New data from the FBI points to an improving national trend in carjackings this year following an apparent sizable increase between 2019 and 2022, crime analyst Jeff Asher writes on his Substack. 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. 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. 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 D.C. was the headliner last year for the surge in carjackings it was seeing and D.C. is a headliner again this year for the opposite reason. D.C. 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).
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