Fact vs. Fiction: America’s Carjacking Spree

In February, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/2/7/22922606/carjacking-wave-violence-lori-lightfoot-remote-learning-teens-ctu-teachers-union" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">offered a controversial explanation</a> for the explosion in carjackings that has plagued her city since mid-2020: Remote learning, Lightfoot alleged, had made juvenile carjackers out of bored youth. “A lot of parents went to work during the day thinking their teenagers were logged on for remote learning, only to find something else,” she told reporters at a press conference. The something else being, presumably, TikTok footage of Junior stealing a Jeep at gunpoint. While Lightfoot may have been talking about Chicago, specifically, her claim surely resonated with folks in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/23/us/carjackings-rise-major-cities-pandemic/index.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">New York City, and Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.,</a> all of which experienced carjacking increases of their own starting in 2020. And Lightfoot was far from the first to tie the phenomenon to young people growing listless while stuck at home. Last June the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab put a <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-data-points-carjackings-20210618-af4hlyfkwjevplanlcdzixfvfq-story.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">more sympathetic spin</a> on that same idea when he made the case that the regions of the city where carjackings proliferated were “also the places where internet access is most limited and — surely not a coincidence  <a href="https://medium.com/@jakejeromesmith/fact-vs-fiction-americas-carjacking-spree-250733f3bbc2">Read More</a>