Carjackings Continue to Fall (A Lot)

Another positive trend from 2023 and 2024 continues into 2025.

All indications are that carjackings rose a ton in 2020 and 2021. They’re a bit hard to measure because carjackings were not officially tracked until recently, but they have been unofficially tracked in a lot of places making it possible to tease out short and medium-term trends.

Take a look at Chicago, for example.

There were 736 “vehicular hijackings” (aka carjackings) reported in Chicago in 2019 and 2,151 in 2021, a 192 percent increase according to data from the City of Chicago. The huge surge in carjackings can be clearly seen in Chicago’s open data (which shows incidents and is thus slightly smaller than the totals reported on Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard linked above).

Chicago isn’t alone.

New Orleans went from 103 carjacking incidents in 2019 to 281 in 2021, Washington DC went from 152 carjacking offenses in 2019 to 424 in 2021, and Oakland went from 203 in 2019 to 521 in 2021.

An assessment from the Council on Criminal Justice released earlier this year found carjackings were 83 percent higher in 2023 than 2019 in a sample of 10 cities with carjacking data. Given this enormous increase, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) released a report last October entitled “The Carjacking Crisis: Identifying Causes and Response Strategies.”

The surge in carjackings was very real, but so too is the large scale decline over the last two or so years.

Carjackings surged in 2020, 2021 and 2022 before appearing to fall slightly in 2023. Evidence of this decline can be seen in a report from last August from the FBI which showed the number and rate of carjacking incidents from 2019 through 2023.

You have to be careful when using this report because it’s based on NIBRS reporting (any robbery where a motor vehicle was stolen is considered a carjacking). A lot more agencies are reporting via NIBRS now than were in 2019, so a NIBRS-reliant report will generally be reporting more everything now compared to a few years ago. Still, that both the number and rate of carjackings fell from 2022 to 2023 is pretty good evidence that that’s a real trend and not just a NIBRS thing.

The FBI’s data matches data from 30 agencies that I gathered in 2023 pointing to a decline. Of those 30 agencies, carjackings were down YTD in 24 with that trend countered by Washington DC experiencing a massive rise. Carjackings fell even more in a similar sample in 2024 which showed carjackings down more than 25 percent in a sample of 22 agencies.

That downward trend has quite clearly continued into the first half of 2025. Let’s revisit the carjackings in Chicago graph from earlier but extended it through May 2025:

Chicago has reported its fewest carjackings through mid-June since 2015, good for a 72 percent drop from the YTD total in 2022. It's also worth noting that Chicago's trend mimics the national surge through 2022 followed by a decline starting in 2023. Any explanation of why this is occurring needs that starts in 2024 or 2025 is probably wrong.

And Chicago still isn’t alone. I gathered data from 35 agencies with carjacking data in one form or another for this year. The data shows that the plunge continues.

Carjackings are down in 33 of the above 35 agencies with an increase being recorded only in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Of course there are caveats to consider. Data on carjackings, like shootings, is not historically collected by many agencies. As such, gathering such data can be tedious and the sample size of 35 agencies is not particularly large. I’m also relying on Calls for Service (from CAD) for a couple of agencies, so the counts for these agencies may not be as precise as other, more official aggregated counts (but they should mimic the trends closely!).

Finally, only half the year is over, so these trends could always reverse or abate over the rest of 2025. I’d be surprised if running this same exercise in six months with a full year of data shows an increase, but it could certainly show a less substantial decrease.

Overall though the carjacking trend is incredibly positive. It’s also a trend based on a crime that tends to get reported to law enforcement, so there are less concerns of underreporting when measuring carjackings compared to, say, shopliftings.

The massive surge and dramatic drop in carjackins is a trend that begs further study. Carjackings are a relatively small subset of overall robberies (about 15 to 25 percent of all robberies in most places with data) but they’re unique. Carjacking arrestees tend to be younger than other people arrested for robbery and carjackings appear to be dropping faster than other types of robberies. As such, possible policy solutions to carjackings may be different from possible solutions to other types of robbery.

Ultimately, the big question isn’t whether carjackings are falling fast, they are. The big question is whether this downward trend will continue, slow, or reverse, and for an answer to that we’ll have to revisit the issue later this year or early next.