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https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/

Coronavirus pandemic

A year of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5" title="www.washingtonpost.com">the coronavirus</a> has given rise to what police leaders nationwide call an alarming trend: bored, wayward teenagers pointing guns in people’s faces and carjacking them.

In Chicago, the frequency of the crime more than doubled in 2020 to a rate of about four per day. Three teenagers are charged with murder after a 65-year-old retired firefighter was shot in December during a noontime holdup in a busy shopping district.

New Orleans has seen a similar spike as teenagers know they’re less apt to be punished. “The wheels of justice,” said that city’s top police official, Shaun Ferguson, “just aren’t moving like they did pre-covid.”

In Washington, total carjackings hit 345 in 2020 compared with 142 the year before. Things are only getting worse this year, with 46 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/dc-carjacking-car-theft/2020/12/22/35b8b812-4123-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">carjackings</a> through early February.

The rise in carjackings includes plenty of adult suspects. Experts say the coronavirus  has made jobs more scarce and — because people are home all day — made breaking into homes more of a risk. Pandemic reality also applies to juveniles. Schools are closed, and youth programs are shuttered. Precautions against packing children into locked juvenile facilities have led to their quick release, while reductions to in-person contact have made them more difficult to monitor.

“We’re not giving them enough supervision. That really created a problem,” said Tim Hardy, longtime director of the juvenile court in Yuma, Ariz., and  president of the American Probation and Parole Association.

[D.C. police launch task force to curb rise in carjackings]

Carjacking suspects often cross police jurisdictions — hitting the driver in one area and taking the car into the other. The alarming increase in carjackings has prompted <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/carjacking-police-surge/2021/02/09/45aa6a0e-6adb-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">law enforcement to create task forces</a> to stem the problem, such as one formed this month by police in the Washington region and the FBI.

Victims have been left terrified and bewildered.

“I felt like my life was about to end,” said a 25-year-old who was driving through an affluent section of Washington at 1:30 a.m. before being halted by masked assailants standing directly in front of him in the road and pointing rifles. The gunmen forced him from his car and sped off, police said.

Two weeks later in adjacent Montgomery County, Md., a pair of teenagers approached a 23-year-old sitting in his parked car, according to police records. One pointed a handgun, while the other shouted: “Shoot him! Shoot him! Get it over with!” The driver got out, and the assailants drove off in his Honda Accord.

Minutes earlier, according to court papers, the pair had made a similar, unsuccessful attempt in the parking lot of a nearby 7-Eleven. As they threatened to shoot a man while kicking and punching him, a store employee came out and began video recording the attack — forcing them to run off empty-handed. Police arrested the two teens that night after a high-speed chase of the stolen Accord down Interstate 270.

“Sixteen-year-olds just being dumb,” said the 7-Eleven victim, who, like the driver in the District, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his privacy.

[Puzzling spike in auto thefts, many of them violent, worries D.C.-area police]

There are no nationwide statistics on carjacking because many enforcement agencies lump the crime into more general robbery tallies. And not everyone is convinced the spikes go beyond select cities that are seeing a wave of carjackings.

But the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a Washington-based think tank that  regularly consults with chiefs across the country, found that “with many schools closed for in-person education, school-aged youths with free time — some as young as 12-15 — are committing a large portion of the increase in carjackings.”

D.C. police recently said a 12-year-old was charged in three attempted armed carjackings March 4 and a fourth that night in which a vehicle was stolen. Police said they are looking for a second suspect.

“The pandemic comes into play with the offenders who have been arrested,” Minneapolis Deputy Chief of Investigations Kathy Waite told PERF.  “Nobody wants to hold anybody in our jail system, especially with our juvenile offenders.”

Minneapolis saw 405 carjackings in 2020 compared with 101 the year before. The same suspects have been linked to many of the crimes, Waite said, and needlessly unleash violence.

Ferguson, the New Orleans police superintendent, told PERF that carjackings rose 154 percent in his city from 2019 to 2020, prompting his department to launch a violent-crime abatement team last fall.

“We’re making arrests, but the criminal element is becoming bolder and more brazen because they’re not seeing any consequences to their actions,” Ferguson told PERF.

No city seems harder hit than Chicago. Police there say teenagers have driven the skyrocketing carjacking rate.

“To them, it’s just a game, like ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ” Chicago Police Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan said in an interview. “They’re extremely young, terrorizing people, and a lot of them feel, ‘It’s just somebody’s car. It’s no big deal.’ ”

The prevalence of masks during the pandemic, he said, has made it difficult for victims to identify suspects.

“If we are fortunate enough to arrest someone, it’s still an extremely difficult case to prove,” Deenihan said. “This continues to exacerbate the problem — juveniles caught in stolen cars aren’t charged and get released.”

