Mom of New York girl who was kidnapped, rescued over 47 hours reflects on year since terrifying disappearance

The Guardians will use their bullpen frequently against the Yankees in the ALCS.

That there are still 22 unbeaten teams is just one of the surprises this high school football season.

The Wyoming Episcopal diocese has had about 200 Northern Arapaho tribal items since 1946. On Monday, the tribe gets them back.

Don't get any ideas over there, Tom Brady.

Michael M Santiago/Getty ImagesThe Trump camp is facing backlash for what critics say are increasingly fascist overtones at the Republican candidate’s events.Examining footage from a Trump rally in Saginaw, Michigan on Oct. 4, USA Today reports that almost a dozen GOP supporters were seen holding up placards emblazoned with the slogan “Reclaim America.”The wording is well-known in certain circles for its associations with Patriot Front, a Texan neo-Nazi organization currently facing at least two high-profile lawsuits for attacks on Black U.S. citizens.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Erie County, Pennsylvania, Republican Party Chair Tom Eddy spoke to Fox News Digital in a recent interview on his party's ground game, what he is seeing in his swing area and the importance of voting early.

A new CBS News poll shows a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump with Election Day just over three weeks away. Harris is leading by 3 percentage points nationally but the race is even closer in key battleground states. Both candidates return to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday.

In his preparation for starting Game 1 of the ALCS against the Guardians on Monday night in The Bronx, Carlos Rodon watched Gerrit Cole intently on Thursday night at Kauffman Stadium.

Bill Clinton is campaigning for Kamala Harris in the key battlegrounds of Georgia and North Carolina just three weeks shy of Election Day.

Haason Reddick is turning to the NFL's most prolific agent to try to get his payday from the Jets.

Baltimore scored on five consecutive possessions and finished with 484 yards of total offense.

Nicole Kidman appeared to push Salma Hayek away when they crossed paths at the Balenciaga show last month.

Zeke Landon, we miss you.

Many New York City theaters didn't show the film "Reagan" -- about Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States and conservative icon who won re-election in a 1984 landslide carrying 49 of 50 states, admirers fumed.

LSU gymnastics star Olivia Dunne revealed what the "frustrating" part of social media fame as she tries to be the best in the sport she has compete in her entire life.

China has launched massive military exercises surrounding Taiwan in response to the island refusing to follow the rule of the Communist Party.

The actress and politician were spotted showing PDA in Cape Cod, Mass., nearly a month after his alleged cheating scandal with a reporter was exposed.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are polling neck and neck in an NBC News poll as Election Day draws near.

Scott Olson/Getty ImagesVice President Kamala Harris promised to legalize recreational marijuana use at the federal level if elected president, her campaign announced as part of a slate of new policy promises Monday.Recreational cannabis is currently legal in 24 states, but has remained illegal federally, often leading to a contentious clash between overlapping laws.The announcement was made alongside a slate of new policies the Harris campaign said are part of an “Opportunity Agenda” for Black men, and are designed to appeal to the important voting bloc that traditionally votes overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Israel says its war in Lebanon is against Iran-backed Hezbollah, but many victims seen by CBS News at one Bekaa Valley hospital were children.

The female passenger, who hasn't been identified, apparently erupted into the expletive-laden tirade as the flight was getting ready to take-off from San Diego en route to Las Vegas, according to a viral clip posted on TikTok on Sunday.

We’re once again scratching our heads, wondering what Lincoln Riley was thinking at the end of a heartbreaking loss.

Two supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris from Nevada's largest labor union spoke to Fox News Digital about why they are campaigning for the vice president in the leadup to the election.

Have a mountain of footwear inside your front door? These strategies will help you tame the chaos.

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Jerry Jones addressed head coach Mike McCarthy's job status after the Cowboys were completely destroyed at home by the Lions in what the owner said was a "shocker."

"I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility," the Republican candidate, 78, fired off in a Truth Social post.

Vice President Harris is crushing former President Donald Trump among Asian Americans, Hawaiian natives and Pacific islanders, according to a new poll.

Eminem had a one-word reaction on Sunday after Detroit Lions defensive end Aidan Hutchinson broke his tibia against the Dallas Cowboys.

