BLM race riots and pandemic lockdowns made carjacking into big business. This from Daniel Greenfield at frontpagemag.com.
Carjacking is booming like no form of crime in Biden’s America. Homicides are up, especially in those cities that defunded their police, pharmacies are going out of business in San Francisco and other cities where shoplifting was legalized, but stealing cars is where it’s really at now.
Carjackings more than doubled in Chicago, and increased 537% in Minneapolis, the capital of police defunding, and around 500% in Washington D.C.
In Atlanta, mayoral candidate Antonio Brown, who had advocated defunding the police, was leaving a ribbon-cutting ceremony when he was carjacked and dragged for a block.
(One reason Ubers have become harder to find is that drivers are afraid of being carjacked.)
In Philly, a Lyft driver avoided a similar fate by pulling out his gun and shooting a 14-year-old carjacker.
The media, which assured the country that defunding the police, freeing all the criminals, and ending bail would reform public safety, claims to be baffled by the rise in carjackings.
The carjacking boom is the outgrowth of the two worst Democrat policies from 2020. The lockdowns wrecked the economy and created a booming black market for criminals. The BLM movement and its race riots helped spur a decriminalization that led to a massive crime wave.
Democrat municipalities dismantled law enforcement, destroyed police morale, and shut down much of the justice system in response to the Black Lives Matter riots because of the overdose death of George Floyd. The arrest and prosecution of teens, already unpopular, went by the wayside.
The same drug rings exploiting children to run drugs began using them to steal cars. And organized gangs employed young recruits to shoplift from stores when it became clear that even the most brazen daylight robberies would not be prosecuted in major urban areas.
The criminal justice reform movement has fought against prosecuting teenagers, even those who commit murder, as adults. And, indeed, the two teen girls who killed an Uber driver in D.C. reportedly reached a plea deal. Teen carjackers know that even if they kill their victim, the worst thing that will happen is they’ll be in the custody of the state until they become legal adults.
Carjackings have multiplied because the price of new cars is sharply up. Likewise used car prices have shot up by as much as a quarter and inventory is low. Supply is meeting demand.
It’s not just the consumer market. There are severe rental car shortages and Uber shortages also.
Even after the economic devastation of the Democrat lockdowns, Biden’s signature program is pushing subsidized electric cars. Car manufacturers are waiting to see what sort of mandates and rewards they’ll be dealing with under Biden’s infrastructure program.
If Biden’s electric car push implodes, the auto market may begin to stabilize and recover. But the carjackings will just give way to other lucrative criminal enterprises. Decriminalizing drugs and prostitution won’t decrease crime or make society safer. The most basic level of crime is still theft. Legalizing immoral social ills will just shift criminal resources over to various forms of theft.
Democrats have become socialists and their obsession with controlling markets is leading to artificial shortages that criminals are happy to meet by redistributing some wealth. Like cars.
Socialism, whether in the USA or the USSR, feeds a black market as consumers try to get hold of whatever is no longer available in the controlled legal marketplace. And since those socialists criminalized legal sales of many products, while decriminalizing crime, the criminals are filling niches by stealing from those who have a product in order to sell it to someone who doesn’t.
As capitalism becomes a crime, criminals become capitalists.
Everything that Biden and the Democrats are doing will only make the new crime wave worse.
In Biden’s America, carjacking is how used car sales work. And 11-year-olds hijacking cars at gunpoint are the new used car procurers of a broken economy that prints worthless money.
This is the Biden economy. Sad but true, democrats are unable to see beyond the implementation of their socialist programs. Like an alcoholic who requires constant reminding of the harms of that first drink, if only democrats had the capability of playing the tape through to the end and seeing the destruction and cruelty their initiatives bring in short order, they may stop implementing counterproductive craziness.
But, who am I fooling? Democrats will always be democrats. Ya can’t live with ’em and ya can only wish ya could live without ’em.