A national spike in carjackings appears to have peaked in 2024, according to a new analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice. But the rates of both carjacking and nonviolent car theft remain higher than before the pandemic.
"The carjacking rate during the first half of 2024 was 26% lower on average than during the same period in 2023," says CCJ senior researcher Ernesto Lopez. That calculation is based on a sampling of cities that publish carjacking statistics. But he says this kind of car theft, which involves violence or the threat of violence, is still worse than it was a few years ago.
"The first half of 2024 was 60% higher than the first half of 2019," he says, although he adds that today's carjacking rate is far lower than it was in the 1990s, when overall crime rates were higher.
He says a common assumption has been that carjacking is a crime committed mostly by teenagers, especially after the closures of schools and other community organizations during the pandemic. In fact, he says, the carjacking data is more complicated.
"When you look at the offending rates, it's about the same with juveniles and adults," Lopez says. At the same time, juveniles do seem to gravitate more to carjacking than adults.
"Compared to motor vehicle theft and robbery, juveniles do commit a higher rate of carjacking compared to those other offenses. So it's not a uniquely juvenile phenomenon when you compare it to adults, but within the sphere of juvenile offending, it does appear to be pretty high," Lopez says.
Nonviolent car theft, which is tracked nationally by the FBI, also rose dramatically after the pandemic, driven in part by a viral video demonstrating how to exploit a security flaw in Hyundais and Kias.
According to city-by-city data available via the Real-Time Crime Index, nonviolent car theft surged through 2023, then started coming down again in 2024. Some cities are still struggling to contain the increase.
"In 2020, we had about 2,000 stolen vehicle cases," says Ira Cronin, the public relations manager for the Colorado Springs Police Department. "Then in 2023 and 2024, our numbers have been above 3,000."
Cronin says some of the cars are being stolen to use in another kind of crime.
"We've had 43 of these smash-and-grabs, where juvenile offenders are driving vehicles into businesses to gain access," Cronin says. "Once in the business they are stealing, and we've seen primarily two products that have been targeted ... vape products and ... firearms."
According to the CCJ's sampling of cities, car theft is nearly 30 times more common than carjacking. But carjackings have an outsized effect on people's sense of safety, says Frank Noto with the nonprofit Stop Crime SF.
"If you have a video or a celebrated incident, that can remain in people's minds for a long time, so I think people are still recovering from some of that," Noto says.
"While these are scary events, traumatic events, they generally do not end in any injury or death," says Lopez, referring to his analysis of recent data. "About 70% of carjacking incidents involve no injury, and about one in a thousand carjacking incidents involve a homicide."
What's odd about the recent carjacking wave, he says, is that it hasn't mirrored the rise and fall in other crimes since the pandemic.
"The carjacking trends do not follow typical robbery trends. So there's something unique about carjacking that we need to take a closer look at."
He says he doesn't know if it's driven by factors such as police presence, the layout of neighborhoods or the availability of guns, but it's worth further study.
Copyright 2024 NPR
