When Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty announced last week that he’d chosen Cathy Lanier, a 16-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department, to replace Charles Ramsey atop the police force, local media didn’t do much more than throw together a few details on her history and her ideas for fighting crime in the District. The City Paper, though, started digging.

The paper trail they uncovered on Lanier makes for relatively interesting reading by City Paper standards, though they certainly didn’t find anything that might damn her confirmation. Staff writers James Jones and Jason Cherkis report today that in her early years on the force, Lanier’s gender didn’t go unnoticed by her male peers. According to a deposition, Lanier was often subjected to degrading treatment at the hands of male officers, so much so that she was eventually forced to file a sexual harrasment lawsuit against one commander who was just a little too friendly. That case ended up in court, and Lanier and another female officer got $250,000 from the city.

The City Paper’s reporting also uncovers some management snafus on Lanier’s part when she headed up the department’s Horse Mounted Unit and her role in dealing with arrestees during the 2000 anti-World Bank/IMF protests and during the now infamous 2002 Pershing Park incident. In that specific case, Lanier was apparently a vocal proponent of hogtying detained activists, arguing that the practice of tying their left wrist to their right ankle wasn’t all that uncomfortable (the detained seemed to disagree, though). Incoming Ward 3 Council-member Mary Cheh has promised to bring this up in her confirmation hearing.

Finally, it seems that Lanier’s revolutionary scheme for community policing isn’t really so, well, revolutionary after all. What she’s calling “precision patrol teams” were once known as Ramsey’s “focus mission teams.”

None of these tidbits really seem to add up to a compelling argument that she shouldn’t be Police Chief, however. That she stood up to sexual harassment is a pretty compelling case for her character, really, though we do look forward to getting some answers to Mary Cheh’s questions about treatment of arrested protesters. And as for community policing re-naming scheme, we just hope she brings a little creativity to the job.