Carjackings are on the decline in the District, running at about 200 this year compared with the approximately 600 in all of 2008, the FBI said, crediting a joint police FBI task force for the success.
The task force has been a “tremendous asset in fighting violent crime across the region,” said Joseph Persichini Jr., FBI assistant director for the Washington field office.
He credited the task force and other recent initiatives, including a joint FBI and Prince George’s police squad that can operate across jurisdictional boundaries, with the dropping rate of violent crimes.
Launched in January, the carjacking task force combines one District police sergeant and five detectives with four FBI agents. The group also has access to an additional 15 FBI agents on the agency’s violent crimes task force.
“Collectively we needed to dig down to the root causes of crime,” Persichini said. “We found that the same people who carjack are involved in other crimes like homicides, robberies and more carjackings.”
The task force’s work has led to the indictment of 14 carjackers, an FBI spokeswoman said. Of those, six have been convicted and are currently serving time in prison. Seven others are being held in jail awaiting trial, and the 15th is out on bail.
This isn’t the first time District police and the FBI have worked together to take down the often armed criminals who pull people from their cars when they pause at stop signs and traffic lights.
By September 1992, seven people were killed in carjacking incidents in the Washington-area. Among them was a 34-year-old Maryland woman who was dragged outside her car for nearly two miles and a carjacking suspect who was shot when he tried to steal an off-duty FBI agent’s car.
Then-U.S. Attorney Jay B. Stephens called the crime “an act of terrorism against the community.”
Law enforcement agents fought back, building a computer network to track carjacking incidents and setting stings to catch the suspects in the act.
Carjackings haven’t reached such dangerous levels since, officials said.
