The Washington Post published an editor's note backing away from a suggestion last week that the Washington, D.C., police department under Chief Cathy Lanier, in reporting its annual homicide-closure rate, "may have manipulated data to foster a positive impression." The Post said a police department decision to include in a current year's closure count cases closed from previous years "casts the department in a more favorable light but does not mean that the underlying data are distorted." The original article was linked in a summary in Crime & Justice News.

The newspaper gave the chief a column to respond to the article. In the column, Lanier said that "to support its slanted claims," the Post had "used misleading and inflammatory quotes and ill-informed sources." She said the piece "left out information supplied by my department that would have invalidated the assertions contained in the story."