WASHINGTON — The quiet alley behind his mother’s house was where Tariq Majeed, a 45-year-old father of three, often came for some uninterrupted work. He ran a car-detailing business, and around midday on a chilly Tuesday in late January he was deep-cleaning the back seats of a client’s BMW. He felt a nudge from behind and turned to find it was a gun.
The gunman — who was masked and, Mr. Majeed estimated, could not have been older than a teenager — demanded the keys. When Mr. Majeed fumbled to get them out of his work apron, the young man slammed the gun into the bridge of his nose. Mr. Majeed doubled over, the keys fell out of the apron, and seconds later the car was gone.
The police quickly found the BMW, which had been shut off remotely by an anti-theft system and left behind. They told Mr. Majeed that earlier that morning there had been another carjacking, of a Dodge Durango at a Shell station up the road. The Dodge, too, had been abandoned — not far from where Mr. Majeed was working. No one has been caught.
“I honestly believe it’s a game,” Mr. Majeed said. Stolen cars used to be stripped down, with the parts sold for cash, he said. Now people are carjacked, and the cars are often found afterward, crashed or just left on the street. “It’s a game.”
In the strange math of the past two pandemic years, as different kinds of crime have spiked and plummeted, carjacking has made an alarming resurgence. The number of reported incidents nearly quadrupled in Philadelphia from 2019 to 2021 and is on track to double this year; Chicago had more than 1,900 carjackings last year, the highest number in decades. Two months into 2022 the number of armed carjackings in New Orleans was already at two-thirds the whole year’s tally in 2019. Washington, D.C., where 426 carjackings were reported last year, is not an exception.
There are reasons carjacking may have begun proliferating even as robbery rates dropped in 2020: Push-button ignitions have made it harder to operate cars without getting the keys from the driver; supply chain problems boosted the price of used cars as millions found themselves in economic straits; and the pandemic ushered in an army of delivery workers, often stopping in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Ride-share drivers, the police said, have been summoned, then robbed on arrival.
But none of this fully explains what officials say is the most troubling part of the trend: the ages of so many who have been arrested. Fourteen-year-olds, 12-year-olds, even 11-year-olds have been charged with armed carjacking or in some cases murder.
“They are children,” Robert J. Contee III, chief of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, said at a news conference in early February about a carjacking task force formed with the police in a neighboring county. “The fact that between Prince George’s County and D.C. we have over 200 young people that committed a carjacking is staggering to me.”
Carjacking is a hard crime to analyze. In statistics, it is often mixed in with other auto theft and robbery crimes. Arrest rates are low — fewer than one in eight carjackings in Chicago resulted in arrest in 2020, according to a study by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab — making conclusions hard to draw. Young people are more likely to be caught, criminal justice experts say, and thus show up disproportionately in arrest numbers.
Still, something appears to be happening. Karl A. Racine, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, reported that from 2020 to 2021 his office saw a 60 percent drop in the number of juvenile cases in virtually every category of violent crime. Carjacking cases, however, nearly tripled.
More than half of those arrested on carjacking charges in Washington in the past year were under 18, including two girls in their early teens who pleaded guilty to charges of murdering a 66-year-old delivery driver; a pair of 15-year-olds charged last month with taking more than a dozen cars at gunpoint; and a 14-year-old girl arrested last weekend who was accused of taking part in four carjackings, three of them armed.
The mayor and the police chief say that there is too little accountability and that young people who are arrested on carjacking charges are often right back out in the community. Of the 151 carjacking arrests in 2021, police officials said, 85 involved juveniles with prior criminal records.
Mr. Racine has pushed back, explaining at a recent public hearing that a vast majority of teenagers charged with carjacking in the past year had no carjacking arrests on their records. There should be a focus on preventing recidivism, he said, but the problems driving this run deeper.
“You can do all you want and even lock up everyone who commits a crime,” Mr. Racine said. “I’m here to tell you there is a long line of tomorrow’s crime that’s coming up, because of the reasons below the iceberg.”