Minnesota Timberwolves guard Donte DiVincenzo appeared to be furious during his return to MSG in a preseason game against the New York Knicks.

Robert Roberson could be the first person put to death in connection with shaken baby syndrome. The state’s highest criminal court ruled in another case that the science had changed.

The actress -- who keeps her children out of the limelight -- was previously spotted with her son and daughter in April 2023.

One person was killed and six others were injured after a tree fell on top of a train traveling through New Jersey Monday morning, according to reports. The accident unfolded around 6 a.m. in Mansfield Township on the New Jersey River Line Light Rail track near US 130, WPVI-TV reported. Initial reports said a tree fell...

Jack Flaherty throws seven masterful innings, and Daniel Hudson and Ben Casparius finish the job as Dodgers rout Mets.

In the world of neuroscience research, the mouse reigns supreme: in the US alone, tens of millions of mice are studied as a proxy for the human brain in labs. They’re small, they breed quickly, and they’re relatively easy to genetically manipulate, making mice ubiquitous in biomedical science. When studying something fundamental to biology, like how individual cells work, the leap from mouse to human doesn’t feel egregious. But when mice are used to study distinctly human conditions like autism, the parallels start to break down. Fifteen years ago, researchers introduced the first two mouse models of autism, each carrying a genetic mutation linked to autism in humans. They claimed that these mice behaved like autistic humans, unusually preferring solitude over meeting new mice, and squeaking only around half as often as their non-autistic littermates.  Their results made major waves, inspiring researchers to experiment with other autism-related genes. Since the late 2000s, neuroscientists have bred over 20 types of mouse models with motor problems, sensory sensitivities, and repetitive behaviors. These each capture some hallmark of human autism — provided you buy that a mouse burying marbles is the same as, for example, an autistic child insisting on eating the same food every day.  As a freshly minted PhD working at the National Institute of Mental Health in the late 2000s, Jill Silverman ran experiments on mice missing part of their SHANK3 gene, a mutation found in about 1 in 100 autistic people. These SHANK3 mice seemed to show “autistic-like behaviors” like social discomfort and compulsive grooming, similar to the repetitive body movements, or stimming, seen in some humans with autism. Silverman, now a principal investigator at the UC Davis Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute, still gets compliments on these mice — even though many of her original findings couldn’t be reproduced in future experiments. “They’ll say all this amazing stuff praising it,” she said. “And I’m like, that is the biggest mistake this field has ever made.” Billions of dollars have been poured into autism research over the last decade, funding a staggering number of experiments — including over 1,500 studies in the US in 2020 alone. Many of these studies use animal models, especially mice.  Whether or not you believe that animal testing is ethical (many don’t), scientists in numerous research fields — especially neuroscience, genetics, and other areas of biology — run experiments on animals. To understand how cells in the brain communicate to form thoughts and guide behavior, you need a living brain connected to a living body. Millions of rodents are used — and nearly all killed — for science experiments every year, many of which are preclinical tests of new drugs and other treatments with potential public health benefits, including for autism.  And yet, all attempts to make drugs that help people manage some of the more challenging effects of autism, like sensory sensitivity or self-harm, have failed. When I asked senior scientist Brigitta Gundersen, who manages Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) funding for autism studies involving rodents, for an example of a tangible quality of life improvement that this line of research has given us, she paused. “I struggle to think of examples across all of psychiatry, frankly.” “There’s this overall idea that understanding biology and understanding mechanisms will lead to better interventions,” she said. “But that hasn’t totally panned out.” In theory, figuring out how autism manifests in the brain and body should help scientists develop better treatments for some of its more debilitating symptoms, like seizures, mobility challenges, and self-harm. Given how much we still have to learn about how the brain works, autistic or otherwise, this kind of research is “a really long game,” Gundersen said.  Mouse models of autism-related gene mutations may help uncover the underlying biology of autism in the long run. But autistic people understandably want tangible support now, and research serving that need is hugely underfunded. “It barely matters to us what a mouse model says,” said Sam Crane, an advocate for people with disabilities and a public member of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that helps policymakers decide what types of autism research to pay for.  Others, including the parents of autistic children with very high support needs, fear that deprioritizing biological research will leave their loved ones behind, turning attention away from developing potentially lifesaving treatments. Massive funding agencies like the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are also wary of those trying to shift autism research away from genetics and neuroscience, arguing that scientific breakthroughs often come from long-term studies of fundamental biology — even when those studies don’t seem to offer real-world benefits in the short term.  