Photographs by Anna Rose Layden

On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.

She called the police, and later that morning, a patrol officer spotted her Accord with several teenage boys in it. When the officer approached, the teens fled. As they sped down Alabama Avenue, in Southeast D.C., they collided with a city bus, then crashed into a pole. One was seriously injured. Two of the teens had been arrested for armed carjacking eight months earlier; one was still on probation. This was in keeping with what police had been regularly seeing: the same perpetrators arrested for carjackings again and again, even after getting caught.

Summers took three days off from work. She kept thinking about the feel of the gun on her skin, the way those seconds had stretched on interminably, the terror of believing that she would leave her children motherless. She was too scared to sleep at night, and afraid to leave her apartment. In need of groceries, she finally forced herself to walk to Safeway. “Every teenage African American male I saw, I’d freeze up,” Summers, who is Black, told me. “I was standing in the middle of the store crying and shaking.”

Now her fear was overlaid with guilt. Here she was, a Black woman who considered herself progressive, stereotyping young Black men as threats.

Summers is a single mother of four who works for the U.S. Postal Service. To pay for a new car, she had to take a second job that had her working until 11 o’clock every night, after her eight-hour shift at the post office. All the while, she was consumed with fear that the suspects, who knew where she lived, would come back and hurt her in retaliation for calling the police. She moved out of the apartment she’d lived in for eight years.

Shantise Summers was carjacked at gunpoint. None of her teenage assailants got jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves. What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.” (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic)

Two of the carjackers took a plea deal; the assistant state attorney declined to prosecute the one who had been seriously injured in the crash. This past January, at a hearing for the fourth suspect, who’d been 16 at the time of the offense, the judge ordered his family to pay $2,000 in restitution (which Summers says she has not received, and doesn’t ever expect to), then let him go. He walked out of court ahead of her.

Summers found herself puzzled by the language of juvenile court. Kids are called “respondents” rather than “defendants.” They get found “involved” rather than “guilty.” “We’re treating them like children,” Summers told me. “But there was nothing childlike about what they did to me.” Summers believes that all four should have faced jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves,” she told me. “What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.”

On a June evening about six months later, Detective Darren Dalton peered into the fading light, trying to determine the make and model of the vehicle approaching him. For the past two hours, ever since the call had gone out that a Cadillac Escalade had been stolen at gunpoint, Dalton and four other police investigators had been hunting for it.

As the SUV neared, Dalton glanced down at its license plate: FH 7152. He pressed the mic on his radio.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

Dalton, a 15-year police veteran, is one of a dozen detectives on the new Prince George’s County Carjacking Interdiction Unit. In the District of Columbia and the surrounding area, which includes Prince George’s County pressed up against most of the city’s eastern border, this crime has become an offense committed not just by seasoned criminals but by adolescents looking to rob people, go for a joyride, and beef up their street-tough bona fides. Since early 2023, a third of the unit’s detectives have been shot at or have fired their own gun while pursuing carjackers.

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd transformed the politics of policing in America. That summer, consensus solidified not just on the left but in the political center that tough-on-crime policies had had a net negative effect—and a disproportionate impact on poor Black neighborhoods. Politicians moved quickly to meet the moment. Many communities, including D.C., diverted money away from police departments and talked about directing it instead toward addressing crime’s chronic causes: the insufficient number of jobs paying a living wage, failing schools, run-down public housing.

But during the pandemic, violent crime exploded around the country. This was especially true in the Washington area. By 2023, homicides in D.C. had climbed to a level not seen in a quarter century. Carjackings rose even more. They were happening everywhere, to everyone: a mother buckling in her children outside an elementary school; a food-delivery driver making his final stop of the day; a 90-year-old who watched the carjackers drive off with her late spouse’s ashes.

Some of the victims were high-profile. In October of last year, three masked men carjacked Henry Cuellar, a Democratic congressman from Texas, as he arrived at his apartment, making off with his Toyota, phone, iPad, and sushi dinner. In January, Mike Gill, a 56-year-old father of three who’d served as the chief of staff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was driving his new Jeep to pick up his wife from her law office in downtown D.C. when a man climbed into his car and shot him. Gill’s wife found him in a pool of blood on the sidewalk outside her office, one foot still inside the Jeep; he would die in the hospital several days later. (Within hours of shooting Gill, his assailant successfully carried out three additional carjackings, and killed one other person.) Even law-enforcement officers have been victimized: In the past year, carjackers have attacked a police officer driving an unmarked car, stolen an FBI agent’s car—pushing her to the ground near the Capitol before making off with her Chevy Malibu—and tried to steal the car of the two deputy U.S. Marshals on protective detail near Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home. (This attempt was thwarted when a Marshal shot one of the carjackers in the mouth.)

