The bill is coming due for our 2020 and 2021 efforts to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19. The price we are paying is a massive spike in violent crime by the teenagers whose lives we shut down.
The crime wave sweeping most of America is disproportionately a teenage crime spree. Children of high school age, including plenty from among the record number of dropouts, are leading the trend of assaults, homicides, and carjackings in many major cities.
Carjackings in Washington quadrupled over the pandemic. Two-thirds of the arrestees so far in 2022 have been children. Neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, has reported more than 100 carjacking arrests so far. The median and modal age of a carjacker was the same: 16. Chicago police officers in November arrested a “prolific carjacker.” He was 11.
And the motives are not necessarily what you might expect.
“I honestly believe it’s a game,” carjacking victim Tariq Majeed told the New York Times. According to the report, “Stolen cars used to be stripped down, with the parts sold for cash, he said. Now people are carjacked, and the cars are often found afterward, crashed or just left on the street. ‘It’s a game.'”
That makes sense. The first wave of lockdown crimes was notable because we saw a decrease in burglaries and robberies and an increase in assaults and homicides. That is, crimes of profit went down, while anti-social crimes went up. We were stealing purses less and punching strangers more.
The crime wave has broadened since 2020 to include more homicides and robberies, but part of the pattern remains: Young people (whom our health authorities spent 18 months desocializing by closing their schools, canceling their sports, and discouraging them from seeing friends) were acting out.
Teenagers turning to crime were “more likely to live in areas with lower internet access and school attendance, especially during the pandemic,” one University of Chicago study found.
Crime, particularly carjacking, is “a thrill, almost like a fad,” explained Tariq’s brother, Warees Majeed, who works with troubled youth in the district. “When you don’t have activities in their communities, everything’s shut down, young people are going to find a way to entertain themselves. It’s recreation — that’s what it is.”
So when you look at those plummeting math and reading scores, recall these weren’t the only harms we inflicted on children by shutting down their lives. We also turned thousands of them into violent criminals.
