Much like the well-known “seven stages of grief,” Chicago’s leaders go through a series of predictable phases when there is a crime problem:
- Denial
- Announce a plan
- Falsely claim the plan is working
- Silence
We have now reached the “silence” phase of Chicago’s carjacking problem.
Between April and July, CPD issued monthly press releases in which police brass claimed that carjacking cases were “continuing” to decline month after month — even though carjacking cases were actually increasing month after month.
We called them out on their nonsense in July. And CPD decided not to mention carjackings in its August media statement. Silence. Let’s just not talk about “IT.”
And there’s a good reason they don’t want to mention it. Hijackings are up 45% over last year’s record-setting pace. The city has had just shy of 1,000 carjackings so far this year. And the pace is picking up. Police logged 52 carjackings through the first eight days of August. That’s up from 44 during the same days last year.
The latest cases were reported early Monday in Wicker Park and Sunday evening in Old Town.
More recently, a 52-year-old Uber driver was sitting in his car near the Damen Blue Line station around 2:37 this morning when three men got out of a black sedan, and two of them forced him from his vehicle at gunpoint, according to a CPD statement. Two offenders drove away with the victim’s 2018 Hyundai, and the third followed in the vehicle they arrived in, according to police.
The carjackers were described as three Black males who wore white face masks. The car they used might be a Nissan Sentra, according to a CPD report.
Around 9:20 p.m. Sunday, a man told police he was carjacked of his white 2008 Chrysler Sebring on the 1400 block of North Sedgwick. The victim told police four men in their mid-20s, three of whom had guns, were last seen heading west on Blackhawk in his car.
No arrests have been made in the latest cases.
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