[David A. Graham: Does being a victim of crime shift a politician’s views?]

Even when the pandemic abated, carjackings kept increasing. In 2019, Prince George’s County police officers investigated fewer than 100 carjackings; by the end of 2023, that number had risen to more than 500. Angela D. Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, said the community was “under siege.” “I don’t feel safe stopping at a gas station,” she said at a press conference. In Washington, the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing—to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.

On that night this past June, the stolen Escalade and Dalton’s unmarked Mazda CX-9 passed each other driving in opposite directions along D.C.’s border with Maryland. Dalton didn’t want to spook the carjackers, so he waited until the Escalade’s brake lights disappeared over a hill in his rearview mirror, then made a quick U-turn. He accelerated to catch up, sliding into position about eight cars behind the stolen SUV, then slowly moved in closer, weaving through traffic until he was three cars back. Other detectives from his unit, also in unmarked cars, were heading toward him from across the county. They would take turns following the Escalade.

The view from Sergeant Josh Scall’s passenger-side mirror as he drives his unmarked car through Prince George’s County, looking for carjacked vehicles (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic)

If the SUV turned left, staying in Maryland, the detectives could chase it. But if it slipped across the D.C. line, the officers would have a harder time getting permission to chase it. This, too, was an outgrowth of the changing politics of policing over the past decade: Communities all over the country had placed new restraints on police departments’ ability to aggressively pursue criminals. There were good reasons for these reforms—tragic examples of police overreach and outright abuse, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods, were common. But police say this sudden overhaul had serious unintended consequences: more murders, more carjackings, and more violent crimes of other sorts, most of them in the very communities that the police reforms had ostensibly been aimed at protecting.

Among the new limits placed on police in D.C. was an effective ban on high-speed car chases, which too often end up killing innocent bystanders, or the police officers themselves. But the spike in carjackings had been so extreme that by now, in 2024, the city had been compelled to loosen its restrictions a bit. Still, Dalton and his fellow detectives weren’t sure they would be able to get permission, so they were hoping the Escalade stayed on the Maryland side of the border.

Dalton followed for two more miles, to the intersection of Southern and Branch Avenues. A crucial moment.

“Left turn onto Branch,” Dalton said into the radio. The car was staying in Maryland.

At a stoplight, Dalton pulled up next to the Escalade and finally got a look inside. The driver wore a blue surgical mask and a hoodie cinched tight around his face. The front-seat passenger was wearing a black ski mask, with only his eyes showing.

In the distance, a police helicopter thumped across the sky, positioning itself overhead. As Dalton steadied his breathing, a fleet of patrol cars converged, preparing to give chase.

Stealing cars is as old as making them; as soon as Henry Ford’s factories began churning out Model T’s in the early 1900s, people began swiping them. But over time, car alarms and anti-theft systems made them harder to steal. You could no longer take most vehicles just by pushing a screwdriver into the ignition or manipulating wires. Which is partly why, in the 1980s and ’90s, another type of car theft exploded: stealing occupied cars at gunpoint. In 1991, Scott Bowles, a police reporter for The Detroit News, wrote a story about Ruth Wahl, a 22-year-old drugstore cashier who’d been shot and killed after refusing to give up her Suzuki Sidekick. Bowles described this crime as a “carjacking.”

The word would soon be inscribed in the American consciousness because of stories like this one: On a September morning in 1992, Pam Basu, a 34-year-old chemist, left her Maryland townhouse to take her 22-month-old daughter to her first day of preschool. When she pulled up at a stop sign, two men forced Basu out of her BMW. As she tried to grab her daughter from her car seat, screaming “My baby!,” the suspects took off. Basu, caught in a seat belt, ran alongside the car, then tripped and bounced on the pavement. The suspects dragged her for about two miles, leaving behind a trail of flesh, clothing, and blood. Basu, who died from her injuries, “looked like a rag doll,” a witness later told jurors. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” A neighbor found the car seat in the road, the toddler uninjured. Stories like Basu’s helped fuel the ’90s panic about vicious “superpredators” and led to the passage of the federal Anti Car Theft Act of 1992, which made carjacking a federal crime, punishable by a possible life sentence.

Criminologists found carjackers to be different from traditional car thieves, most notably in their willingness to commit violence. As Bruce Jacobs, a former criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, has put it, a carjacking is “a Hobbesian standoff where fear reigns and brute force is the medium of communication.” Not every criminal has the temperament for it.

Carjacking violence can be wanton, even gratuitous. In March 2022, after an Uber driver named Juan Carlos Amaya drove two men to Southeast D.C., they put guns to his head and demanded his keys. Amaya quickly obeyed and got out of his car. One of the men shot him in the leg anyway. “They already had the car and the key,” Amaya told a local TV station. “They just had to leave.”

Major Sunny Mrotek noticed the uptick in carjackings in Prince George’s County the month that COVID lockdowns began, in March 2020. By the end of that year, the county police department had logged a 183 percent increase over the previous year. Most of the carjackers in the area were going unpunished—roughly 70 percent of cases go unsolved. The majority of those caught are younger than 25, and about two-thirds of those arrested for carjacking in D.C. from 2020 to 2024 were juveniles, many of them from predominantly Black neighborhoods hollowed out by economic neglect.

Mrotek believed that the pandemic had created an environment ripe for crime. With schools, malls, and recreation centers closed, and in-person access to various social services diminished, more young people were unsupervised. The first pandemic year was bad. “But then came 2021, and we just got crushed,” he told me. By year’s end, carjackings in Prince George’s County had jumped another 49 percent. And for the first time, the number of juvenile carjacking arrests surpassed adult arrests. Mrotek, who had been a cop for three decades, had never seen anything like this.

In response, the county’s new police chief, Malik Aziz, created the agency’s Carjacking Interdiction Unit, centralizing investigations in hopes of improving arrest rates and successfully resolving more cases. Starting in the fall of 2021, a lieutenant, two sergeants, and 12 detectives would handle all carjackings, under Mrotek’s supervision.

Mrotek handpicked his investigators. He needed officers who had a detective’s mind—part thinking cop, part street cop, with the skills to piece together complex cases; to surveil suspects; and, when necessary, to engage in risky chases by car or on foot. They would wear plain clothes—not suits and ties, like homicide detectives—and drive unmarked cars.

The carjacking crisis came at a time when police departments were already struggling to hire officers. The Prince George’s County Police Department, budgeted for 1,786 sworn officers, has about 350 open positions, leaving the force the smallest it’s been in a dozen years. (In 2012, according to Aziz, nearly 8,000 people applied to be police officers in the county; in 2022, only about 800 did, most of them unqualified.) D.C. has lost nearly 500 sworn officers since 2020, leaving the force at a half-century low of 3,285. Many officers who remained were hesitant to do proactive police work, preferring simply to respond to 911 calls. “The general feeling was If you’re not going to fund me, acknowledge me, or appreciate me, I’m going into self-preservation mode,” Mrotek told me. To Mrotek and his colleagues, the relationship between the retreat from aggressive policing and the explosion of violent crime seemed obvious.

Around this time, Mrotek and other detectives noticed that they were arresting the same kids again and again; more than a few wore GPS monitors on their ankle from previous arrests. “Why are we locking up the same people every time?” Mrotek wondered.

His unit was judged by its numbers: how many cases it closed, how many cars it recovered. So he wanted to see data on what was happening to offenders after they were arrested. Were they getting locked up or released? What was the recidivism rate?

Mrotek, who retired this year, found himself frustrated by what he viewed as the “coddling mindset” of the juvenile justice system. To better understand what was happening to kids as they went through the system, he began tracking the aftermath of every arrest his team made. He was stunned by what he found: dozens of cases in which teens were arrested for armed carjacking, pleaded to this or to lesser charges, and were released on probation. Kids found to be involved in carjackings rarely seemed to get any significant time in juvenile detention. He compiled a list of what he called the “top offenders”—teens on probation for carjacking who went on to be charged with additional carjackings. Suddenly, explaining the county’s carjacking problem seemed simple: If there were no meaningful consequences for committing a crime, kids would just keep committing it. “This isn’t brain surgery,” Mrotek told me. Kids would say to detectives, “ ‘I’m a juvenile—I’ll be home later today.’ ” Christina Henderson, a member of the D.C. city council, told me she would hear about offenders committing multiple carjackings. “That tells me that when he didn’t get caught after the first one, there was a feeling of invincibility—Nothing is going to happen to me; let me keep going.”

