Chicago Police Carjacking Task Force Expanded To 24-Hour Patrols

CHICAGO — Police soon will expand a joint carjacking taskforce to combat the years-long spike in vehicular hijackings that have created "a very real and pervasive fear of carjacking across our city, our region and our state," Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday.

Police Supt. David Brown announced that the taskforce, which includes suburban police departments, sheriff's police in Cook and Lake counties and state law enforcement, will operate around the clock, with a focus on making carjacking arrests.

So far this year, carjackings in Chicago have declined 23 percent— from 230 to 177 — compared to the same time period in 2021, Brown said.

"We will not let up. We will be relentless. ... We are expanding the carjacking task force to all three of our watches, to address the overnight shift," Brown said. "We are also growing our citywide network of pod video cameras and license plate readers. ... We have people on the ground. We have people in the air in helicopters tracking and arresting carjackers."

The mayor said her administration's response to spiking carjackings includes tapping into $1 million in funding from the "Choose to Change" program, which offers kids caught in the criminal justice system access to socioemotional supports and job training.

"We've got to bend the curve on this issue, which is whey're working so hard with criminal courts not to just process a case and turn these young people back into the community. We've got to do something to prick their consciousness, and frankly for those kids that want to get out of this life, provide them with way home. But there's got to be accountability. We can't keep seeing kids that have four or five more (carjacking cases) stacked up, and they continue to reoffend. We have got to break that cycle."

Lightfoot said that over the last two years, an inordinate amount of juveniles were involved in the more than 3,300 carjackings in Chicago. She said about half of people arrested on carjacking-related charges were juveniles, at least one was as young as 11 years old.

At Monday's news conference, the mayor said there seems to have been a correlation between remote learning during the coronavirus crisis and the spike in carjackings.

"Having talked to state’s attorneys who were dealing with these cases in juvenile court, and others, a lot of parents went to work during the day thinking their teenagers were logged on for remote learning, only to find something else," the mayor said. "I asked is there some new market for stolen cars? And unfortunately, that answer was no, that for many of these kids, who some of whom had no prior involvement in the criminal justice system, this was pure boredom."

The Chicago Teachers Union quickly chastised the mayor for those comments.

“Every child in our public schools in Chicago deserves an apology from the mayor today, who claimed with zero evidence that there was a correlation between remote learning in 2020 and an increase in carjackings, which have been growing across the nation. To suggest that our students are somehow disproportionately responsible for these crimes is precisely the kind of scapegoating and smear tactics Black and Brown students and adults have had to contend with in any discourse about crime for generations, CTU union leaders said in a statement.

“Does the mayor not understand that to claim that remote learning causes car-jacking is intellectually unsound and politically venal? Is the reason she resisted moving to remote learning during the Omicron surge because her bogus belief in that false correlation has become part of her crime-fighting tactics? The mayor’s rhetoric today hails back to the 1980’s smear tactics of Ronald Reagan and his education secretary Bill Bennett."