The soaring number of young people who have engaged in carjacking is indeed one of the key factors that has driven the surge in the Washington area and beyond, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen police officials, criminologists and youth advocates.
Some of these perpetrators stole vehicles to use them to commit more crimes. Many others commit carjackings simply for the thrill of it, or to earn respect and attention on social media, according to police investigators and advocates who have spoken to the young offenders.
Many of those who were arrested in or around Washington were out of police custody in a day or two, the investigators and advocates said. In Waller’s case, court records show that the men who were later arrested for being in the stolen car were not prosecuted at all — an outcome that those familiar with the system in D.C. said was not uncommon.
Over the last 18 months, the carjacking numbers have fallen in the D.C. area. Sgt. Josh Scall, a supervisor in the carjacking unit in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, said he’s proud of the numerous arrests his unit has made in recent years, and the impact that’s having on the crime rate. But even one carjacking is one more than he wants to see in his county.
“People look at these numbers and they don’t take a minute to realize, numbers are people,” Scall said. “These are people who were violently removed from their vehicle and are going to be psychologically changed for the rest of their lives.”
“We can parade that we’re not at 573,” Scall added, referring to the record number of carjackings recorded in Prince George’s in 2023. “But it’s still unacceptable in our books.”
‘Spiraled out of control’
Peter Newsham was entering his fourth year as the chief of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department when Covid began to sweep across the country. Crime skyrocketed in D.C. and other major cities spurred by a perfect storm of factors, including school closures, mass layoffs and social unrest following the death of George Floyd.
“I had never seen anything like it in my time in Washington, D.C.,” said Newsham, who joined the force in 1989.
Carjacking was among the crimes that rose the highest and the fastest. Newsham’s department was dealing with a staffing crisis, low morale and new legislation that reduced penalties for young offenders.
Even when investigators were successful in tracking down suspects, Newsham said, they were often right back on the street in a matter of days. That was especially true for those under the age of 18, who amounted to 65% of the 243 arrests the department made for carjacking in 2020 and 2021, according to police data.
“These young people knew they could get away with it,” he said. “There was very little consequence, and it spiraled out of control.”
Roughly 150 carjackings took place in the district in 2019. In 2020 that number more than doubled to 360, according to police data.
Newsham left the department in January 2021 to become chief of police in Prince William County, Virginia. That year, the number of carjackings in D.C. rose to 424. It went even higher — to 484 — in 2022.
But the next year was when the situation got really out of hand. A total of 957 carjackings — nearly three a day — were reported in D.C. in 2023, according to police data.
Lt. Scott Dowling, who leads the more than two dozen detectives in the Metropolitan Police Department carjacking task force, said a relatively small group of offenders helped drive the explosion in cases.
“The same people were committing multiple, multiple, multiple offenses,” Dowling said. In one case in 2023, a search warrant led to the arrest of three people suspected of carrying out roughly 50 carjackings and thefts, according to Dowling.
The carjacking trajectory in D.C. during the pandemic mirrored that of other major U.S. cities.
Philadelphia went from 224 carjackings in 2019 to 409 in 2020. The numbers kept rising over the next two years — to 866 in 2021 and 1,311 in 2022.
In Chicago, carjackings rose from 603 in 2019 to 1,852 in 2021. The city experienced a slight dip in 2022, recording 1,649.
The numbers began to drop sharply in those cities and many others in 2023. Not so in D.C. or one of its closest neighbors — Prince George’s County.
Situated along Washington’s eastern border, the sprawling, 900,000-person county is more residential than the nation’s capital. It’s home to the National Harbor and the main campus of the University of Maryland but also has pockets of low-income areas with high crime.
Sgt. Scall, the carjacking unit supervisor, said the volume of cases was so extreme in 2023 that he would go to bed with his phone in his hand.
“We had some really bad incidents happen where we were surveilling for cars and we were shot at,” Scall said. “That happened three times. It was pure insanity.”
Scall said the stolen cars were rarely going to chop shops, where the perpetrators could make quick cash. It was far more common for people to steal cars for the thrill of it, to get recognition online or to use them to commit other crimes, he said.
And it wasn’t just young people from poorer neighborhoods behind the crimes.
“There’s no quintessential carjacker,” Scall said. “We’ve done search warrants at million-dollar houses. It really crossed over financial lines.”
The number of carjackings in Prince George’s County dropped to 368 in 2024, down nearly 40% from 2023. So far this year, there have been 113, which is roughly 50% fewer than the 250 recorded at this point in 2024.
Scall attributes the drop to his unit’s increased prowess in busting the carjackers.
“If you do a carjacking in Prince George’s County, we’re usually closing it in a day or two,” he said. “We’ve sharpened our skills. We know what to do. We know where to look.”
But it’s not lost on Scall that the numbers this year are still trending far higher than the 93 recorded in 2019. He said policy shifts have helped keep repeat offenders off the street for longer than before, but he thinks the juvenile justice system is “still playing catch up.”
“If they are a juvenile, I don’t expect them to go to jail for 20 years,” Scall said. “But I think if you violently rob someone you should probably sit out for a little bit.”
In D.C., 183 carjackings were recorded through July of this year. That’s about 40% fewer than the same period in 2024. But it’s already higher than the 152 incidents in all of 2019.
The case that got Trump’s attention — the attempted carjacking of Edward Coristine, 19, better known by his online nickname “Big Balls — took place in the early morning hours of Aug. 3. According to the police report, officers on patrol spotted about 10 “juveniles” assaulting Coristine, who worked under Elon Musk at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, before moving to the Social Security Administration. The officers managed to arrest two suspects – a boy and girl, both 15.
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