Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had existed. Composers were considered craftsmen in an evanescent art, their creations regularly superseded by fresher work. Most music that got performed was relatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early 17th century, was largely forgotten within decades of his death, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly more than a cult figure after he died, in 1750, his major works unplayed well into the next century.

When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already well fortified for posterity. A celebrity since his 20s, he had been the subject of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary four years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Handel stands apart in another way from the musical giants who have since been rediscovered and enshrined: Each of them is renowned for an array of often-performed pieces. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. The Messiah often is, trotted out during the Christmas season by amateur and professional choruses around the globe. A fair percentage of the world probably knows the “Hallelujah” chorus well enough to sing along.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why music really does make you happier]

This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. But it is also a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,” the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and a splendid writer, has made a specialty of popular cultural history. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one of them:

Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot … He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.

These fine and vivid sentences are not, as the reader expects, about Handel. They are about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a figure few listeners are aware of.

King proceeds to relay more about Jennens’s inner life and creative struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand reports are skimpy. Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating. A rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” but still managed to be a significant art collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s crucial role, laboring in private over a libretto that he hoped would inspire “the Prodigious” (as he called Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how unusual Handel’s oratorio was and remains.

Here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is essentially an unstaged opera, a story told in music. The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all. “It has nothing that could be called a plot,” King observes. “Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion. Jennens, for whom faith and kingship were imbued with mystery, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his part, Handel—a generally agreeable though fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was probably indifferent to such political and sectarian matters. But he knew a good librettist when he saw one.

The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context. Not all of the figures are directly connected to Handel, and at times King’s deep background verges on the tangential. But a similar storyline links his cast of characters: They are coping with dire predicaments (of widely varying sorts), in a time of political flux and fear, all of them managing to carry on—a spirit of perseverance that runs through the Messiah.

For example, King delves at length into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for both. We learn, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and family’s efforts to protect her, the two lawsuits her husband filed against the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known suffering lent her musical lamentations in the oratorio a raw power—“He was despised and rejected of Men,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a stunned opening-night audience and in many of her performances after.

Other lives and issues are more peripherally entangled in King’s tale of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave trade, to which Handel had a minor financial connection, features an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who ends up enslaved in Maryland. Against all odds, he ultimately succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey includes an interlude in London, where “it would not have been unusual to see Diallo walking past Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Square”—though who knows if the two ever met. Several times in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these sorts of indirect associations.

And what about Handel’s evolution, personal and musical? After all, he is the composer who made the Messiah, even if he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating idea for it. Handel sometimes gets a bit lost along the way in Every Valley. After a well-stocked chapter about the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t devote much space to exploring the particulars of Handel’s style and reputation, or the special place of the Messiah in his work as a whole.

The compositions that Handel churned out at a remarkable rate were simultaneously demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working within the musical language of his time, he could conjure any effect: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comic. He could do it all, and he had an uncanny sense of how to grab an audience. (His effervescent Water Music is a familiar example.) Few could work faster; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has long stirred talk of divine inspiration, though in fact he was known to turn out a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his speed was abetted by liberal borrowing from his own work and generous pilfering from other composers’ (not illegal in pre-copyright times, but still regarded as a bit tacky). Four Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier pieces, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying more or less that those people didn’t know what to do with their stuff.

He wasn’t wrong: Handel the enthusiastic copier was also a pioneer in developing the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and concentrated on the genre of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose popularity later faded. Facing bankruptcy by the 1730s, Handel revived his career by turning from seria—courtly entertainment stuffed with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic skills and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical genre with results that most choral composers you could name—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. By contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the major part of his output, has kept them from becoming repertoire staples.

[From the November 1946 issue: Handel]

In all of his work, Handel was among the greatest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of word, meaning, and music. To that end, Bach often pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal lines crossing in the music when Christ is mentioned, and the like. Handel wanted his illustration to be more on the sleeve. “Their land brought forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that is hopping, hopping, hopping. When the chorus proclaims, “There came all manner of flies,” the strings break out in buzzing.

In those places, Handel plays the plagues of Egypt for laughs, but he does the same kind of thing in earnest in the Messiah. “Every Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and every Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held note), “and the rough Places” (jagged again), “plain” (long held note). Each word and image of the text is painted like this.

Meanwhile, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes over and over, and it never gets old.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” the chorus sings, tossing that bit back and forth in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to gather, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously along: “And the Government shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Name shall be called.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who considered Handel his only musical superior, particularly admired was his ability to get dazzling effects with simple means. As both composers knew, simple is hard.

Among the possibly apocryphal stories about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon finishing the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” In fact, nothing indicates that he considered the Messiah his magnum opus at the time, or expected that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its power to be emotionally moving at nearly every moment—would be his ticket to immortality. Famous though he was, Handel was still a jobbing composer, and composers had never been endowed with an immortal aura.

[From the April 1885 issue: Handel 1685–1885]

Yet he was eager to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King reports, Handel wrote a letter a few months after the event, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other.”

The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wanted him to know “how well Your Messiah was received in that Country.” One of the most inspired composers of all time might have been aware, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, but he could not claim to understand the alchemy that had worked this wonder. In the spirit of his oratorio, the goal of his letter to Jennens seems to have been not to blow his own horn but to give comfort to his companion in the endeavor.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in History.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is James Parker, a staff writer who addresses readers’ existential worries in his “Dear James” newsletter. He has also written about why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants, how Game Change foretold the current state of American politics, and whether Theo Von is the next Joe Rogan.

James is currently in the mood to rewatch Logan, a superhero movie that he calls “grungy, nasty, expertly done.” He also enjoys attending local pro-wrestling events, reading any of John Sandford’s tense thrillers, and tapping along to Kacey Musgraves’s “Slow Burn.”

The Culture Survey: James Parker

The last thing that made me cry: How many times can I watch Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 2004 Metallica documentary, the Don’t Look Back of heavy metal? We’ll find out, I suppose. Anyway, I watched it again the other night (always at night, always alone), and James Hetfield’s wobbly speech at San Quentin State Prison, before Metallica plays a set there—and the grateful, encouraging roar he gets from the gathered inmates—made me (as always) cry. “Everyone is born good, everyone’s got the same-size soul, and we’re here to connect with that,” Hetfield tells his wary, hyper-attentive audience. “So we’re very proud to be here in your house and play some music for you.”

My favorite blockbuster: Right now I’m in a Logan mood. Does that count as a blockbuster? It’s a superhero movie—an X-Men movie, to be precise, a Wolverine movie, to be even more precise. It’s grungy, nasty, expertly done. Professor Xavier is demented, his telepathy warped, suffering grand mal seizures that frazzle the brain of anybody who happens to be nearby; Wolverine, always fascinating, is an alcoholic limo driver. [Related: Logan is a fitting farewell to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.]

My favorite art movie: Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Berlin is full of angels, beautiful, ministering angels in long coats who float unseen among the people, loaded with compassion and consolation but made slightly forlorn by their own immateriality. The scene where Peter Falk, sensing the presence of an especially wistful angel, describes for him the pleasures of a hot cup of coffee in cold weather … magic. (Here’s an uneasy thought, though, prompted by my writing this: If I saw Wings of Desire now, for the first time, would I still be open to it? Or am I too old and coarsened and impatient and Netflix’d-out?)

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: At a local pro-wrestling event (Chaotic Wrestling: guaranteed entertainment!), I saw the amazing Cody Fluffman—a gorgeous, curvy presence amid all that wrestler’s gristle, as light on his feet as a dancer—do his signature move. It’s called the Steamroller: Having rendered his opponent prone in the ring, Fluffman then lies down and rolls his splendid bulk vertically over their body, from the toes upward, at a stately pace, making chuffing engine noises. [Related: A close encounter with wrestling’s most authentic madman]

Best novel I’ve recently read: Anything by John Sandford. I love this guy. King of the airport thrillers, in my opinion; Holy Ghost is the one I’m halfway through right now. His plotting is very rambly and relaxed, but by a strange trick, he keeps the tension twanging, and his descriptions of landscapes, buildings, and weather are extraordinary—lucid and compact to the point of poetry, sometimes.

Best work of nonfiction: I’m really enjoying Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb, by Eric G. Wilson. Lamb, a 19th-century London essayist whose BFF was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a wit and a weirdo, and he celebrated—as Wilson writes—“the transience, variety and crowdedness of metropolitan life, thus challenging his friend Wordsworth’s nature worship.” Sold! For 33 years, Lamb held down a day job as a clerk at the East India Company. “I always arrive late at the office,” he wrote. “But I make up for it by leaving early.”

A quiet song that I love: “Slow Burn,” by Kacey Musgraves. I play the drums, and tapping along to this one inflates me emotionally in ways I dare not express.

A loud song that I love: “Rhino Ket,” by Kneecap: Irish rappers enjoying their ketamine. Which I’ve never taken, but I appreciate a good ravey drug anthem. “I’m k-holed out my head, this shit puts rhinos to bed.” Isn’t that good? Puts rhinos not to sleep, but to bed. Nightlight on, door cracked open, see you in the morning. (And they’re very good live, this lot.)

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Have a Nice Day,” by Spike Milligan:

So the man who was drowning, drownded
And the man with the disease passed away.
But apart from that,
And a fire in my flat,
It’s been a very nice day.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The most opinionated man in America This influencer says you can’t parent too gently. Trump: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

The Week Ahead

Here, a drama film starring Tom Hanks about the families and couples who inhabit the same house over generations (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of The Diplomat, a thriller series about a U.S. diplomat handling international crises and her marriage to a high-profile politician (streaming Thursday on Netflix) Dangerous Fictions, a book by Lyta Gold about the influence of fictional stories and the moral panic they can induce (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Americans Are Hoarding Their Friends

By Faith Hill

Hypothetically, introducing friends from different social circles shouldn’t be that hard. Two people you like—and who like you—probably have some things in common. If they like each other, you’ll have done them a service by connecting them. And then you can all hang out together. Fun!

Or, if you’re like me, you’ve heard a little voice in your head whispering: not fun. What if you’re sweet with one friend and sardonic with another, and you don’t know who to be when you’re all in the same room? Or what if they don’t get along? Worst of all: What if they do—but better than they do with you?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Six political memoirs worth reading The chronically online have stolen Halloween. Welcome to the trolligarchy. Why Randy Newman is least loved for his best work “Dear James”: The worst insult I ever heard as an opera singer Michael Keaton’s simple trick on SNL

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“There’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war.” The Democrats’ Hail Mary Election officials are under siege.

Photo Album

Replicas of a woolly mammoth and a giant octopus are displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. (The Field Museum Library)

Check out these photos of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where visitors were introduced to new (and relatively new) products, including Cracker Jack, Juicy Fruit gum, and the Ferris wheel.

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The Irish actor stars in director Ridley Scott's sequel to 2000's Gladiator, released next month.

The fictional president Josiah Bartlet dropped into a Democratic canvassing headquarters in a Madison, Wisconsin, strip mall last Sunday morning. He was there on behalf of Kamala Harris, addressing a room full of jittery volunteers stranded in a real-life political campaign.

Bartlet—or rather, Martin Sheen, the actor who played him on the beloved TV show The West Wing—was an emissary from a bygone era of better political angels that may or may not have ever existed off-screen. The show aired from 1999 to 2006 but has continued, on streaming platforms, to inspire fresh generations of operatives with its portrayal of a noble Democratic White House untainted by House of Cards, Veep, and the Trump-era darkness that would follow.

“While acting is what I do for a living,” Sheen told the crowd, “activism is what I do to stay alive.” He looked out at his audience, about 100 people set to embark on a day of canvassing and door-knocking. His voice acquired a note of paternal warmth: “I see all the faces in here.” All of this work is “worth it,” he assured everyone. “I see that the light is on.”

Personally, I saw anxiety. Fear and exhaustion, too. I might have been projecting, but it seemed palpable in this den of last-minute activity—the strain and burden of another jump-ball election, with stakes entirely too high and margins entirely too thin and nerves entirely too frayed.

With two weeks left in this writer’s-room-nightmare of a campaign, and Wisconsin still up for grabs, all the usual platitudes felt far too plausible: Everyone was talking about Democracy being at stake and the threat of fascism on the other side and America facing an existential moment and all of that. None of it felt like the usual overwrought melodrama.

Who could blame volunteers for wanting a little escapism and some doughnuts on a Sunday morning? Sheen brought along three of his West Wing co-stars: Bradley Whitford (who played deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman), Richard Schiff (communications director Toby Ziegler), and Mary McCormack (deputy national security adviser Kate Harper). They were upbeat but quick with their reality checks. “This ain’t no stinkin’ television show,” Whitford said. “The stakes are real.”

Ever since The West Wing ceased production, the cast has enjoyed its own next act as a kind of progressive wish-cast ensemble. First Lady Jill Biden hosted several of the actors and creators at a White House celebration of the show’s 25th anniversary last month. They have toured some of the well-trodden battlegrounds of the campaign trail. I’ve encountered them periodically through the years, popping up at the various headquarters, candidate events, and hotel lobbies of Iowa; New Hampshire; Washington, D.C.; and assorted other political petting zoos.

“We’re not just a bunch of people from television paying lip service here,” Whitford said on Sunday. “What you are doing is so important.” The cast likes to think The West Wing is also so important, or at least carries with it some level of relevance today, in these very different political times.

After the canvassing headquarters, the West Wing troupe headed to a packed theater across town. “We’re going to win!” Whitford declared onstage. He sounded like he really believed it. Then again, he is an actor.

Schiff echoed his co-star’s message, but lacked the same volume—and conviction. “I’m going to say it softer than Brad, but we’re going to win,” he said. The crowd cheered. Hope can be galvanizing, even if laundered through Hollywood characters who vacated their fictional offices nearly two decades ago.

Yes, it’s easy to be cynical. The West Wing was a TV show—a very good one, depicting a world very much still yearned for, even if gathering dust. You can question the utility of these celebrity drop-bys. But at the same time, why not? What’s the harm of nostalgia to keep the throngs awake in these final, weary days?

I admit that I came away less skeptical than I went in. “I know I’m preaching to the choir,” Whitford told the Democratic volunteers. “But I just want to make you sing!” And everyone sang: “The Star Spangled Banner” to kick off the morning and “America the Beautiful” as the cast left the stage.

Sheen, who is now 84, looks tremendously well preserved—but thankfully has no interest in serving in any role beyond the pretend president emeritus that he still plays in the eyes of his adoring public. He told me that someone will come up to him at least once a day, often more, and address him as “Mr. President.” He had just boarded a plane at LAX the day before, and a fellow passenger greeted him: “Good morning, Mr. President, is Air Force One in the shop?” He happily plays along—being gracious is not hard work. Changing minds and coaxing votes and winning elections is hard work.

On Sunday, Sheen emphasized that the struggle is its own reward. He likes to tell an old Irish story about a man who dies and arrives at the gates of heaven. “Saint Peter says, ‘Show me your scars,’” Sheen said. But the man has no scars to show, and Saint Peter tells him what a pity that is. “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” Saint Peter asks. At this point in the story, Sheen’s voice gained several octaves, and he launched into the crescendo of his speech: “We are rightly called to find something in our lives worth fighting for. Something deeply personal and uncompromising.” Nothing that has value in life, he argued, comes easy.

“You’re my president!” a woman standing next to me shouted. Within seconds of his pep talk ending, Sheen was swarmed. Volunteers posed for pictures and clutched Harris-Walz signs for him to autograph.

A young woman who walked up to Sheen/Bartlett seemed quite emotional. It can be a momentous experience, meeting an actual fake president. “It was all because of your show that I got into politics,” the young woman, Amanda Boss, told him. Boss said she’d started watching West Wing at the age of 5. She loved how fast everyone talked and walked and how important everything seemed to be, at all times. She told me she had never met a president before. I was compelled to remind her that Saint Bartlet was a fictional character.

“Yes,” she said. “But he was real in my head.”

Gardai (Irish police) are continuing the search in Dundalk after eight-year-old Kyran Durnin's disappearance.

An Irish mother whose eldest boy was stillborn hails the importance of a new public record of loss.

It comes after the Green Party leader indicated he would like an election to take place on 29 November.

Rossi was extradited from Scotland despite claiming to be an Irish orphan who had never been to the US.

Illustrations by Ben Denzer

The splendor of the American big-box store lay before me, with its endless variety of shaving products in every imaginable size and color—a retail extravaganza, all of it locked behind Plexiglas. I needed a razor, and in order to obtain one at my neighborhood Target, I had to press a red button to summon a store clerk. Depending on where you live, you may know the drill. I waited in Aisle B45 with two women, one in front of the Dove deodorants, the other in the Old Spice section.

“I keep pushing, but no one comes,” said the Old Spice lady.

Six minutes passed. I pressed my button; my fellow shoppers pressed theirs. The Dove woman let out a dramatic sigh and left. Was a clean shave really worth all this? I looked at Old Spice; we shook our heads and departed. Result: three paying customers sacrificed to the War on Shoplifting.

By definition, most shoplifting is petty plunder—candy bars, baby formula, lipstick. But the small stuff adds up, as demonstrated by viral videos showing shelves of deodorant or cold medicine swiped into Hefty bags by thieves who can’t even be bothered to run away. Some people contend that all of the noise about shoplifting reflects mainly a race-tinged social panic, but the retail industry is not locking up its goods, annoying its customers, and closing stores because of a few viral videos. Companies are doing it because they’re seeing their goods walk out the door, costing them billions.

[From the March 2018 issue: The dark art of stealing from self-checkouts]

Big corporate retailers, mom-and-pop shops, cops, prosecutors, and lawmakers have tried everything to stop the thefts: get tough, be gentle, invest in new surveillance technology, turn pharmacies into fortresses. Nothing seems to work. At my Target in Washington, D.C., I counted 21 aisles of goods locked behind plastic, including toothpaste, body wash, underwear, earbuds, and air fresheners—all items that impulse thieves and organized criminals alike find desirable and easiest to resell, on the street or, more often these days, online.

Who is taking all of this stuff? And why has this age-old nuisance crime become so prevalent?

People steal because it’s easy and—with rare exceptions—free of consequences. David Kimmel, who resides at Northpoint Training Center, a former state mental hospital repurposed as a medium-security prison, in Boyle County, Kentucky, is one of those exceptions.

Kimmel is on his fourth tour in prison for shoplifting, for stealing a $12.88 doll from Walmart and $142.68 worth of ammunition from a Rural King store. This time, Kimmel faced a Kentucky prosecutor and jury who seemed determined to send a message. Each of Kimmel’s two charges was bumped up from a misdemeanor with a 90-day maximum sentence to a felony carrying up to a five-year penalty, mainly because he had already been banned from those stores for shoplifting (several previous instances of stealing from that Walmart, Kimmel told me, and one prior instance—stealing a lawnmower—from the Rural King). The jury didn’t think even that was enough, so they increased each sentence to 10 years. Finally, the jury recommended that Kimmel serve the two sentences not concurrently but consecutively, for a grand total of four decades.

Kimmel steals, he told me, because he’s a drug addict—pain pills, usually, or heroin and fentanyl. He is 39 now and has been shoplifting since he was 15. “I’ve done it hundreds of times,” he said. During all of those years, he was mostly employed—painting houses, doing construction. “I could make a living, pay rent and electric,” he said. “I couldn’t afford drugs.” He sold the stolen items at half their retail price to fences in a nearby parking lot, or on Facebook. He knows it’s not right, but “you ain’t hurtin’ nobody,” he told me. “It’s just from a big company.” If he were back on the street now, as an addict, he figures he’d still be shoplifting.

Kimmel appealed his conviction, and last year, the Supreme Court of Kentucky agreed that he should not have to serve his sentences consecutively. He told me his prison time was eventually cut back to 20 years. But the original sentence reflects how fed up many Americans are with shoplifting. At a rally last fall, Donald Trump announced that if he’s reelected, “we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. Shot!” At another rally last month, he said he could end shoplifting “immediately” with “one really violent day”— a “real rough, nasty day,” maybe even just “one rough hour”—during which police could take on criminals. Both times, the crowd cheered.

Whereas many on the right see the rise in shoplifting as proof of a nationwide moral collapse, many on the left deny that it’s even happening or that it is a meaningful problem. Shoplifting is one of the hardest crimes to measure, because only a tiny proportion of cases are ever reported to police. Thefts aren’t increasing in every city—in some, reported thefts have gone down—and viral videos of shoplifters-gone-wild don’t necessarily add up to a crime wave. But merchandise is disappearing off shelves at such high rates that stores have resorted to extreme measures to defend themselves—even at the risk of alienating paying customers. The surge, retailers and industry experts say, is real.

[From the November 2024 issue: How carjacking became a teenage pastime]

Shoplifting has soared over the past three years, according to a survey by Jack L. Hayes International, a loss-prevention consulting firm, of 26 big retail companies with, collectively, more than 22,000 stores. The study calculated the total retail losses due to theft to be $7.1 billion in 2022, up from $4.9 billion in 2019. Retailers say stores are closing because they can’t make up their losses, and because some employees are scared and don’t want to work there anymore.

When Mike Mershimer worked as a store detective in the 1980s and ’90s, the primary tools deployed against shoplifters were handcuffs, shame, and mockery. He’d see shoplifters swipe a belt or Air Jordans, and “I’d grab him, throw him on the ground, and cuff him,” he told me. Customers would ridicule the thief as Mershimer marched him out the door. “I never saw those shoplifters again,” he said. Today, Mershimer advises retailers and major brands on store security. Clients are looking for fixes, but though Mershimer can offer constructive advice, he’s well aware that there’s no simple solution. “I get a helpless pit in my stomach,” he told me. “I don’t know what to tell them.”

Guards aren’t the answer, he said. New engagement rules at many retail stores discourage police and security guards from using force to stop offenders—they can no longer grab and cuff shoplifters. Some chains, their lawyers eager to avoid injuries to employees, have made even chasing down shoplifters a fireable offense. In a recent video capturing a shoplifter rolling a cart of stolen items out of a D.C. supermarket, a customer berates the guard for not chasing the thief. The guard replies, “I’m just a visual deterrent,” a phrase now common in the retail-security industry. The criminals, Mershimer told me, “see them for what they are: nothing.”

Some businesses try to look tough by dressing the guards in black tactical gear or equipping them with a German shepherd or a handgun, but “you’re mainly intimidating your customers,” he said. “If I pull up in the parking lot and see that, I’m pulling out.”

Hardening the target—creating what the industry calls the “fortress store”—doesn’t work either. Adding physical barriers and locking away products “not only deters shoplifters; it deters legitimate customers,” Mershimer said. Ditto for limiting the amount of stock placed on display: A mostly empty shelf is more of a turnoff to real customers than to thieves.

Some stores have started locking their front doors, buzzing in only people who look like paying customers. But what does a paying customer look like? Door buzzers are invitations for a discrimination lawsuit.

Yet something has to be done, Mershimer told me. Twenty years ago, if someone swiped a pair of Levi’s, “you could stand the loss. You budgeted 2 percent for shrink. Now you can’t sustain these enormous losses. Now it’s a whole shelf of Levi’s.”

A senior executive at a national chain store was equally frustrated. He spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, because his bosses didn’t want the debate over shoplifting to tarnish the company’s brand. His stores lock up products even though they know it chases away paying customers and is an ineffective barrier against professionals. “They pop the locks; they melt the glass; they take the keys out of employees’ hands,” he said.

In the early 2000s, many cities and states began easing the consequences for shoplifting. Dallas police stopped responding to calls about thefts under $50 in value. In 2014, California voters approved a referendum reclassifying thefts of items worth $950 or less as misdemeanors.

Now the clamor for safer stores is pushing the pendulum back toward enforcement. In the past few years, states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana have ratcheted up penalties, especially for people caught stealing in a group. Next month, Californians will vote on a referendum that would toughen penalties for shoplifting, essentially undoing the reforms voters approved just a decade ago.

[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]

Whether this will have an effect on thieves’ behavior is unclear. Shawn Hunter is 29 years old and has racked up more than 40 criminal charges in D.C., plus additional charges in Maryland and Virginia. Earlier this year, in a Target store in a wealthy section of D.C., two cops conducting a retail-theft surveillance operation watched Hunter stuff $54 worth of items into his bag and leave without paying. The officers stopped him just outside the door.

Hunter did not respond to requests for an interview, but I sat behind him in May in D.C. Superior Court as he waited his turn for a hearing. The judge called him to task for having missed a previous court date, but his lawyer explained that he had a good excuse: He’d failed to appear because he was in another courtroom on that same day, answering to yet another theft charge.

Hunter fidgeted throughout the hearing. The second he was dismissed, he jumped up, took the escalator two steps at a time, and burst out of the courthouse with a yelp of regained freedom.

Shoplifting is not a modern development; the term lifting dates back to a 1591 British pamphlet. In the years since, people have come up with plenty of theories about what drives shoplifters to steal. In Victorian Britain, shoplifting was seen predominantly as a female malady. The opening of department stores caused a moral panic—women with money and time to spare, London newspapers warned, were in danger of sullying their virtue and filling their days with petty crime.

When Rachel Shteir set out two decades ago to write a book on shoplifting, her idea was to plumb the roots of the early aughts’ apparent surge in retail thefts. She sold her book, The Steal, to her publisher on the back of a wave of attention devoted to the actor Winona Ryder, who’d been caught taking $5,500 of designer clothes and accessories from a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. According to a witness, Ryder claimed to have been conducting research for a role as a kleptomaniac. Ryder’s attorney denied this and suggested that the actor had assumed that the Saks clerk knew what she had taken and would charge her later for the goods. There was a sense then that women “were stealing not because they needed to eat but because they were shopping addicts,” Shteir, now a professor at DePaul University, told me. Talking about shoplifting in those years often meant discussing mental-health issues such as borderline personality disorder.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially after the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a different conception of shoplifters emerged, one that continues to dominate on the intellectual and political left. In this view, oppressed people steal to assert their power in the face of a society determined to keep them down. In the 2012 article “Stealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance,” the sociologist Victor Rios argued that shoplifting was a reasonable act of defiance against a system that preemptively labeled young men of color as criminals. Stealing, he wrote, was a way of “fighting for dignity.”

The idea that theft was both a reflection of social need and a form of political resistance became more entrenched on the left after protests—and, in some places, looting—erupted around the country over the murder of George Floyd, in 2020. Some commentators explicitly lumped shoplifting in with looting as a justified expression of frustration and rage. As Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting, told NPR, looting “freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it’s basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

This is not a popular perspective in the retail industry. Those who have studied shoplifting point out that retail theft has always been more common than people think, and not primarily among the poor or those who view themselves as politically oppressed.

[Read: Why people loot]

An estimated one in 11 Americans have shoplifted at least once. In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001. The study used shoppers’ clothing, jewelry, and other markers to draw conclusions about their economic class, providing a rough profile of who steals. The result: The shoplifters were not disproportionately minority, male, and lower-class, as many experts had assumed. In fact, about a third were middle-class and nearly 40 percent were women, and white people were just as likely to steal as were Black or Hispanic people.

These days, industry analysts say they are seeing more middle-class shoplifters than they did pre-COVID, mainly because shoplifters think they won’t face significant consequences (which is likely correct). Men might treat themselves to home-improvement tools and video-game accessories. Women, many of whom are the primary shopper for their family, will pay for milk and eggs but then swipe luxury items that a tight budget can’t accommodate: high-end cosmetics, skin-care products, jewelry.

Retailers are also becoming more concerned about what is known as organized retail crime, which often involves ringleaders ordering up shopping lists of goods they’ve often already sold to customers online. The thefts are contracted out to professional boosters, who rip off home goods, hardware, clothing, and drugstore items from any point along the supply chain, including freight trains, delivery trucks, warehouses, and stores. No reliable statistics show what portion of overall thefts are initiated by organized rings, but estimates range from as little as 5 percent to half of all theft. Coordination online has made organized theft more efficient, but it’s a different kind of puzzle for law enforcement than the far more common, and more psychologically complicated, individual shoplifting.

Why is shoplifting surging now? The coronavirus pandemic and social media are the two factors most often cited by researchers and industry executives.

At the very beginning of COVID’s spread, many categories of crime decreased, because people mostly stayed home and access to stores was limited. Shoplifting apprehensions reported by 22 major retail chains declined by 44 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the Jack L. Hayes consultants. But since then, the numbers have soared far beyond their pre-COVID levels, reflecting persistent inflation, “less staff on sales floors,” and “thieves viewing shoplifting as a high-reward, low-risk endeavor,” their survey concluded.

Read Hayes is a former store detective with the scars to prove it. Back in the ’90s, his hands were repeatedly cut by shoplifters’ fingernails and pocketknives. These days, he runs the University of Florida’s SaferPlaces Lab, which develops and tests innovations in shoplifting prevention. He’s busier than ever. He told me he’d “seen surges before, but this is different—more significant, more widespread.”

He said that “everything changed” with COVID, “including how you think about other people. Everybody around you is a threat to your health and safety.” Store employees grew less willing to confront thieves, and lifters felt free to ignore shopkeepers’ efforts to halt them. People seemed “quicker to go violent” against clerks who did intervene.

“People just seem bolder,” Hayes told me. “We used to use shame as a deterrent, an informal sanction.” At some point, it stopped working.

Hayes told me that shoplifting has become more common among both casual thieves and hardened professionals. On one end of the spectrum, videos on social media showing young people how easy it is to steal items they’re not allowed to buy—cigarettes, beer—have gone viral, encouraging the curious to try their hand at it. On the other end, some people who formerly sold drugs are now drawn to big-ticket theft—power tools, TVs, laptops—because of the lower risk of punishment.

Thieves advertise their loot on Facebook and eBay, and trade tactical tips on Reddit as well as on more obscure sites. Online communities of pros and amateurs are occasionally shut down, but new ones pop up all the time. Many shoplifters are now trained by helpful online advisers to know precisely what to target. “They come into the store with a list,” the senior retail executive told me. “They want Prevagen or Maybelline. They know when our delivery trucks arrive; they know when we stock the shelves. They know when we’re lightly staffed.”

The internet isn’t just a place to garner tips. It has also, Hayes said, become a place “to showcase what you’ve stolen.” Videos of shoplifters committing their crimes and showing off their loot have become internet mainstays, both a reflection of evolving attitudes toward retail theft and an encouragement for new practitioners. Videos tagged #haul—some set to the tune of Ayesha Erotica’s “Real Messy Bitch” (“Yeah, I sca-a-am and I ro-o-ob, I’mma take everything that you go-o-ot … I love robbery and fraud, I’m a shoplifting god”)—feature slo-mo pans: energy drinks, candies, cleaning products.

The subreddit r/ShopliftersGoneWild, which has been around for two years and has 5,200 members, is run by a 53-year-old man in Florida who works from home for a medical company.  He asked not to be named, “because the internet is a crazy place.” He’s not a shoplifter himself; in fact, he’s quite derisive of lifters. His wife works in retail and has long provided him with a steady supply of shoplifting stories at the dinner table. He told me that he launched the forum “to be funny”; he enjoys watching thieves and their critics go at each other in the comments.

GoneWild Man, as I’ll call him, started off posting videos of encounters between clerks and thieves. But the subreddit morphed into a place where compulsive lifters talk about why they do it, and right-thinking Americans confront them with the damage they’re doing to their own community.

“Some people love the risk,” GoneWild Man told me. “It’s the same adrenaline rush as skydiving, but a lot cheaper and safer.” The lifters “try to claim ‘we only do it from the big boxes, not the mom-and-pops,’” he said. “They make themselves out to be the good person.” Or not: Some advise newbies to avoid problems by threatening store security guards that if they “touch me, I’ll sue” or—an enduring legacy of COVID—“I’ll cough on you.”

GoneWild Man often struggles with a “moral dilemma”: Should he shut down the subreddit, especially when he sees people encouraging crime by, say, offering instructions on how to remove security tags from expensive garments?

He says he likes that law-abiding people jump in, trying to talk lifters out of stealing more stuff. But he’s under no illusions that his subreddit is converting thieves into upstanding citizens. It’s hard to detect much shame among brazen lifters. He does, however, see some fear. Perhaps the most frequently asked question on the forum is: “Am I going to get busted?”

If there’s one thing retailers agree on, it’s that the courts will never make shoplifting a high-enough priority. The industry, therefore, devotes enormous energy to figuring out its own defense.

Kay Patel, an engineer for a tech company in Philadelphia, thought that owning a convenience store would be a rewarding side gig. What he didn’t count on when he bought the store last October was about $200 to $300 in goods walking out the door every day. “This place is definitely harder than I thought it would be,” he told me. “People came in and took whatever they wanted.”

