Photo by rjs 1322

Last week’s news that D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier was juking the stats on the city’s homicide clearance rate by including years-old cases may have seemed like a ding in her otherwise strong armor, but she chose to fight back over the weekend and won herself a partial victory when the Post published a lengthy clarification to its story.

Last Friday, Lanier defended her practice of including old cases in the city’s homicide clearance rate in an irate-sounding letter to the Post:

The MPD’s homicide clearance rate is calculated, as it is in most police departments in the country, using the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) guidelines established by the FBI in the 1930s — guidelines that are the national standard for reporting homicide clearance rates. The UCR closure standard is not a new development in the District; it has been used by the D.C. police since the early 1980s.

Because it includes action on both current- and prior-year homicides, UCR measures all of the work that an agency exhausts in closing cases. I have always stressed to my department the importance of closing all homicides — including prior-year cases. Any suggestion that the MPD is being deceptive by including prior-year closures is absurd. In fact, I have repeatedly and publicly explained the UCR closure calculations in our annual reports, to the media and in public testimony to the D.C. Council.

Lanier further argued that the reporting standards cut both ways. While a 2008 murder that’s closed in 2011 could count towards the 2011 clearance rate, a 2008 assault that results in a death in 2011 is counted as a homicide in 2011. The first murder of 2012 is an interesting example — even though it occurred on the last day of 2011, that it wasn’t classified as a homicide until the New Year means that it counts as the first killing of 2012.

The Post was quick to post a clarification to its original reporting (which was based on a December post by Homicide Watch), largely backing Lanier’s point that there was no shady business going on — MPD was simply doing what the FBI and many other police departments do in calculating how many murder cases it closes a year.

Still, some skeptics say that by allowing elected officials like Mayor Vince Gray to tout a 2011 clearance rate that exceeded 90 percent without offering a full picture of what that meant, Lanier was being too clever by half.