On January 22, the City Council’s public safety committee held a five-and-a-half hour Zoom hearing on carjackings, a crime that has surged across the country since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year Chicago had more than 1,400 carjackings—800 more than in 2019, and the highest it’s been in two decades. News about these attacks were on TV and in the papers nearly every day. “Three CPD Officers Wounded In Shootout With Carjacking Suspect,” CBS2 reported in July. “Boy, 15, Fatally Struck on Eisenhower Expressway Following Carjacking,” NBC5 announced in September. “Ride-share drivers carjacked in Roseland,” the Sun-Times proclaimed in November. “Chicago carjacking numbers not slowing,” a Tribune headline declared in January, above a map that, at first glance, makes the whole city look awash in carjacking cases. “Carjackers smash window, pull woman and daughter, 2, from vehicle in Wicker Park carjacking, Chicago police say,” ABC7 informed us two weeks ago.
“Our residents are extremely afraid,” said Seventh Ward superintendent Marcello Siggers. “They don’t want to hear about why these kids may be doing it because they’re not in school—they don’t want to hear about all of that. They want these people held accountable for their actions.”
From the way CPD has presented the numbers it’s not at all clear how many of the 1,127 arrests were actually related to last year’s 1,417 carjacking cases. Deenihan didn’t explain that oftentimes CPD arrests multiple people related to a single carjacking incident, nor did he mention how many of those arrests were for incidents that happened in prior years. In a table breaking down arrestees’ age ranges in five-year increments, the 15-20 age group was indeed the largest in 2020. More than half of the people arrested, however, were actually over the age of 20.
Across town at Northwestern University’s law school, Stephanie Kollmann, the policy director at the Children and Family Justice Center, had been ringing similar alarm bells. “In Chicago we unfortunately have a pattern of focusing the spotlight on one crime type and focusing on youth involved in that crime type,” she told me. “Sometimes it’s gun violence, sometimes it’s flash mobs, or the knockout game. The city and media were focusing specifically on young people [in discussing carjackings] and it was being linked to young people being out of school perhaps.” Indeed, during his presentation, Deenihan showed a graph with a sharp drop in carjacking cases between August and September, which he labeled “e-learning school year begins.”
Kollmann said CPD was not only obscuring that it was reporting all vehicle-related arrests alongside the carjacking numbers, but it was also presenting an inflated solve rate for carjacking cases by reporting total numbers of arrestees rather than the numbers of cleared cases. “CPD not solving these crimes is why it feels like nobody is held responsible,” she said. Kollmann saw this as particularly problematic given the department’s abysmally low clearance rate for violent crime in general.
CPD arrested a total of 366 individuals connected to those 215 cleared carjacking cases, and just over half were under the age of 18. The youngest arrestees were ten years old, and the oldest were in their mid-50s. A fifth of the people arrested reside in the 60612 zip code—an area that covers parts of East Garfield Park, West Town, and the Near West Side. There were three times as many arrestees from there than from each of the next three zip codes with the most arrestees—60644 and 60624 on the west side (Austin and West Garfield Park) and 60628 on the far south side (Roseland and Pullman).
