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          The Post Rings Twice It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to fit facts. —Sherlock Holmes, quoted on Jeff Leen’s office wall \magine attending this story meeting held by Washington Post editors and reporters in the fall of : Jeffrey M. Leen notes his investigative team’s probe of the high toll of shootings by District of Columbia police, a dark footnote in the city that had become the murder capital of the nation. Taking turns going around the room, Post “poverty beat” reporter Katherine Boo is pursuing a story about D.C. homes for the mentally retarded, where she’s uncovered horrid conditions. Both sound like winners. Were they ever. In  and , for the first time, a newspaper won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service—for projects that had overlapped in their newsroom. As a fortyyear -old investigative specialist who had just moved to the Post from the Miami Herald in the prior year, Leen remembers thinking of that meeting, “I’ve got a good story, but she’s got a good story, too. I wonder if all the stories around here are like that.” His perspective now that the Gold Medals belong to the Post? “You could have a thousand of these meetings and not have that occur.” The two projects actually were very different. The intensive nine-month investigation of police shootings was driven by computer-assisted reporting and involved three main reporters, several editors, and a raft of staffers in supporting roles. Kate Boo’s project was essentially a one-woman operation built on a combination of interviews, old-fashioned data mining, and prose that filled her editors with awe. “She writes like a poet, but she’s got the skill of an investigative re-  porter,” says Leen, who served as one of her editors during what evolved into two connected series in . “She wrote with a lyrical sensitivity without becoming purple, and without getting in the way of the facts.” Although the two projects might seem a reflection of the same investigative tradition that flowed from Watergate in the s, this newer coverage was in the form of planned projects rather than the day-to-day incremental approach of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting. Woodward, now known more as an author of books on Washington politics than for his role as a Post assistant managing editor, knows both those traditions. After Watergate, he became Metro editor —“I was not good at it,” he says with a laugh—although he was involved with the creation of the Post investigative unit, and led it for more than a decade. A Job for Teamcop The  Gold Medal started with a simple statistic. Jo Craven, a computer-assisted-reporting specialist who was being considered for a job at the Post, noted a high number of “Category s”—justifiable shootings by city police, charted by the FBI. D.C. officers had killed fifteen citizens in . Said the memo she wrote just before Christmas in : “When measured against the average population for the five-year period, District police racked up . homicides per , residents—the highest rate in the country among cities of at least ,. It is almost twice the rate of Atlanta, at ., nearly three times the rate of Los Angeles, at ., and more than four times the rate of New York City, which measured ..” The spike the numbers formed over Washington raised eyebrows in the newsroom . “Based on that information, though, you could write about eight paragraphs ,” says Jeff Leen, who was assigned by investigative editor Rick Atkinson to work with Craven. Leen would decide what to do next with the computer pattern. Such work was familiar to Leen from his time at the Herald, where Hurricane Andrew in  had presented the backdrop for some of his projects, and where— with partner Guy Gugliotta—his stories had first identified the role of Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cartels in the U.S. cocaine trade. For the Post police gunplay story, he started with basic updating. “I spent two weeks reading ten years of Washington Post clips on shootings and I discovered a number of bad shootings, and a number involving cars,” he says. In those cases, the driver often had been struck with a bullet. The introduction of the controversial Glock -millimeter sidearm, which tended to fire too easily, seemed to play a role, as well. Next came a stroll to the...

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