Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s city has just set a new record after the Chicago Police Department reported its 1,000th carjacking of the year so far.
Chicago passed the grim milestone on August 6, according to city data.
Last year, which saw a record number of carjackings, the city recorded 1,000 carjackings on August 16.
But Lightfoot insists that there is nothing to see here except a few kids joyriding.
The city’s Democrat leaders continue to downplay violent crime in Chicago, arguing that carjackings are just teenagers looking for a vehicle to use in other crimes.
However, a new study debunked Lightfoot’s faulty claim.
The study found that from 2017-2021, Chicago police recovered less than one in five carjacked vehicles.
CPD recovered just 10% of the vehicles carjacked in 2021 as of Feb. 8, 2022.
“When you look at these numbers, it’s hard to line these facts up with the narrative that our city leaders have put out that the spike is being driven by young people seeking joyrides,” Professor Robert Vargas, director of the UChicago Justice Project, said.
“Because unless young people are extremely good at hiding cars after having gone for a joyride, it seems like there’s some pretty strong economic incentives going on here and things linked to the informal economy, which suggests a far different set of interventions needed to address the problem.”
“If the vast majority of carjacking incidents are being motivated by economic incentives, then it means that youth programming alone isn’t going to be sufficient to address the problem.
“It means that the problem is being driven by economic need,” Vargas said.
“And when you look at the fact that the carjacking spike occurred just as the pandemic and the economic downturn hit, it makes logical sense that a lot of the carjacking is tied to the tremendous increase in economic need in Chicago’s disadvantaged neighborhoods.”
A security guard fired shots during a carjacking in River North yesterday evening, police say.
Chicago's hijacking count has passed the 1,000 mark — ten days faster than last year.https://t.co/ALxN2SM4XK
— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) August 17, 2022
According to NPR:
In the years prior to 2020, there were fewer than 1,000 carjackings each year, according to the study. Last year, there were more than 2,000 such incidents. And city data show carjackings are on pace to be even higher this year.
In press conferences over the last 18 months, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown has highlighted the extremely young age of some of the alleged carjackers they’ve arrested and called for a combination of more services and more “accountability” for young people as a way to stem the tide of carjackings.
At a March 10, 2021 news conference, Brown said the No. 1 motivation for carjackings was joyriding.
“It’s a shame that you’ll hold a gun to someone’s head just to joyride, but that seems to be what our young people are doing that we’re capturing,” Brown said.
