A Little Bit Out of Whack
by Clay Risen

Chandra Levy's body was found in a corner of Washington's Rock Creek Park last week, and almost as soon as the story hit the papers the next morning, the backlash began. Howard Kurtz of CNN and the Washington Post led the charge, claiming the media's "priorities are a little bit out of whack" and that the whole thing harked back to "that less serious, pre-9/11 world." David Schuster of Fox News, a network that brought in boatloads of viewers with the story last year, said on May 27 that he was "embarrassed" by his employer's 2001 coverage.

If nothing else, Sept. 11 gave the media the chance to claim (despite Robert Blake, despite Michael Skakel) that it had rid itself of the fluff-news virus that the Levy case symbolized. And, just to prove it had grown up, the media world quickly dropped the story — after a day or two of frantic coverage, the story piped down considerably, sticking around as fodder for daily bloggers but more or less out of sight, out of mind.

Of course, no one should be fooled — the story isn't getting top billing because the media are suddenly too mature, it's gone because the discovery of Levy's body points the case away from the very thing that had the media so entranced in the first place: her amorous link to Gary Condit. No Condit, no story, so back to Bush in Europe. The media haven't grown up, they've just grown bored. As Schuster predicted, the story will disappear completely "if it turns out Chandra Levy was just another woman, unfortunately, who was strangled and murdered in the park."

We'd like to think that it has something to do with the collective crash course in seriousness that we went through after Sept. 11. We'd like to think that these days, we know what matters, what's really important, and that the Levy case, while a bittersweet reminder of simpler, more superficial times, is not. We're all breathing a self-congratulatory sigh of relief for giving Chandra II the soft shoe — but what we really should be doing is paying that much more attention to the story. Because it's only now, after the case has shed its political-sex disguise, that it gets really interesting.

Think about it: For about a day last week, CNN and FoxNews and the rest did in fact pay a lot of attention to the discovery. But the evidence they were hoping for — a bullet hole, a business card, anything that could point the way to Gary Condit — didn't turn up. Instead it looks, increasingly, that she was assaulted, perhaps sexually, and left under some leaves. Chalking it up to the fate that awaits the sexually unfortunate, we turned back to our NBA playoffs and "Fear Factor." After all, what's one more crime in the nation's capital?

Everything, in fact. If Levy was the victim of a sexual assault, she can be added to a growing list of crimes against women that the Metropolitan Police Department seems unable to stop. In August 1998, Christine Marzayan, a graduate student living in Georgetown for the summer, was raped and murdered in the woods just off Canal Road. Three years ago police found the body of Joyce Chang floating in the Potomac; she too had been assaulted. And Levy's murder has already been linked to a man convicted of two later attacks in the same vicinity.

Last week the Post's Colbert King wrote a trenchant opinion on May 25 about the sad status of sexual-assault investigation in the city. King notes that "violence against women made up about 50 percent of all reported violent crimes to the D.C. police in [2000]," or about 22,500 incidents, but only 51 percent of those got written up. The Levy case isn't just about an unfortunate young woman, King argues, but about all women, and the false sense of security that has the city promoting itself as a safe, fun place for young women to live, sending them out for twilight jogs without being able to protect them.

What's even more disturbing is that despite a massive, citywide search last year that involved both local police and the FBI, Levy's body — hidden in a relatively trafficked part of an urban park — went uncovered for almost 12 months, to be discovered accidentally by a man hunting turtles. Metro Police Department Chief Charles Ramsey can trot out all the excuses he wants — it was in a thick section of woods, it was under leaves — but the authorities' failure to discover a body with a massive manhunt doesn't paint a very rosy picture of their ability to complete their everyday tasks, let alone stop future assaults.

A decade ago, the nation was shocked when police busted a drug dealer in Lafayette Park, just north of the White House. Crime, it seemed, had come too close to the institutions that were supposed to stop it. But while crime rates across the nation dropped during the 1990s, they have hardly budged inside the Beltway. A full 1,700 murders from the 1990s remain unsolved in the District, thanks to a system that, despite constant calls for reform, has barely responded. Corruption and mismanagement in the MPD isn't a new story, but it's one that hasn't gotten the sort of national coverage it deserves or requires.

This isn't just a symbolic failure, a sad commentary on our nation when its own capital is a crime zone. It's a real failure of a major American city to do the minimum to protect its citizens. The Levy case, now that it has shed its patina of tabloid sleaze, should be a shrill klaxon in Congress to force real reform. But without a voting constituency in the District, that can only happen with serious public and media pressure. Unfortunately, we're too busy patting ourselves on the back while we turn to more important things.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.