How the pandemic has accelerated carjackings across Chicago
Chicago, like other cities across America, has seen a surge in carjackings this year. It’s a crime that until recently most of the public had largely forgotten about; between 2001 and 2014, the number of carjackings in Chicago plummeted by nearly 80%. But in 2020 the total number of carjackings in Chicago was more than the previous two years combined. Carjackings are right back to where they were 20 years ago.
What’s behind the surge in carjackings? One way to understand the “why” is to look at the “who.” A much-discussed (and increasingly debated) argument is that young people, teens particularly, are driving the increase. When we look at the ages of those arrested for carjacking in 2019 and 2020, there’s been a small increase in arrests of adults but a massive increase in arrests of youth (under 18).
That explanation is increasingly debated, in part because we only know the age of those who commit carjackings when they are arrested — and a small and declining share of carjackings in Chicago ever lead to an arrest. How do we know the people who are arrested are representative of the larger group of people committing carjackings?
It turns out a generally similar conclusion about youth involvement comes from looking at a different source of information: victim statements. In about 70% of cases, the victim of a carjacking provides police with information about the offender’s age range. While social science evidence suggests adults generally perceive teens to be slightly older than they are, in cases where a suspect is arrested, we can see that victim reports and the suspect’s actual age are usually fairly consistent. Using this data, we see the share of carjackings committed by people perceived to be teenagers increased, albeit not as significantly as the increase in youth arrests.
Some have wondered whether teenagers, with less experience and maturity, might be more likely to be found and arrested after a carjacking. The apparent surge in teenage carjacking seen in the arrest data could reflect an increase in the chances of getting caught for teens relative to adults. But when we look at the share of crimes resulting in arrest for older versus younger suspects, we see that the arrest rate for carjacking suspects under 18 seemed to decline slightly in 2020 compared with adult suspects.
We see a similar story in other cities. In Washington, D.C., for example, where carjackings increased by 143% last year, the number of adult carjacking arrests declined slightly while the number of youth carjacking arrests more than doubled.
The simplest explanation that ties these facts together is that over time youth are indeed becoming more involved in carjacking. It’s possible that carjacking is one of those crimes where youth are among the most involved; about half of all arrests for carjacking in Chicago are youth, far higher than what we see for other crimes.
The pandemic is likely driving the carjacking spike — but not for the reason you might think.
It’s natural to assume the rise in carjackings is being driven by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. But if teenagers are involved in many of these incidents, there might be more to the story.
One clue for what’s driving the spike in carjackings is geography. Carjackings are mostly concentrated in the same communities that already disproportionately bear the burden of so many other social challenges: the city’s South and West sides. When we look at the addresses of the youth arrested for carjacking, we see they also disproportionately live in those same South and West Side neighborhoods.
What’s telling about these neighborhoods, given the involvement of so many teenagers in carjackings, is they’re also the places where internet access is most limited and — surely not a coincidence — where school attendance has fallen off most during the pandemic.
Put differently, the neighborhoods where access to quality educational opportunities was most tenuous before the pandemic are also the places where school has been most disrupted by COVID-19, partly because of the “digital divide.”
It’s not just education, though. Young people in these neighborhoods have experienced a disproportionate impact of all of the pandemic’s harms — from lost parents and grandparents to a surge in gun violence and substance use. Last year, for example, saw a 31% increase in youth mental health-related emergency department visits. Young people living on the South and West sides have spent the entire past year in this pressure cooker of trauma, violence and isolation.
What’s next?
Another reason the idea that young people are behind a lot of the rise in carjacking has become controversial is because of some people’s fears about what government agencies might do in response — for example, increasing detention in the juvenile justice system. Indeed, the data show that juvenile detention comes at a cost. Detention, especially for those who are still of school age, seems to significantly increase the chances that a young person drops out of high school and gets incarcerated as an adult.
A social service response could potentially avoid some of these negative consequences. The problem is that we’re currently missing many existing opportunities to connect young people involved in carjackings to social services. We know that around two-thirds of youth arrested for carjacking have a prior arrest; 3 in 10 have been arrested four or more times before. To the extent that teens arrested for carjacking are still connected to Chicago Public Schools, the school district is another institution that might regularly come into contact with these youth.
Despite these potential key “touch points” for the public sector to connect young people to social services, right now we’re failing to provide them with supports. The most striking way to see how the current system is failing young people is to see what happens to them a year after their arrest for carjacking. In the subsequent 12 months, those young people were 77 times more likely to be murdered than the average Chicago resident (and 940 times as likely to be murdered than in other rich cities around the world, such as London). The rate at which these young people are murdered on the streets of Chicago exceeds even the death rate among active U.S. combat soldiers during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
While there is light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to the pandemic, that doesn’t seem to be true for carjacking. The number of carjackings has continued to increase. The problem, in other words, does not seem to be getting better on its own.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “Data Points” examines issues relevant to the Chicago area through data provided by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab.