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No time to go into too much detail on this now, but the aspect of this story which has yet to get a lot of attention is the DC police department’s general reputation for incompetence and boobery, and how much their rep, not just Gary Condit’s, is on the line in how this whole situation turns out.

You may have seen the computer-enhanced pictures the police released which allegedly show what Chandra might look if she was in disguise.

It might be more accurate to say that this is how Chandra might look if someone took a picture of her and gave the photograph to a six year old with a bottle of paste and some pre-school clip-art. I mean, you don’t want to be overly jocular about this, but these enhanced photos don’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in the folks heading up the investigation. If this is computer-generated, what’s the computer? The Atari 400 my Dad bought me when I was like twelve?

Anyway, the point is that the DC police department has a very bad reputation, and though the current leadership, Ramsey et.al., were brought in to clean the place up, they’ve clearly still got a lot of work ahead of them. The local Fox affiliate just reported Friday night that a slew of officers were just taken off the beat and given desk duty because they didn’t know how to load their weapons. If the mystery of Levy’s disappearance is simply never solved — or if the evidentiary trail just grows cold — the DC police department is going to start looking a lot like the Boulder PD after the JonBenet case. And they know that.

So it’s important to see all the conspicuous aggressiveness of the investigation in recent days — like arranging for TV crews to be there when they search vacant buildings — in this light. This doesn’t mean all the searching isn’t necessary, or that they shouldn’t be leaning so hard on Condit, but it’s just important to keep this part of the story in mind.

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