Carjacked Drivers
In the movies, as well as in real life, motorists are yanked out of their cars and trucks by highwaymen who hop in behind the wheel and make a quick getaway. In the early 1990s, the catchy term carjacking was coined to describe the robbery of a motor vehicle directly from a driver, as distinct from the theft of a parked car. Once the crime had a name, the news media started to report the most outrageous cases (such as the death of a woman who, while trying to rescue her toddler from the back seat of her commandeered BMW, became entangled in her seat belt and was dragged more than a mile).
Police departments began to keep track of carjacking incidents separately from the general category of “robberies of all types,” and state legislatures began to impose stiffer penalties for the crime. In 1993, Congress passed the Anti-Car Theft Act, which made robberies of motorists carried out with a firearm a federal offense, under the legal rationale that vehicles and guns are involved in interstate commerce (see Gibbs, 1993a). The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act made killings arising from carjackings punishable by death.
Although the probability of being robbed of an auto- mobile, SUV, or truck is low, the potential for disastrous consequences is high. With luck, occupants are forced out of their vehicles and left standing at the roadside, shaken but uninjured. However, this frightening type of confrontational crime can easily escalate from a robbery into an aggravated assault, abduction, rape, and even murder.
Because this combination of circumstances is relatively uncommon, researchers had to merge the findings from a number of years of NCVS surveys to assemble a sufficient number of cases to analyze. During each of the 10 years from 1993 to 2002, the NCVS projected that roughly 38,000 carjackings took place nationwide. That worked out to about 0.17 incidents (some involved more than one person)
per 1,000 people, or 17 per 100,000—making this kind of robbery about three times more common than murder. Almost 25 percent of these motorists were hurt; of these casualties, about 9 percent suffered gunshot or knife wounds, broken bones, or internal injuries.
Each year, up to 15 motorists were killed during car- jackings, according to the FBI’s SHRs. As for trends, this kind of holdup, like other varieties of robberies, tapered off after the mid-1990s (Klaus, 2004).
Many of the differential risks surrounding carjackings paralleled the patterns for other robberies. Male motorists faced greater risks of being accosted than females. Cars driven by people from households with incomes less than $50,000 were seized more frequently than vehicles owned by more affluent families (which probably also means that rob- bers took less expensive cars more often than high-end vehicles). Higher risks were faced by black and Hispanic motorists, drivers between the ages of 25 and 49, people who were not married, and city residents (Klaus, 1999a, 2004).
In the vast majority of the incidents, the driver was alone; in almost half of all confrontations, the robber acted alone. Males committed more than 90 percent of these crimes and were armed in about 75 percent of the incidents (45 percent wielded a gun).
Two-thirds of the drivers put up resistance. About one- quarter used confrontational tactics, such as fighting back against the assailant, trying to capture him, chasing him, or threatening him. About one-third tried nonconfrontational tactics like bolting out of the car and/or screaming for help. Nearly all motorists (98 percent) reported their losses to the police if the robber drove away with their vehicle, but only 58 percent of attempts were brought to the attention of law enforcement agencies. About one-quarter of the owners never recovered their vehicles, but about half suffered some financial losses (Klaus, 1999a, 2004).
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by superpredators soon would be getting out of hand and spiraling out of control.