Chicago police ramped up their focus on carjacking, Deenihan said, after the slaying of Dwain Williams, a retired firefighter who was walking to his car when three armed men leaped from a passing car, then shot him.

[With children stuck at home during coronavirus shutdowns, online sexual predators can swoop in]

Avik Das, director of juvenile probation for Chicago’s Cook County Circuit Court, declined to say whether the coronavirus had led to more teenagers committing carjackings. But in an email, Das said “the pandemic continues to expose inequities in resources at the neighborhood level that may otherwise steer children away from engaging in such dangerous and troublesome activity.”

Although the pandemic has made it easier to communicate with teenagers with  phone or video links, virtual supervision generally is not as effective, especially because it has been coupled with reduced in-person counseling programs.

“What we see with kids on probation is, we really need to keep them busy,” Hardy said, adding that health precautions have made doing so difficult. “We’ve got to do more than we’re doing. We’re failing these kids.”

Maryland has seen more juveniles charged with carjacking: 259 in 2020 compared with 136 the year before, according to state figures. Those numbers don’t include juveniles who were charged as adults for carjacking and remain charged as adults.

Early in the pandemic, much of the criminal justice system — judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors — agreed with public health experts who viewed the confined quarters of jails as especially vulnerable to coronavirus outbreaks. They worked to reduce the number of potential carriers sent into confinement.

That can be seen in Maryland’s numbers. In the first 10 full months of the pandemic, an average of 61 juvenile-charged suspects were placed in detention at the state’s Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), compared with 194 a month for the same period a year earlier, according to state figures.

For those allowed to live at home with ankle monitors, coronavirus restrictions also have slowed down routine processing, which delays the evaluations needed for counseling and treatment programs, said Ashley Watson, a case manager at the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Cheltenham, Md.

“They’re waiting for the next step,” said Watson, who spoke to The Washington Post in her capacity as  an AFSCME union steward for those who work at the DJS. “A lot can happen to a child’s life in 30 days before we get a chance to try to help them.”

As for kids ultimately committed to DJS facilities, that population stood at 35 statewide in January 2021, compared with 113 in January 2020.

Paul Zmuda, a former prosecutor and longtime defense attorney in Maryland with a large juvenile client practice, said most of his teenage clients don’t attend virtual classes. Kids are discouraged, restless and bored, he said, and their propensity to commit crime follows with more lenient consequences.

[Crime rose unevenly when stay-at-home orders lifted. The racial disparity is the widest in years.]

“Kids used to know, ‘Hey, this is what you can get — juvenile detention,’ ” Zmuda said.

Eric Solomon, a DJS spokesman, said there are too many variables at play to make correlations between covid-19 and crime totals.

“It’s too early to tell what the factors are with youth crime,” he said.

He added that some of the declining populations inside DJS facilities also may reflect declines in overall arrests during the pandemic. And Solomon pointed to pandemic-related factors that may swing the other direction.

“We have seen more parental supervision at home,” Solomon said, adding that virtual communication has led to improved relationships with kids: “The department has seen better outcomes with youth during the covid pandemic.”

Regardless of who is committing the carjackings, another aspect of the pandemic — ubiquitous face coverings — may be playing a role.

“If everyone around you is wearing a mask, you can’t distinguish who is good and who is bad,” said Christopher Herrmann, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The reality is, it doesn’t take long for a guy with a mask to whip out a gun — three seconds — and get from the curb to your car.”

Masked suspects certainly have struck in Montgomery County, which recorded 11 carjackings last month compared with none in January 2020.

“I’m scared someone is going to get killed,” Marcus Jones, the county’s police chief, said.

In January, a woman was attacked at gunpoint after filling the tank of her Audi in a Chevy Chase gas station — a carjacking caught on video surveillance that sparked widespread attention. The driver fought back and got hit in the face just before the assailant zoomed off in her car. The next day, after spotting and pursuing the car in Prince George’s County, police arrested a 19-year-old.

“My strategy for living during the time of covid has been to primarily run errands or go shopping in the evening to reduce my risk of exposure from others,” the woman said recently. “Never did I think that by doing this, I might actually be increasing my risk for becoming the victim of a violent crime.”

<email>dan.morse@washpost.com</email>

<email>tom.jackman@washpost.com</email>

Peter Hermann contributed to this report.

Pulitzer Prize finalist

The Yoga Store Murder

Vanderbilt University, BE in environmental engineering

Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of "The Yoga Store Murder."

Dan Morse

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's breaking news coverage of Virginia Tech shooting, 2008

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, 2022

Rites of Burial

University of Notre Dame, BA in English and American Studies

Tom Jackman has been covering criminal justice for The Washington Post since 1998 and anchors the True Crime blog. He previously covered crime and courts for the Kansas City Star.

Tom Jackman

The Washington Post

Teen carjackings increase with coronavirus restrictions, police say

Carjacking suspects armed with rifles allegedly halted a driver

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