Carjacking Spirals Out of Control in the Capital
1st February 2024
A former Trump official is reportedly in critical condition after being shot during an attempted carjacking in Washington on Monday evening. Mike Gill was waiting to pick up his wife when a man shot him and then fled on foot. The carjacker allegedly went on a rampage, killing Alberto Vasquez Jr. after taking his car keys, stealing two more cars and then firing a gun at a police officer before he was finally shot and killed.
Carjackings have become a serious problem around the country, but especially in the nation’s capital. Last year, carjackings doubled, reaching a shocking 959 reported incidents. Public officials have said that most of the carjackings in DC are committed by repeat teenage offenders. On Tuesday night, multiple DC officials appeared on a panel moderated by Councilman Charles Allen to discuss why this is happening. As I’ve previously written in this newsletter, Allen is one of the chief individuals responsible for DC’s soft-on-crime approach to policing: he wrote the bill that allows the worst offenders (rapists, murderers, etc.) to get out of prison in fifteen years so long as they were under the age of twenty-five when they committed their crime, and wrote the updated DC criminal code that was considered so heinous Congress stepped in to override the bill. As one commenter on a Facebook livestream of the event wrote, “Having Carjack Chuck moderate this forum is like have [sic] OJ Simpson moderate a forum on domestic violence.”