Looking at the numbers, though, research exploring how to help autistic people navigate everyday life — the research many autistic people say they’d like to see — is still only getting about a quarter of the money allocated for autism research in the US. At a moment when autism diagnoses are on the rise — for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand — why are we spending so much on mice that might help humans eventually, and so little on services that could help humans now?  The history of autism research, briefly explained Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as defined by the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), is usually characterized by communication challenges, trouble navigating social interactions, and a high sensitivity to change.  It’s also defined by how different the roughly 5.4 million people diagnosed with autism in the US are from each other. The wide umbrella of ASD includes people who live independently, have fulfilling careers and relationships, and can advocate for their own needs. It also includes people who don’t speak much (or at all), use a wheelchair, and may require full-time support from a caregiver for the entirety of their lives. Biologically speaking, autism — like the brain in general — is still poorly understood. In the 1950s and 1960s, medical professionals embraced the now-discredited “refrigerator mother” theory linking autism to cold, distant parenting, blaming mothers for their children’s condition. Later, psychologist Bernie Rimland presented evidence that autism is rooted in biology. Then, former physician Andrew Wakefield published a paper in 1998 incorrectly linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, fueling the modern anti-vaccination movement.  Today, most researchers believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics. However, when symptoms can include everything from difficulty reading social cues to seizures to constipation, it’s hard to figure out what genes might be causing what — after all, over several decades of work, scientists have compiled a list of 100 or so genes that might be linked to autism.  To leaders at private funding agencies like SFARI, Autism Speaks, and the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), that complexity is precisely why we need basic research to explore the underlying biology and genetics of autism. The ultimate goal of these funders, several of whom have autistic children, is to find treatments for autism. Historically, some of these institutions even wanted to find “cures.” But digging into the genetics of autism in the early aughts raised more questions than answers, forcing researchers to reconsider what autism even is. Meanwhile, in the absence of meaningful medical progress, some desperate parents turned to extreme DIY “cures” like making their autistic kids drink bleach. “Despite the fact that they’re pointing in diametrically opposed directions, there’s a common theme with the refrigerator mother approach and the anti-vaccine approach,” said Ari Ne’eman, assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). “Namely, they both really emphasize the idea of causation as central to the business of autism advocacy.” Framing autism as a disease that “happens” to otherwise-healthy children as a consequence of their parenting, genetics, or environment makes it feel like something that science can fix, or even prevent in the first place. For many diseases — think deadly cancers — this wouldn’t be controversial.  But many autistic adults believe the “causation” framing is hugely misguided. Efforts to pinpoint genetic markers of autism have raised serious concerns about eugenics — namely, that if parents could get a prenatal test for autism, many of them would choose not to have those children.  Prenatal tests for many diseases, like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, already exist, and the fears of autism advocates are not unfounded. In Iceland, for example, nearly 100 percent of parents who get prenatal tests for Down syndrome — a chromosomal condition affecting as many as 6 million people worldwide, many of whom live long, healthy, fulfilling lives — choose to abort their pregnancy if the results are positive, causing the population of Down syndrome children to almost completely disappear there. Even in the US, where abortion is politically fraught, over two-thirds of parents choose not to give birth after finding out their child will have Down syndrome. Should it also be acceptable for parents to abort a pregnancy if they learn that their child will be autistic? “Autism research was really built with the assumption that the goal is a world without autism,” Ne’eman said. But a growing number of people embrace the neurodiversity movement, proposing that autism is simply another way to move through the world. To them, the condition is not something to cure with medication or prevent with prenatal testing. This shift has led to significant controversy in the world of autism research. Autism Speaks came under fire in the mid-2010s for portraying autism as a devastating disease that ought to be stamped out, before denouncing that rhetoric in 2016. For now, an effective prenatal test is not widely available — while autism does seem to be strongly influenced by genetics, there isn’t a single gene that flags autism. Prenatal tests and emerging gene-editing tools like CRISPR seem to work best for conditions caused by a single genetic mutation, like sickle cell disease.  