Mrotek is a father of two. He doesn’t think that a single impulsive decision should derail a kid’s future. But some crimes, he believes, are bad enough to require serious consequences, even for minors. “If you’ve just finished working 10 hours, stop at a gas station, and two juveniles pistol-whip you and drive off in your car, should they get only probation?” he said. “If we’re not punishing people for having a gun and violently assaulting people, what’s left? Murder?”

I talked with an assistant principal of a 1,200-kid middle school in the metropolitan D.C. area who shares this concern. “I don’t care who you are,” Ateya Ball-Lacy told me. “If you are in the community carjacking and putting a gun to somebody’s head, you need to be in a restricted environment. Period. Is it jail? Is it juvie? I don’t know, but clearly you need to be somewhere you can get help.”

Ball-Lacy grew up in Southwest D.C. during the crack epidemic. Several of her cousins died. “I never agreed with ‘defunding the police,’ ” she said. “When that conversation happened in my school district, we were very clear: That’s insane. If we don’t have police, who is going to break up the fights? I have a permanently torn rotator cuff as a result of breaking up fights. We cannot pretend that we are not in this place.”

Mrotek proposes a fix that he believes could solve the carjacking problem: If a juvenile pulls a gun during a carjacking, they serve a mandatory three years—one-tenth of the maximum sentence for adults.

“I guarantee you the numbers will drop real fast,” he told me.

Some people say that society can’t arrest its way out of a crime problem. “Yes, we can,” Mrotek said. “It’s actually very simple.”

As the sun set, Detective Sara Cavanagh joined Detective Dalton in tailing the Escalade, following it into an apartment complex. The SUV stopped in front of an apartment; two suspects got out of the car and disappeared inside.

Cavanagh sat behind the wheel of her unmarked Chevy Equinox and waited. Four other detectives parked nearby, each in a separate unmarked car. Patrol vehicles began lining up along a side street. If the suspects tried to flee in the Escalade, officers would deploy a spike strip—Teflon-coated metal spikes arrayed along a cord that cops can throw onto the road—to flatten its tires. The police department’s helicopter circled above. If Cavanagh and her colleagues had to give chase, the helicopter would serve as “the eye,” with a spotter calling out directions.

Left: Detective Darren Dalton, of the Prince George’s County Police Department carjacking unit, spotted a carjacked Cadillac Escalade this past June, leading to a chase and an arrest. Right: Detective Sara Cavanagh is the only female member of the Prince George’s County carjacking unit. Her experience has led her to conclude that carjacking is among the most heinous of crimes, behind only rape and murder. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic)

Cavanagh is the only woman in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, which tends to attract rough-and-tumble, testosterone-driven types. Her squad’s resident gym rat, Rusty Ueno, can bench-press 450 pounds. Many of the detectives have elaborate tattoos, samurai and lions swirling across their biceps, and they fish, hunt, and drink beer together on the weekends. Cavanagh, who is 29, has taken on the role of little sister. She bounces into the office every day, ponytail swinging, chattering nonstop. “She makes us say hello to her,” her sergeant, Matt Milburn, grouses. But she has the unit’s respect. She is the only woman in the entire department certified to carry a rifle, and many times she is the first to arrive at a crime scene. A former Division I soccer player, Cavanagh can beat anyone in her squad in a foot chase.

For Cavanagh, carjacking ranks behind only murder and rape in the hierarchy of awful crimes. She has seen the terror in victims’ eyes. The ones that affect her the most are the elderly women. Like the old lady who had been unloading groceries in her driveway when four suspects approached and demanded her car. The woman put up a fight and screamed for help; as she tried to run, one of the men tackled her, breaking her foot. Or the woman in her mid‑80s who was assaulted while parked at an ATM. Three adolescent boys grabbed her cash and pushed her while taking her car keys; she tripped backwards over a concrete parking barrier and hit her head on the ground. When Cavanagh’s unit later arrested one of the boys, in a grocery store, they discovered that he was only 12.

