profiling from getting caught.

KIRO Team 7 Investigators have also confirmed cases where State Troopers have marked Hispanic citizens as white.

After tickets are filed, it's almost impossible to determine if a race mistake has been made, so start checking it yourself.

Washington State Patrol administrators would love to hear from you if one of their trooper's errors.