Carjackings Fell in 2023 and Appear to be Falling Again in 2024

New data from the FBI points to an improving national trend in carjackings following an apparent sizable increase since 2019.

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I frequently talk about the downsides of the FBI transitioning from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), but one of the advantages is that substantially more detailed crime data can be captured in a systemic manner. Case in point: Carjackings.

The FBI recently released a report on motor vehicle theft trends through 2023 showing — surprise, surprise — motor vehicle thefts rose quite a bit in 2023. There aren’t a ton of new nuggets in the report, other than confirming the previously known trend that auto thefts surged the last few years, but one bit at the very end stands out:

Carjackings fell nationally in 2023 after appearing to rise substantially from 2019 to 2022.

I say “appearing” in the above sentence because the population of agencies with available data in 2019 was dramatically different from the one that reported data in 2022 and 2023. Taken at face value, carjackings rose more than 140 percent from 2019 to 2022, but some back of the napkin math using the rates per 100,000 provided by the FBI shows that the 2019 figure was derived from a population coverage of about 155 million while the 2023 figure was derived from a population coverage of around 280 million people. There were way more agencies using NIBRS in 2023 than in 2019, so a large part of the increase in the number of offsenses is simply due to more reporting.

This difference in populations is because the FBI’s figures rely on NIBRS and NIBRS expanded substantially over that span. Which isn’t to say that carjacking did not increase nationally between 2019 and 2022, I’ve seen enough cities that saw big increases over that span to believe it was a trend. But the populations are different enough to cast a ton of uncertainty on to the degree of the increase.

The 2022 and 2023 populations seem decently similar (around 255 million in 2022 vs the 280 million in 2023), so the decline last year seems decently real and fits what the city data for 2023 showed. Still, because the agencies in the population aren’t apples-to-apples it makes it hard to say just how large the decline actually was nationally with certainty.

The news for 2024 appears as good if not better. Carjackings are hard to quantify in a lot of cities, but I was able to gather carjacking data for 29 cities with available data for 2024 and a comparable timeframe in 2023. Carjackings are down in 24 of those cities with an overall decline of 24 percent.

Washington DC was the headliner last year for the surge in carjackings it was seeing and DC is a headliner again this year for the opposite reason. DC carjackings are down 50 percent this year compared to last year with the decline accelerating lately (largely due to the scale of last summer’s surge in carjackings). Carjackings in DC are largely in line with where they were at this point in 2022 (288 this year vs 289 through July 2022) but still elevated considerably relative to where they were pre-2020.

DC isn’t alone in seeing a dramatic decline in carjackings, here’s New Orleans where they’re down 46 percent after a big decline last year as well:

And Chicago is seeing a steady decline too:

All three cities are experiencing large declines though carjackings are coming down from a substantially higher level when compared to a few years ago.

Carjackings is a new datapoint to be able to formally track and most places don’t make it easy. As such, the sample of available cities is smaller, obtaining historic data is usually harder, and — as a result — the analytic certainty is less than with other crime types. Still, the FBI data confirms what we’re seeing in big cities is also happening nationally even if it’s harder to put a percent change and historical context around it.