As the reckless and dangerous Democrat policies for the nation by Joe Biden and by radical leftists like DC Mayor Muriel Bowser play out with increasing leniency for criminals, growing disdain for the American people, and an increase in violent crime, the media is still hesitant to report the truth, carefully couching information so as to protect their allies- refusing to tell the story that our country is in grave danger and the Democrats are incapable of acting like sane grown-ups.
Instead of solving crimes and protecting us, they are perseverating on locking up the only people who want to protect our Republic.
They would rather attack people like the former mayor of New York, Rudy Guiliani, the man who pioneered RICO prosecutions. But he is still out there punching away.
“There is a time to take our country back. These crimes around the nation need to stop. It is time to go on Offense,” Guiliani said on his daily podcast about the general nature of increased crime in the United States.
Check out his broadcast and hear him break down current events on the War Room platform:
Lawmakers may want to pay attention to him.
In Maryland, prosecutors hope organized-crime legislation can help crack down on carjackings. Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy (D) said her office is working on a statute that would go after the entire carjacking ecosystem, from those selling and supplying the weapons used in these crimes to those directing the carjackings.
“Our goal is to hold everyone who’s involved in a carjacking incident accountable, not just those who are committing the actual carjacking, but those who are making it profitable for these individuals to commit the carjacking,” Braveboy said in an interview.
In addition, she has collaborated with faith leaders, educators, businesses and nonprofit organizations to host events that feature employment opportunities to deter crime through community engagement.
Teens drive brutal spike in carjackings with pandemic limiting school and supervision
At least one Democrat is trying..
The question here is what is Democrat mayor Muriel Bowser, who is responsible for holding political prisoners and attacking supporters of President Donald Trump, doing about carjacking in the nation’s capital?
This story is the perfect case to draw those questions out:
On October 2, 2023, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) was carjacked in Washington, D.C.
CNN reported on the details , Tuesday night:
Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar was carjacked in Washington, DC, Monday evening, the congressman said. He was physically unharmed.
The armed carjacking took place at the intersection of K Street and New Jersey Avenue in Southeast DC’s Navy Yard neighborhood, according to an alert from the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Police are searching for three male suspects, the alert said.
Cuellar said his sushi dinner, phone, iPad and car were all stolen, but later recovered. The incident occurred around 9:32 p.m. Monday night while he was parking his car.
“They came out of nowhere and they pointed guns at me. I do have a black belt, but I recognize when you got three, three guns, yeah, I looked at one with a gun another with a gun, no one behind me. So they said they wanted my car, I said, ‘Sure.’ You got to keep calm under those situations and then they took off. They recovered the car, they recovered everything,” Cuellar told reporters on Tuesday.
“What really got me upset was they took my sushi, but anyway, that’s something else,” he said.
“Cuellar said he does not believe he was targeted as a member of Congress or that he doesn’t believe the assailants knew who he was”
CNN concluded:
“The safety of lawmakers in the district has been an increasing concern in recent years. In February, Rep. Angie Craig was assaulted in the elevator of her apartment building in Washington, suffering minor injuries. In the spring, Congress overrode police reforms passed by the city’s council over concerns that they were too soft on crime.”
Here is some good reporting from a citizen journalist who did a little more digging:
Several months before Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) was carjacked in Washington D.C., the Washington Post reported that the Washington D.C. Council had voted to “reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies,” Daniel Alman reported on his site, Dan From Squirrel Hill.
From Alman:
On January 17, 2023, the Washington Post reported that the Washington D.C. Council had voted to “reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.”
Diffing deeper-From a June WaPo article- they know there is a problem.
Number of carjackings in the D.C. area
In 2018, authorities in D.C. and its neighboring jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia reported a little more than 200 carjackings, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from area police departments. By the end of 2022, that number swelled to more than 1,000, with the majority reported in D.C. and Prince George’s County. Despite the launch of task forces to address the problem and a slowdown since pandemic peaks, carjackings each year since 2018 have surpassed the previous year’s total.
Carjackings are increasing across the D.C. region.
Here is more from the Washington Post:
Carjackings— which involve violence or the threat of violence and are different from unoccupied cars being stolen —have become so prevalent in the District that they became a political talking point as Congress debated D.C.’s crime and policing bills. D.C. currently averages one reported carjacking per day compared with every three days in the two years before the pandemic.
As carjackings spike in D.C. and Prince George’s, officials focus on youths
Cities nationwide are facing the same burden. According to a Post analysis of crime reports from 2018 to March 2023, Chicago, Fort Worth, New Orleans and San Francisco also recorded an increase in carjackings during the pandemic.Data shows those crimes have remained at elevated levels in each city.
Officials and community leaders have said gaps in the social safety net that were widened by the pandemic explain some of the uptick in carjackings and increased arrests of juveniles charged with the crime.
In the end, scores of victims are left traumatized. Some have been injured or killed.
