Vehicle-Based Crime Plunged in 2024
Preliminary city data points to an encouraging trend.
Carjackings, vehicle burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts are three similar crimes which surged around 2020 in most of the places that measure it. These three crimes carry varying degrees of difficulty in terms of tracking them, but data from big cities suggests a similar very large decline in all three crime types occurred last year.
Let’s dig in to the data!
Carjackings are a tough crime to track because it hasn’t been an officially counted crime nationally until just a few years ago. Technically, carjacking is a robbery offense where a vehicle is stolen. I wrote last August about how they fell in 2023 according to a new report from the FBI and appeared to be falling in 2024.
Well, it is a few months later and there appears to be stronger evidence that a very large decline likely occurred. Some analytic weasel wording is needed because A) solid data for the full year is not available in every city with data and B) there are only a limited set of cities with carjacking data.
Still, the places where carjackings measurably surged in 2020 timeframe are seeing huge declines in 2024. I gathered carjacking data from 22 cities that either report it or are large cities in a state that publishes it. Carjackings were down nearly 27 percent overall in those cities including a decline in 19 of them.
Many of these cities like Chicago and Baltimore publish aggregated carjacking totals either in dashboards or reports. Other places like San Francisco and San Diego have carjackings as an incident type in their Records Management Systems. Carjackings for the cities in Texas and Philadelphia relied on offense reports from each state’s UCR program where I identified robbery offenses where a vehicle was stolen.
The degree of the decline in many cities is a sight to behold. There were more carjackings in New Orleans in December 2021 and January 2022 than in all of 2024. Washington, DC fell from 959 carjackings in 2023 to under 500 in 2024. Chicago1 has also seen a remarkable drop after seeing a peak in late 2022.
It’s important to remember that this is a reasonably small sample given how challenging it is to collect carjacking data. There isn’t carjacking data available from New York City or Los Angeles, which isn’t great.
A similarly sized sample with murder could be expected to be off by 5 to 7 or so percentage points from the national change, but the decline is so large across the board that we can say with some confidence that a plunge in carjackings likely occurred last year.
So while we don’t know how far carjackings fell nationally in 2024 — and probably never will — there’s ample evidence that carjackings fell a lot in the places that disproportionately have the most carjackings. It seems fairly safe to say that carjackings likely plunged last year nationally even if we can’t put a number on it.
The same could be said for vehicle burglaries which is a NIBRS offense type (23F - Theft from Motor Vehicle). I gathered data from 38 cities with YTD data for 2024 and a comparable timeframe in 2023. For New York City I used Petit Larceny of Vehicle Access as the crime type in the agency’s open data portal to approximate the motor vehicle theft trend. Vehicle burglaries were down in 34 of those cities and down 16 percent in the sample as a whole.
The decline in vehicle burglaries some places has been exceptionally sharp. Below are offenses in San Francisco and New Orleans rolling over 12 months highlighting just how far things have fallen. Sometimes declines in property crimes can reflect increasing response times, but the drop in New Orleans at least has accompanied a corresponding (and very encouraging) plunge in response times back to pre-COVID levels.
And then there are motor vehicle thefts which surged between 2020 and 2023 before hitting a peak and starting to fall in 2024. This is clearly seen in the most recent sample of the Real-Time Crime Index which has data from 323 agencies nationwide showing a greater than 20 percent decline through November.
There were 78 cities in the RTCI that reported at least 1,000 motor vehicle thefts through October or November 2023, and offenses were down in nearly 90 percent of them. There are 15 cities reporting a decline of 35 percent or more in 2024 which is more cities than are reporting an increase of any size. Only one city (Antioch, CA) is reporting an increase of greater than 25 percent while 31 cities are reporting a decrease of that size.
These trends are encouraging though it remains to be seen if they will continue into 2025 and beyond. Much like murder, it will take a few months to know whether vehicle-based crimes can go lower or will start to level off.
The above graph uses data from the cities open data feed while the table was derived from the aggregated total on the city’s Violence Reduction Dashboard (https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/vrd/home.html)