During the arrest, the kid said something to Detective Dalton about a bullet.

“You have a gun on you?” Dalton asked.

“No, a bullet in me,” the kid said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I got shot two weeks ago,” the kid said.

He’d been a victim in a triple shooting. A bullet was still lodged in his back.

Cavanagh later went to search the house where the kid lived. She found cockroaches everywhere, an empty refrigerator, 10 people crammed in two rooms, old takeout rotting beneath a bed. “I really didn’t want to like this kid—he’d just carjacked an old lady,” Cavanagh told me. “But I felt sorry for him.”

After every arrest, Sergeant Milburn looks up the suspect’s prior contact with the criminal-justice system. He estimates that in at least half of the unit’s juvenile cases, the suspect has had previous interactions with the police as a victim—of physical or sexual abuse, for example, or of neglect by a parent or family member. Milburn searched the 12-year-old’s history, and sure enough: He’d allegedly been physically abused at 6 years old. “Most of these kids don’t stand a chance,” Milburn told me. “I can’t tell you how many times we notify parents and they say, ‘I don’t care,’ or ‘Just send his ass to Cheltenham’ ”—the county’s juvenile detention center. “That happens more times than not.”

Cavanagh kept her eyes on the Escalade in the gathering dusk. The two suspects emerged from the apartment. “Carjacking 14,” she radioed, announcing herself by her call sign. “I’ve got two people on foot.”

The suspects climbed into the Escalade and headed toward the complex’s exit. Just past the gate, officers were hiding between two cars, where they’d laid the spike strip. Once the vehicle had passed over it, the officers would quickly yank the strip out of the road, to spare the tires of pursuing police cars.

From the sky, the helicopter spotter called out the Escalade’s movements: The suspects were coming around the corner, approaching the gatehouse. As the Escalade bumped over the spikes, air hissed out of its tires. It wobbled but kept going.

The line of patrol cars emerged from the side street, sirens wailing. Cavanagh joined the chase, crossing into a residential neighborhood, bouncing over speed bumps at 40 miles per hour.

As the carjackers sped down a hill on their busted tires, they lost control of the Escalade, which veered off the road and smashed into the front of a house. The suspects leaped out and ran. For a long moment, the police radio was quiet as officers chased them on foot.

“Talk to me,” a dispatcher finally said.

“Got one in custody,” a breathless patrol officer replied.

The second suspect had disappeared into the trees, the vegetation too dense for the helicopter to pick up his heat signature. A supervisor called for a canine unit; perhaps a dog could pick up his scent.

Cavanagh raced toward the woodline, listening for the sound of sticks breaking or leaves rustling, then slipping into the trees to search.

Brian L. Schwalb, the District’s attorney general, told me he was surprised at how quickly the prevailing sentiment had returned to “Lock ’em up” when carjackings and other crimes exploded. After all the marches and protests demanding criminal-justice reform in 2020, he said, “here we are four years later, and it’s as if that conversation never happened.” Frightened residents suddenly became less interested in hearing about root causes and long-term solutions, saying in community forums across the region that they felt unsafe and wanted something done now. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C., found himself suddenly being attacked as “soft on crime,” sometimes by the very same people who just months earlier were deriding him and other federal prosecutors as “mass incarcerators.” As soon as people start feeling unsafe, Graves told me, calls for reform are replaced by a desire to “lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible.” Evidence of this dizzying shift can be seen in the 2024 presidential election: Kamala Harris now embraces the prosecutor’s background she attempted to distance herself from during the 2020 primary campaign.

In 2014, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to a wave of police reforms across the country. The killing of George Floyd intensified that wave. But as violent crime rose sharply across D.C. over the past few years, many of those reforms suddenly seemed ill-conceived. A new narrative took hold, even among frightened liberals: The city’s progressivism had prompted a descent into lawlessness. Juvenile criminals were facing no consequences. Young people were out of control. Politicians backpedaled, prosecutors promised to get tough again, and police officers said smugly to one another, What did they think was going to happen?

