On Tuesday, Mark Kleiman blogged about an allegation in a New York Times article that the Bush administration demoted the head of the Department of Justice Statistics, Lawrence Greenfeld, because of a dispute about the content of a press release. According to the story, the report said that whites, blacks, and Hispanics were stopped at the same rate, but blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be search, subjected to force, and ticketed than whites. The story said the dispute was whether the press release would mention more than the conclusion that there were no racial differences in being stopped.

Bob Herbert jumps into the fray.

Both Kleiman and Herbert assume the allegations are true, although the story is based on anonymous officals at the agency, who the story says are friends of Greenfeld.

Herbert describes the story this way:

Mr. Greenfeld is being demoted because he complained that senior political officials were seeking to play down newly compiled data about the aggressive treatment of black and Hispanic drivers by police officers.

The authors of the study said they were not able to draw any conclusions about the reason for the differing rates, but they said the gaps were notable.

What happened to the report? The story says this:

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.

Some statisticians said that decision all but assured the report would get lost amid the avalanche of studies issued by the government. A computer search of news articles found no mentions of the study.

.        .        .

Brian Rohrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department . . . said that "there was no effort to suppress information since the report was released in its entirety." Mr. Rohrkasse said the department had also posted on its Web site a number of other statistical reports without issuing news releases.

The study was then buried in the bowels of the Bush bureaucracy.