However, scientists have listed about 100 genes that all seem related to someone’s likelihood of being diagnosed with autism, making a target for potential screenings, drugs, or other therapies much harder to pin down. Mutations in any one gene don’t necessarily mean that a person will be autistic, or shape what autism will look like for them. While some single-gene mutations cause specific neurodevelopmental disorders that fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder, like fragile X syndrome, they are relatively rare. All considered, autism isn’t currently something that can be addressed by traditional drug development pipelines. Yet, funding for projects studying the biology of autism more than quadrupled since 2008, while funding for projects finding better ways to help autistic people in day-to-day life fell or remained stagnant. Under the Combating Autism Act, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2006, Congress established the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. As the name suggests, the Combating Autism Act was focused on finding treatments to prevent or “cure” autism.  At the time, the vast majority of IACC members were not autistic — and their funding priorities were oriented accordingly. Their first set of recommendations, published in 2009, heavily skewed toward funding the search for causes and cures of autism. For example, they proposed spending $75 million on developing animal models of autism — nearly 50 times more than they suggested spending on studying everyday support services for autistic people. Can biologists breed autistic mice? (Not really.) In the world of biomedical research, where there are genetic risk factors, there are genetically altered mouse models. But by continuing to fall back on the rodents that they are so accustomed to studying, researchers are holding themselves back from fully understanding how autism manifests in humans.  Mice are small, reproduce quickly, and share about 85 percent of their functional genes with humans, making them desirable to geneticists hoping to study diseases outside of the human body. While non-animal models are slowly replacing animal testing in many areas of science, “you need a live animal to study a disorder that’s solely behavioral,” Silverman said. “Cells don’t behave.” Mice behave, but their behavior is very different from ours. So, neuroscientists have had to stretch to draw parallels between the behavior of mice and autistic humans. If a mouse buries marbles with unusual fervor or over-grooms themselves, a study may qualify it as “repetitive behavior.” If a mouse prefers being alone to hanging out with a stranger mouse in its cage, it’s displaying “social deficits.” Studies have even measured changes in ultrasonic vocalizations in mice to try to understand speech problems in autistic humans, and recorded electrical activity from the brains of dogs with autism-related gene mutations to see whether LSD could improve their social interactions. Animal behavior is finicky, though — especially when those animals are living in tiny laboratory cages, far from their natural habitat. The same mouse in the same marble-burying setup, for example, may bury fewer marbles than usual one day because it got distracted by the smell of whatever shampoo the experimenter used that morning.  Human error can play a role, too. An exhausted grad student may miscount the number of times two mice bump noses. Researchers in different labs may not even agree what that nose-bumping behavior means, or how to classify it in their papers. It “just lends itself to a lack of reproducibility,” Gundersen said.  It also makes preclinical trials for new treatments, which are often conducted in animals, challenging to translate to humans. Many symptoms, especially those related to social interactions and communication, are distinctly human — so much so that they’re nearly impossible to reproduce in mice. “You know,” Gundersen said, “no mice talk.” Today, more scientists are rejecting the idea that mice can actually exhibit autistic-like behaviors. “Nobody thinks that mice are people,” Gundersen told me. “Nobody thinks that mice are modeling autism.” But the number of publications featuring “mouse model(s) of autism” in the title has steadily increased since they were first introduced in the mid-2000s. A cynic might wonder why scientists are continuing to pursue this line of research, when both autistic self-advocates and a growing number of leaders in biomedicine are saying that it doesn’t make any sense. Ne’eman said that some people in the autistic community jokingly refer to autism research as a “geneticist’s Full Employment Act” — a parallel to the proposed Autism Full Employment Act, which would create incentives for workplaces to hire autistic people. The grant application system is really competitive. To boost their chances of getting research funding, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how gene expression guides brain cells to form connections with each other, for example, could pitch it as an autism study to open up additional funding opportunities. So, Ne’eman suspects that some scientists are “looking at the autism research agenda as exclusively or primarily a vehicle for a relatively small number of abstract questions of basic science,” which aims to expand knowledge without necessarily translating to new drugs or other practical applications. Just look at the mice: it’s been clear for years that they’re a bad proxy for autistic people, but many biomedical researchers have built their careers around using them. Moving away from dysfunctional models requires time, money, and critically evaluating old, imperfect findings — something scientists aren’t really incentivized to do.  