When the facts are inconvient or ugly, suppress them. If you have employees who refuse to play along and remain wedded to the truth, threaten to take away their pension. This is the consequence threatened to Lawrence A. Greenfeld of the Justic Department of Justice when he refused to conceal the truth about a study on racial profiling.
The demotion of the official, Lawrence A. Greenfeld, whom President Bush named in 2001 to lead the Bureau of Justice Statistics, caps more than three years of simmering tensions over charges of political interference at the agency. And it has stirred anger and tumult among many Justice Department statisticians, who say their independence in analyzing important law enforcement data has been compromised.
Officials at the White House and the Justice Department said no political pressure had been exerted over the statistics branch. But they declined to discuss the job status of Mr. Greenfeld, who told his staff several weeks ago that he had been asked to move on after 23 years of generally high marks as a statistician and supervisor at the agency. Mr. Greenfeld, who was initially threatened with dismissal and the possible loss of some pension benefits, is expected to leave the agency soon for a lesser position at another agency.
With some 50 employees, the Bureau of Justice Statistics is a low-profile agency within the sprawling Justice Department. But it produces dozens of reports a year on issues like crime patterns, drug use, police tactics and prison populations and is widely cited by law enforcement officials, policy makers, social scientists and the news media. Located in an office separate from the Justice Department, it strives to be largely independent to avoid any taint of political influence.
The flashpoint in the tensions between Mr. Greenfeld and his political supervisors came four months ago, when statisticians at the agency were preparing to announce the results of a major study on traffic stops and racial profiling, which found disparities in how racial groups were treated once they were stopped by the police.
Political supervisors within the Office of Justice Programs ordered Mr. Greenfeld to delete certain references to the disparities from a news release that was drafted to announce the findings, according to more than a half-dozen Justice Department officials with knowledge of the situation. The officials, most of whom said they were supporters of Mr. Greenfeld, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.
Mr. Greenfeld refused to delete the racial references, arguing to his supervisors that the omissions would make the public announcement incomplete and misleading. Instead, the Justice Department opted not to issue a news release on the findings and posted the report online.
I'm trying to work up some moral outrage, but my worker-upper is pretty tired out by now. What is it about these statistics that they needed to be buried? Would they reflect badly on the administration's efforts to woo minority voters away from the Democrats? Or is it that the director wouldn't back down, and insisted truth was more important? The higher up who axed the full release of information has now been moved to a "senior position" in Homeland Security. That is naturally a place where toeing the line is more important than finding the truth. Sure. Right. And I've got some swampland in the 'glades to sell you.
Posted by binky at August 24, 2005 09:14 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics