Don’t look now but carjackings have become relatively rare in Arlington over the past few months.
There were four carjackings in Arlington during the first half of 2024, according to Arlington County police. That’s a third of the 2023 total during the same time period.
Three of this year’s carjackings happened in January and the fourth happened in May, when a rental car garage attendant tried to stop one of six vehicles that thieves drove off the lot in Pentagon City one night.
(What was initially reported as a carjacking series in Rosslyn last week, which led to a police shooting, was later downgraded to the lesser charges of unauthorized use of a vehicle and vehicle trespass.)
There were 12 carjackings from January to June last year and five in 2022, according to ACPD. Both of those years ended with the total number of carjackings well into the double digits.
Arlington is not the only local jurisdiction seeing big decreases in carjackings.
“There have been 258 carjackings in D.C. this year, according to police data, which is a 46% decline from the 477 carjackings in the District this time last year,” NBC 4 reported earlier this week. “An increased focus on carjackings among police and prosecutors has helped reduce the violent crimes, according to [U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew] Graves.”
D.C. established a carjacking task force in 2021, in partnership with federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies. Arlington also increased coordination between police and the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office that year in response to rising carjackings, and last year deployed more police resources to carjacking hotspots in the Crystal City area.
Carjackings may be down regionally, but they have not stopped entirely in D.C. Last week a member of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s protective detail shot an armed teen who tried to carjack his unmarked government vehicle, the Washington Post reported.