The D.C. city council’s decision to trim the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget in 2020 led to a hiring freeze that Peter Newsham, D.C.’s police chief from 2016 until early 2021, believes contributed to the spike in crime. “If you look at our data during that time period, crime almost immediately went in the wrong direction, particularly violent crime,” Newsham told me. “To reduce the size of the police department was, in my opinion, irresponsible.”

Newsham doesn’t dispute that policing needs to reform and evolve. But Washington’s police department has been evolving for decades, he said, under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Justice. “We’re not the Derek Chauvins of the world,” he told me, referring to the police officer who killed George Floyd.

Newsham is now the police chief for nearby Prince William County, Virginia, which has been averaging only a dozen or so carjackings a year. He says that if you were to place a red dot on a map everywhere across the region where a serious crime has occurred, most of those dots would be concentrated in D.C. and some of its adjoining Maryland neighborhoods. “As soon as you go into Virginia, there are very few red dots,” he says. “How do you explain that?”

He answered his own question: “It’s the lack of consequences in D.C. If you want to stop violent crime, you have to separate violent criminals from society. They’re just not doing that. We’re so concerned about the freedom of the violent offender that we’re putting everyone else in jeopardy.” (The poverty rate is also lower in Prince William County than in Washington.) Newsham says criminals in D.C. have told him they know not to commit a crime in Northern Virginia because they know punishment there “is going to be swift and certain.”

The carjacking fever seems to finally be breaking; this is the first year since 2019 in which carjackings are down—by more than 50 percent in D.C. and roughly 26 percent in Prince George’s County through August. Police leaders attribute the decline in part to their specialized carjacking task forces, which have gotten better at solving cases—and also to a public sentiment that has shifted back in favor of more aggressive policing and prosecution. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney, ascribes the decline in carjackings partly to his office’s successful prosecution of multiple cases that resulted in lengthy prison sentences. Christina Henderson, the city-council member, concurs. “I think the growing number of prosecutions has helped curb some of this behavior,” she said.

Sergeant Scall surveils a stolen Toyota Corolla. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic)

But Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center, says the panicked return to a draconian tough-on-crime approach is misguided. “We’re revisiting failed policies from the 1990s,” such as youth curfews and longer pretrial detention, he told me. “We’re bringing back policies that we know did not work and that actually created a lot of harm.”

“When crime rises, the reaction has always been to get tough on crime,” Emily Gunston, who worked as first assistant attorney general for D.C. under Schwalb, told me. But “all of the studies show that putting kids deeper in the juvenile justice system increases criminality rather than reducing it.”

Ferrer noted that it’s a relatively small group of kids getting into trouble: Of the roughly 48,000 adolescents who live in D.C., fewer than 3 percent, or about 1,200, have been involved in the juvenile court system—and of those, about 1 percent, or fewer than 500, are charged with the most violent crimes: homicide, armed robbery, and carjacking. Gunston thinks the focus should be on this subset of offenders. “If we threw enough money and resources at these children,” she told me, “it would be much cheaper and more effective than what we’re doing.” Graves agrees that the most effective approach is to concentrate on the small number of people who are committing violent acts—but that the initial emphasis should be on removing them from the community.

Juvenile crime rates rise and fall, but the primary root causes of the crimes don’t change, Ferrer said: Based on data from 2022, he estimates that 12 percent of the kids involved in D.C.’s juvenile justice system are homeless, 75 percent are on Medicaid, at least 45 percent have a diagnosed behavioral-health issue, and at least 50 percent have reported abuse or neglect. Many of these kids have experienced significant and complex trauma, and so have their parents. Problems that have compounded over generations will not be solved quickly.

“It’s really important to hold two ideas in your brain at the same time,” Gunston said. “Carjacking is a terrible crime that has terrible effects on victims—and these are children who don’t have the same decision-making abilities as adults. A child who commits a crime like this has already been failed in so many ways.”