Lee Alexander Thomas, 54, was killed in December by teens trying to steal his BMW at a gas station in Largo, according to police. The Washington Commanders fan and local bus driver was shot after assailants confronted him and he wouldn’t give up his car, according to hisolder brother, Ernest Thomas.
“There’s no safeguard,” Ernest Thomas said. “He wasn’t doing anything that a normal citizen wouldn’t be doing, getting gas in his car. … You can’t stay in the house all the time.”
Most common locations for carjackings in D.C.
The District and Prince George’s County have accounted for almost all of the region’s reported carjackingsin recent years, according to statistics that date to 2018 and were reviewed by The Post.Montgomery County, Fairfax County and Arlington County have seen increases in carjackings — though raw totals aren’t as high as for D.C., where at various times during the pandemic the city averaged more than two carjackings a day.
Areas such as Fairfax and Arlington counties and the city of Alexandria tallied about 90 carjackings in total from 2020 through early spring 2023.
D.C. reported about 140 carjackings in 2018, which jumped to 360 in 2020. By 2022, the number was 485. Prince George’s County reported 78 carjackings in 2019. That swelled to more than 260 by 2020 and 541 by 2022. As of early May, the county had reported 155 carjackings — about 4 percent more than at this time last year.
In the District, most carjackings occur in Wards 5, 7 and 8, which share a border with Prince George’s County. In many instances, police say, carjackings involve perpetrators crisscrossing the jurisdictions.
To analyze the patterns of carjackings at the community level, The Washington Post collected data sets from 2018 through March 2023 through open records requests and crime reports from Washington, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, Arlington County, Fairfax County and Alexandria.
The data focused on instances in which cars were taken by force or the threat of force — different from car thefts, which are also similarly on the rise, but often occur when the owner is not nearby. The data contained information such as the time that the crime was reported and the type of weapon used. The data also contained the longitude and latitude of each reported crime, which allowed reporters to merge it with demographic data from the Census Bureau.
The data was cleaned and analyzed using R programming to calculate the 90-day-rolling averages.
James Albert Borum had just turned 18 when he went on a carjacking rampage in Maryland in June 2021 while wearing an ankle monitor related to armed-carjacking charges in Washington. One of the victims was pregnant. In three of the carjackings, he had a gun.
“Not even an ankle monitor could dissuade the defendant from committing these instant carjackings and under remarkably similar circumstances as the carjackings for which he was arrested in D.C.,” Jared Engelking, a special assistant U.S. attorney, said at Borum’s sentencing in January, according to court transcripts. “He and his accomplice, you know, held guns to victims’ heads … and they pushed victims to the ground, and they stole four cars.”
Borum pleaded guilty in July 2022 carjacking and using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence. A relative declined to comment when reached for this article.
At his sentencing hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, prosecutors and his attorney sparred over what the appropriate punishment was for someone his age. Engelking wanted to deter “would-be carjackers in the community” because the crime “has become more and more prevalent, especially in recent years, in both D.C. and in Maryland,” according to court transcripts.
But Andrew Szekely, a federal public defender representing Borum, warned against overly harsh sentences and “over-penalization” that would later require a “course correction,” according to court transcripts.
Szekely said his client was “a decent student, a very talented point guard, and his dream was to go to college, to play college basketball.” But after Borum’s brother was killed, Borum “began to abuse drugs, he stopped going to school, he lost his sports eligibility, and he began to act out.”
In a handwritten letter to the court, Borum took “full responsibility” and apologized.
“What I did was wrong and cruel, and I never should have done it,” said Borum, himself a robbery victim. He added: “I know what it is like to be in front of a gun, and there is no excuse for it.”
He was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
Who is getting arrested?
More juveniles are being arrested over carjackings in D.C. and Prince George’s, authorities said. But with many cases unsolved, it’s not clear whether youths are largely responsible for the crime surge.
In Fleming’s case, police arrested a 17-year-old and two 15-year-olds. One of the younger teens was also charged in the killing of a 19-year-old, a shooting that occurred three days after Fleming stopped for gas. The teen laterpleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Fleming grew up in Wards 7 and 8 but said he started to feel unsafe in Washington only in the summer of 2020.
At the time, working on the D.C. Council’s Committee on Recreation, Libraries and Youth Affairs, he noticed that crime victims and perpetrators were getting younger. He also surveyed crime data and saw that carjackings were beginning to surge.
“I did have a weird feeling that I would end up being touched by this violence, because so many people were beginning to be personally touched by violence,” Fleming said.
Prosecutors in Prince George’s say 2021 was the first time they saw more young people being charged in carjackings than adults. A pause in in-person learning and a lack of supervised activities during the pandemic are partly to blame, they said.
“The kids were looking for things to do. … Some of them were cries for help, some of it was just the children were working with adults,” said Lynn Celestin-Antonin, chief of the youth justice unit at the Prince George’s County state’s attorney’s office. “We can’t prove that they were working with some adults, but in speaking to some of them, there is a connection.”
