Shades of the Truth From the Police Years ago, Leland Jones, the press secretary for Mayor David N. Dinkins, and I sat on a bench off the marble rotunda in City Hall and stared at each other glumly. We'd just had another sonic disagreement. He was convinced that I had misunderstood and misrepresented his boss. I was convinced he was an argumentative factotum. But I felt compelled to give that attack terrier his due (Mr. Jones is in fact a fine and cultured fellow and bears no resemblance to a terrier). Lee, I said, you may spin me like top, stonewall me like a stone mason, and argue like a world-class trial lawyer. But you've never ever lied to me. And I truly appreciate that. We shook hands, amiably, and the next day resumed our arguing. Would that I could say the same to Paul J. Browne, who served as man Friday and chief spokesman for Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly all of these years. Mr. Browne has many admirable traits: he is well read and knowledgeable about the Police Department, public policy and politics. But he too often engaged in unwise spokesman behavior, which is to say he shaded the truth, and more than once. That line, once crossed, makes the relationship between press and government a tense and fruitless walk into the dark. In the last few years, he was asked about a police unit that spies on the Muslim community, about the handcuffing of a councilman after the West Indian American Day Parade, and about a deputy inspector who shot pepper spray in the face of an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator. In each case, Mr. Browne offered a variant on up is down. Mr. Browne said there was no such thing as a demographics unit, that the councilman was handcuffed only after a punch had been thrown at a police captain, and that the inspector used pepper spray after being confronted by demonstrators. In each case, Mr. Browne betrayed little doubt - he offered as fact what proved to be flatly wrong. I'm skeptical of reporters who obsess about spokesmen. If only a spokesman was not obdurate, we would get the real story from this mayor, that police commissioner. It's a near infallible rule of politics that politicians get the press secretary they want. If Ray Kelly had not come to view himself as a warrior king, bridling at challenges to his writ, Mr. Browne might have been a better spokesman. And the Police Department, which can brag about genuine accomplishments, might not face an inspector general and lawsuits about spying. This is not, I should note, a general malaise. While the men and women in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's press office spin and sputter from time to time, they most often are professional, prompt and nuanced. And I've been known to wheedle and sputter myself. Mr. Browne, to his credit, got on the telephone. He went through my bill of indictment, calmly disputing that he had bent the truth. He said the spying was a question of nomenclature: The Associated Press asked about a demographics unit while he knew only of its new name, the zone assessment unit. "They were very indirect," he said. I think it was used as a cheap shot to say I denied its existence. The A.P., in fact, told Mr. Browne in advance that they wanted to talk about the "demographics unit." "There is nothing called the demographics unit," he told them, adding that such a unit never existed. I asked about the 2004 Republican Convention. I was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. Mr. Browne insisted that the police had held demonstrators in detention no more than six hours. Only at week's end, confronted with evidence, did he acknowledge that police had detained demonstrators for days in pens. He blamed the protesters. "It's a new entitled, pampered class of demonstrators," he told us. Today he attributes this to poor communication. There was, finally, Graham Rayman, the enterprising Village Voice reporter who broke the stories that precinct officers were being ordered to downgrade crime statistics. After months of denial, the department finally called a news conference to release a report on the matter at Police Headquarters. Mr. Rayman called the police press office to ask about attending. A sergeant told Mr. Rayman that he had called Mr. Browne and that Mr. Browne told him that only "credentialed" press could attend. That left Mr. Rayman on the outside. I asked Mr. Browne about this. "It wasn't punitive," he said. If it had gotten to my attention earlier, I would have let him in. I'd like to believe him.