The concerns of a community worried about safety in the face of runaway violent crime are legitimate. So are concerns about the rights and life prospects of the sometimes quite young kids committing these crimes—kids born into poverty and structural racism, many of whom were themselves victims before they became criminals. Can these concerns be balanced effectively? Ferrer said the solution is to address the root causes of crime and poverty. “Real public safety is a by-product of thriving communities,” he told me, and that’s clearly true as far as it goes. But until we achieve that, would-be criminals, even young ones, have to know that they will face serious consequences for violent behavior. On this, police, prosecutors, criminologists, and most citizens in the afflicted communities agree. It should be possible to concentrate more intensive and proactive police work, and prosecutorial follow-through, on the small core of regular violent offenders, while at the same time investing public resources more broadly in impoverished neighborhoods. Brian Schwalb, the attorney general, calls this a “both and” approach: Violent offenders must face aggressive prosecution—and communities must address root causes of crime. Rather than careening wildly from one extreme (defund the police) to the other (lock ’em up), Schwalb says the whole criminal-justice apparatus—police and prosecutors and policy makers—must constantly be calibrating minor adjustments in the balance between rehabilitation and punitiveness.

Milele Drummond, who has taught in D.C. public schools for 14 years, has been struck recently by how casually some of her students talk about carjacking. “To them, it’s not a big deal,” she told me. “It’s more fun to carjack” than to be in school.

Drummond, who lives in Southeast D.C., near the border with Maryland, worries about getting carjacked when she goes to get gas, especially when she has her two young children with her. But she also worries about her students. She had thought that teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye would lead to productive discussions about racism. But she’s found that an easier way to convey some of these lessons has been to talk about crime and justice in their own city. When crime is a thing that happens to other people elsewhere, she tells her classes, it’s easy for people far from the scene to express empathy toward the perpetrator, and an understanding of why a person might have committed such a crime. But when people who are used to feeling safe suddenly don’t, that empathy and understanding tend to evaporate quickly.

[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]

“When people of means and power and privilege start to feel afraid, everything changes,” Drummond tells her students—the response shifts very quickly from “Oh, they have a sad story” to “Lock them up.”

In other words, when the threat of becoming a victim increases in their own neighborhoods, even progressive reformers are apt to suddenly become tough on crime. Which is what many of the law-abiding residents of higher-crime communities have been all along.

It was now close to midnight. After chasing down the Escalade, the detectives had returned to the maze of gray cubicles on the second floor of their building. One wall was papered with flyers showing carjacked vehicles that had not been recovered. A discarded bumper with D.C. tags lay on the floor, retrieved from a carjacking scene.

Josh Scall, another sergeant on the unit, walked in wearing a backwards baseball cap that read Girl Dad. He has two daughters, 6 and 8. During the car chase, his wife had been texting him, telling him that the girls, worn out from a swim meet, had gone to sleep easily.

Scall looked over at a computer monitor on Dalton’s desk, which was showing live feeds from each of the four interrogation rooms down the hall. Two young suspects, arrested in a different case, were yelling to each other through an air-conditioning vent.

“They’re trying to charge me with armed robbery,” one shouted.

In a third room, the suspect whom the carjacking unit had apprehended that night sat in a chair, his head on a desk, his left wrist cuffed to a wall. Ueno, the gym rat, had gone in earlier to get the kid’s name, and described him as respectful. “He seemed defeated,” he told the others. (They never found the second suspect.)

After George Floyd’s death, Scall, a 14-year police veteran, had questioned his choice of career. Scrolling Facebook, he’d see that everyone, including friends, had seemed to turn against his profession. But since joining the carjacking unit in 2021, he told me, he’d felt renewed purpose. His squad was doing unambiguous police work, with clear victims and villains. Every time he showed up at a scene, he’d been called there to help. He liked that. His wife thinks the job is too dangerous. But Scall feels that the unit is making a difference.

Scall watched the detectives work. Cavanagh was typing up a probable-cause affidavit. Another detective retrieved a copy of the pursuit video from the helicopter hangar. A third followed the Escalade to the evidence bay for processing. Ueno hung up the phone and rolled his chair around to face the others. “All right, the juvenile’s grandmother has been notified,” he said. She had not sounded surprised to hear that her grandson had been arrested.

Just after midnight, Cavanagh walked over to the microwave to warm up a container of Irish stew. As the microwave beeped, her telephone rang. It was the owner of the Escalade. “They ran from us and ended up losing control and hit a house,” Cavanagh told him. “So your car has some serious front-end damage.”

After Cavanagh hung up, she went back to the affidavit. She was charging the juvenile with 13 criminal counts, mostly felonies. In a little while, she’d drop him off at a youth detention center. With no prior arrests, he’d likely be released later that morning.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Catching the Carjackers.”