In Prince George’s, as of May 24, there had been 201 reported carjackings this year, with 33 adult arrests and 50 juvenile arrests, police said. According to D.C. police data as of May 24, there had been 294 carjackings in the city and 40 arrests in such cases, including 25 involving juveniles. Often, multiple people are arrested in a single carjacking case.
Tia Bell, founder of a gun-violence-prevention nonprofit group in D.C. called the Trigger Project, said she is considering expanding the scope of her work to focus on carjackings because of their increasing prevalence in her neighborhood. Bell said she personally knows several young people who have carried out carjackings.
One told Bell he wanted to “joyride” to National Harbor to get a gift for his girlfriend. Another said he wanted attention from a family member. A third told her he was scared of using public transportation because of neighborhood feuds, she said.
“It’s an epidemic,” she said of carjackings. “A gun makes an invisible person feel invincible. A carjacking is doing the same.”
Bell said there is a widespread feeling among youths that they can escape punishment.
Carjackings can occur anywhere — in your driveway, at a stoplight or at a gas station. While carjackings are not the fault of the victim, knowing tips on how to prevent them can help put a person less at risk. This information has been compiled from interviews with law enforcement and police department resources.
- Take notice of your surroundings: When walking to, or getting in and out of your car, look around. If something feels wrong, police and prosecutors say, trust your instincts.
- Park in areas with good lighting: This will allow you to see your surroundings better. Avoid parking in areas that obscure your view such as near large vehicles and dumpsters.
- When driving, stick to the center lane: This makes it harder to access your car.
- Lock your doors, even when driving: This makes it harder for a person to get into your car.
- If you’re stopped, keep enough room for a way out: The more space you give yourself around other cars, it will give you a better chance to drive away if someone attempts to take your car.
- Travel with another person if possible: Don’t drive alone at night, if you can.
And, if you are threatened for your car, police recommend giving it up to avoid any personal injury.
In May, the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. charged a 17-year-old as an adult in multiple armed carjackings. Charging documents in the investigation conducted by D.C. police and the FBI say the teen was seen on surveillance video at a garage where several stolen cars were being parked and where license plates were being swapped.
Jaelen Jordan’s attorney, Elliott J. Queen, said his client is innocent and was “unfairly” charged as an adult because of the climate of concern about such carjackings in the city.
Queen said this was Jordan’s first arrest and argued in court to have him released and placed on GPS monitoring in time for his high school graduation. But the teen was ordered held in D.C. jail until trial.
“I don’t think it’s fair to him,” Queen said. “The mood of the city and carjackings and because there have been so many is what is driving this train. If there is some alleged activity that is going on with juveniles, correct the alleged activity in juvenile court, so they don’t end up in the adult system.”
The attorney general’s office in D.C., headed by Brian L. Schwalb (D), prosecutes most juvenile carjacking and gun cases in the city.
“We recognize that, to protect public safety, sometimes kids need to be taken off the streets and removed from the community for a period of time,” he said. “We also try to make sure every young person who commits a crime — including those we hold accountable through commitment and confinement — receives the mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, educational support and other resources that they need to get back on track so that they won’t reoffend.”
Schwalb said the city needs a strategy to “stop crime from happening in the first place” and support youths who commit crimes after being victims of violence themselves.
“They are too frequently exposed to violence at home or in the community, they may not have a stable place to live or trusted adults in their lives,” he said, “and they often have easier access to guns than to mental health supports or trauma-related care.”
Heather N. Pinckney is director of the District’s Public Defender Service, which represents the majority of youths charged with carjackings in the city. She said the rhetoric about how to reduce youth-involved carjackings echoes conversations in the 1980s and ’90s about the drug epidemic.
“The only solution offered then was more mass incarceration of an entire generation. And we know how that turned out,” she said. “Instead of doing the same thing, the District needs to invest deeply in the communities, programs and resources that children and families need to thrive and enable youth to make positive choices for the community and themselves.”
Seeking solutions
Carjackings can be hard to solve because identifying perpetrators is difficult and vehicles can change hands several times before they are recovered, if they are recovered at all, officials say.
“We’ve got cars that are seemingly just used for joyriding and then they’re parked and abandoned when we recover them,” said Capt. Jeffrey Kopp of the D.C. police. “We absolutely know that some of these cars are involved in [additional] crimes. I think there’s any number of other things people could be doing with them.”
Some stolen cars are being purchased as part of a “growing illegal market,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C.
Puzzling spike in auto thefts, many of them violent, worries D.C.-area police
“This illegal market creates an economic motive for carjacking,” Graves said. “When I look at all of the data and facts, my impression is that these changing economic motives are why we see carjackings rise at the same time that we see robberies remain roughly flat at near-historic lows.”
As officials keep trying to fight the increase in carjackings, families of victims are left dealing with the consequences.
Ernest Thomas said his brother Lee was “very fun-loving” and the youngest of eight siblings. On the night of Dec. 19, police knocked on the door of Ernest Thomas’s residence, where Lee Thomas was living at the time, and told him that his brother was shot at a gas station. Ernest Thomas was preparing to go to the hospital the next day when officers returned to tell him that his brother had died.