Temple University’s campus police have a station down the block, and officers are in and out of Patel’s shop all day. (Patel draws them in with free coffee.) Shoplifters paid the officers no mind. Kids would run in, grab snacks, and bolt. “You can’t do anything,” one of them taunted Patel. He had a point. Patel can’t file an insurance claim without his rates shooting up. He doesn’t want his seven employees chasing or grabbing lifters, because it’s not worth the risk of violence. Patel had 16 cameras inside and outside the store, but his cashiers couldn’t monitor the screens while they rang up purchases.

On a drizzly, gloomy day in May, I watched as a 15-year-old boy strolled toward the exit of Patel’s store, sipping from a Big Gulp cup. From behind the counter, the cashier called to him: “Hey, kid!”

The kid wheeled around and held out his cup: “It’s just water.”

The cashier waved him on. Confrontation diffused. False alarm. What the kid didn’t know was that seconds before the cashier had called out to him, the cashier’s phone had buzzed with an alert. A few months earlier, Patel had installed a security-software product called Veesion—one of a slew of new programs that promise to catch thieves before they steal anything. The software, constantly scanning every aisle of the store, had captured the boy’s image and used AI to analyze his movements. “Gesture close to body,” said the alert, displaying an image of the boy holding his cup up against his chest.

Minutes later, another alert flashed on the cashier’s phone: “Very suspicious,” it said, showing a woman in the back of the store rummaging through her purse. The cashier looked up and saw the woman at the ATM machine. She’d been digging out her bank card.

The software picks up on the kinds of “suspicious cues” that the Atlanta-drugstore study found were the most accurate predictors of shoplifting behavior: people turning their head as they scan the aisles, nervously playing with products, looking for cameras or security tags. Alerts fly when people reach into their pockets, open their handbag, stick a hand inside their jacket. Patel says that Veesion alerts him and his employees 50 to 60 times a day, and about half are false alarms. In the week before my visit to the store, one alert was triggered by a man nonchalantly loading some 30 cans of Red Bull into his backpack. When the cashier confronted the man, he dropped the bag and left, Patel told me. This, he added, happens in many cases when a shoplifter is called out. He told me that his losses have fallen to maybe $75 a day.

Video and AI solutions are all the rage at loss-prevention trade shows. FaceFirst, for example, promises to “instantly detect habitual shoplifters” by running customers’ faces through a database of proven thieves. There’s talk of creating a surveillance network across the retail industry that would allow stores to share images of alleged or convicted shoplifters.

AI doesn’t get bored monitoring video, so it can watch the parking lot and alert store clerks if someone walks toward the shop carrying a crowbar. “Hey, manager, do you want to lock the front door?” the bot might ask. But such technologies also raise the creepiness factor and its more serious corollary: the potential that someone will perceive racial discrimination and take action against your business.

[Read: Defund facial recognition before it’s too late]

Still, the products keep coming. An Irish program, Everseen, recognizes when customers at self-checkout stations mis-scan products (for example, waving a barcode filched from some cheap product over the scanner instead of the one on the steak they’re putting in their bag).

Big home-improvement chains have developed power tools that remain deactivated until they’re purchased. Grocery chains in the U.K. are storing expensive meats in a case that opens only after checkout. Some supermarkets have shopping carts that jam if they approach the store exit without clearing the checkout lane—an extra security layer that may slow down shoplifters but can also make consumers “feel corralled,” says Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist at City, University of London who studies retail theft. Last year, Walgreens opened a store in Chicago in which most products have been removed from the open shelves and customers must order at a kiosk up front, whereupon a clerk retrieves their items from storage.

Barbara Staib, an executive at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, has been at this for a quarter of a century. She’s seen fancy fixes come and go. “You can keep going with your technology and your solutions and all the innovation in the world, but if you don’t address motivations, you’re not going to get anywhere,” she told me. That could mean getting shoplifters into counseling, rehab programs, food-assistance services, and job-training classes. Sometimes, especially with casual thieves, a few hours of education about the impact that shoplifting can have on their own friends and family—raising prices, closing stores—can make a difference. Staib’s organization offers a four-hour course focused on sending shoplifters the message that their behavior isn’t harmless. It seems to help: A four-year study in King County, Washington, found that fewer than 6 percent of young people who finished the course were nabbed again for shoplifting.

Such efforts won’t stop organized retail crime, Staib conceded, but they might help the many occasional shoplifters who think thievery is no big deal. “These people you can educate,” she told me. “We can’t stop them; we have to get them to stop themselves.”

But the surge in shoplifting is one piece of a larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior at least as much as the law did: trust, guilt, and shame. It took a lot to get us to this point—huge technological and psychological disruption; the atomization of American life by the anonymity of the internet; the isolation imposed by COVID lockdowns, which eroded many people’s sense of empathy; a lack of consequences for stealing, attributable to reductions in policing and store staffing. It’s hard to see how better surveillance cameras and longer prison terms, let alone programs like Staib’s, could roll back such powerful changes in how we live.

Maybe GoneWild Man was right when he said, “It’s just okay to be a bad person now.”

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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.”