The University of Chicago study looked specifically at young people arrested on carjacking charges in 2020. It found that they were more likely than in past years to have no prior record and “more likely to live in areas with lower internet access and school attendance, especially during the pandemic.”
In the poorer neighborhoods of Washington, these findings are no surprise.
City schools have struggled for years with chronic absenteeism, and neighborhood groups have long sought more after-school options. But when the pandemic hit, nearly all activities outside the home went away. Many young people found themselves confined in tight quarters with family members reeling from job losses, sickness and death.
Tariq Majeed’s brother Warees Majeed, a founder of a group that works with troubled youth in Washington, said those conditions changed how young people saw the world around them.
He said the pandemic “had people more confined into a space where they were also able to see a little bit more the disparity,” adding, “You’re sitting there all day looking around and you start to think, ‘This isn’t the life I want to live.’”
At E.L. Haynes Public Charter School, a high school in Washington where most students are from low-income households, teenagers described the pandemic years as both terrifying and dull. “Like the world is about to end,” as one 15-year-old boy put it, “like you got nothing to lose.” The closure of recreation centers and schools in 2020 left young people with few places to relieve stress, take the usual teenage risks or make a name for themselves.
“We just plain lost some kids,” said Kimberly Perry, the executive director of DC Action for Children, a nonprofit.
Where young people found one another was on social media. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram started serving the purposes once provided by homerooms, gyms and recreation centers — places where they could hang out and show off. And there were no teachers, coaches or other adults.
“The internet just took over,” one 16-year-old boy at E.L. Haynes said. “Everybody tried to go viral, doing stupid stuff.”
The boy, who like other classmates did not want to be named, said that in the early days of the pandemic, he had heard that guys on the street were stealing cars to bring in some money. Then young people started doing it, he said, at first jumping into cars that were left idling and unattended and just driving around. Videos of these rides around the city started showing up on social media.
Before long, “carjacking became a sport,” said one community organizer. “A big bandwagon,” said another.
“A thrill, almost like a fad,” Warees Majeed said. “When you don’t have activities in their communities, everything’s shut down, young people are going to find a way to entertain themselves. It’s recreation, that’s what it is.”
The notion that crimes go in and out of fashion is not new. In the early 2000s, some young people in Washington began stealing cars, calling themselves “U.U. Boys” after the criminal charge of “unauthorized use of a vehicle.” Then, auto thefts began dropping precipitously, said Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director of the Georgetown Juvenile Justice Initiative, and cellphone snatching began to proliferate.
“It has been interesting over the course of my career to watch the mix of crime shift without seeming explanation,” Professor Ferrer said. “A number of these are crimes of opportunity, folks looking for that kind of low-hanging fruit.”
What is clear, he said, is that the long-term impact of the solitary and traumatic pandemic years on the development of adolescents cannot be overstated. Though schools are back to in-person learning and recreation centers are reopening, that impact — and the rise in carjackings — has not simply gone away.
“I don’t think people are prepared for how much we are going to have to dig out and heal from the pandemic,” Professor Ferrer said.
In January, Nate Fleming, a candidate for the District of Columbia Council, was at a gas station when a masked gunman stepped out of a burgundy S.U.V. and demanded his car keys.
During an interview at a downtown cafe, Mr. Fleming explained how young people who are disengaged can get involved in such a dangerous activity. He recalled his time coaching football at a city middle school, and how the students who did not make the team were far more likely to get into serious trouble.
“Youth are in crisis,” Mr. Fleming said.
Four days after his carjacking, the same burgundy S.U.V. was seen at two separate shootings, one of them fatal, the police said. A week and a half after that, a 17-year-old was arrested and charged with the armed robbery of Mr. Fleming.
But first, the teen “went on social media and took videos of driving around in my car,” Mr. Fleming said. “So I mean, we’re in a warped world.”
