Carjacking is on the rise, as research about it catches up.

Carjacking, a type of violent crime in which people steal cars by threatening or using force, became a federal offense in 1992. But carjacking has become an increasing problem in US cities, according to Bruce A. Jacobs and Michael Cherbonneau, whose article, “Carjacking: Scope, Structure, Process, and Prevention,” published this month in the Annual Review of Criminology. For example, in 2021, Chicago saw the highest number of carjackings in 20 years. Similarly large increases occurred in many other US cities during the period when schools were shut down due to COVID-19. In their paper, Jacobs and Cherbonneau add to the body of relatively new carjacking research by providing “insight into the scope of the problem, the method and manner of the crime’s commission, and the challenges of curbing a clear urban menace.”

Carjacking is not counted as a separate crime from robbery in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data, nor in the National Crime Victimization Survey. So the authors used ten years of data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS): Extract Files, compiled by the FBI and downloaded from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD). NIBRS is an expanded and enhanced Uniform Crime Reporting Program, designed to capture incident-level data on each single incident and arrest within 22 offense categories made up of 46 specific crimes called Group A offenses. In addition, there are 11 Group B offense categories for which only arrest data are reported. NIBRS data on different aspects of crime incidents such as offenses, victims, offenders, arrestees, etc., can be examined as different units of analysis. Jacobs and Cherbonneau were able to parse counts from robbery data involving stolen vehicles. Using that, they created a descriptive account of multiple aspects of carjacking crimes. For the 10 years between 2007 and 2016, they showed the prevalence and seriousness of co-occurring crimes, as well as carjacking victim, offender, and event characteristics.

In their paper, Jacobs and Cherboneau also described the four-phase process associated with committing a carjacking, and they reviewed current offender decision-making theory. In the future, in order for researchers, law enforcement, and others to have a better understanding of the annual prevalence of carjacking, the authors not only advocated for it to be categorized separately from robbery in official crime statistics, but they also called for an overall modernization of efforts to identify crime trends more quickly, accurately, and with more granularity. They thought carjacking lent itself to qualitative ethnographic studies with embedded fieldworkers who could provide unique insight into the process. Indeed, much of the research they cited regarding offenders’ decision making came from such studies. These data help to sort out the complexity of committing the crime, carjacking’s attractiveness to those who perpetrate it, and ways to prevent people from being victimized by it.