People like Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, worry that self-advocates like Ne’eman are too dismissive of basic science. But it isn’t that autistic people don’t value science. Rather, many of them think the somewhat futile search for a “cure” to autism shouldn’t receive as much funding as it does, relative to other areas of research. A more promising path for biomedical researchers could be studying rare neurodevelopmental disorders, like Angelman syndrome and Rett syndrome, caused by mutations in a single gene that exists in both mice and humans. People with disorders like these often have symptoms experienced by others with autism, like seizures, gastrointestinal issues, and insomnia — which are more easily quantifiable in mice than, say, language. Silverman moved her lab in this direction entirely, after losing faith in models of other “autism-like behaviors.” She hopes that a clearer understanding of these specific genetic mutations will lay the foundation for things like better epilepsy medications down the line — not only for those with Angelman syndrome, but for anyone who experiences seizures alongside autism. I asked Halladay what research she wanted to see, as the mother of an autistic daughter. She agreed that more investigations of conditions related to autism, like sensory sensitivity, would be incredibly helpful to families like her own. Halladay, like many other parents, doesn’t want her daughter’s autism to go away; she just wants more support — and possibly medicine — to help her child live the best life possible. Autism research is torn between different visions In general, Ne’eman thinks that “the average autistic person, as well as the average family member, doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Have they found a better mouse model?’” They do think about whether they’ll be able to find a full-time caretaker who is covered by insurance, or what the newest adaptive communication devices will be capable of. When autistic self-advocates were largely excluded from the decision-making process, funding for things that would help them immediately, like communication assistance or housing support, fell by the wayside.  That’s since changed — today, the IACC includes 23 non-autistic government employees and 22 public members, seven of whom are autistic themselves. Their budget priorities have shifted accordingly, centering research questions like “What services and supports are needed to maximize health and well-being?” in addition to basic biology studies. At the same time, the gap between the committee’s proposed budget and how much funders actually spend has also grown. And while funding for services and support doubled between 2019 and 2020, it still only accounted for 8.4 percent of the money spent that year.  One big thing standing in the way of the IACC’s recommendations and reality: the biggest sources of science funding, public and private, weren’t really built to fund things other than biology research. Of the 28 organizations listed as funding autism-related projects between 2019 and 2020, the National Institutes of Health and SFARI — which only award grants for basic science and clinical research — together paid for over 80 percent of research.  Agencies like the Department of Education and the Administration for Community Living pay for projects studying interventions like how to help autistic adults avoid institutionalization and live as independently as possible — major priorities for autistic self-advocates. However, they only fund a tiny portion of autism research. Solving this problem will likely require a major redistribution of funding, or a big overall increase in the pool of money available to everyone. “I’m not sure that you can totally fix it by just yelling at the NIH,” Crane said. In fact, she suspects that the Office of National Autism Coordination, housed within the NIH, knows that they’re supposed to be funding more studies about how to support autistic people — they’re just not receiving grant applications for them. The NIH did not respond to Vox’s requests for comment by the time of publication. One solution the IACC recommended involves growing the overall pool of money set aside for autism research to $685 million by next year. They specifically highlighted three research areas that need the most additional resources: lifespan issues, evidence-based interventions and services, and the development of culturally responsive services. By “lifespan issues,” the IACC means anything related to big life transitions: access to higher education and employment, opportunities to live as independently as possible alongside non-autistic community members, and health care. Figuring out how to help autistic adults — including those with the most severe disabilities — find fulfilling jobs that they’re good at, stay out of harmful psychiatric institutions, and form healthy relationships doesn’t require mouse models. It requires piloting initiatives like new housing programs, building better assistive communication devices, and other community-oriented research. Studying existing interventions to make sure they’re helping autistic people — not just making them appear non-autistic in public — is also crucial, Crane said. For example, applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapy, which rewards “goal behaviors” like making eye contact or saying hello to people, is controversial in the autistic community because it can be experienced as abusive and coercive. Most existing studies on the effectiveness of ABA measured things like whether recipients behaved better in the classroom, rather than long-term outcomes like overall academic achievement or quality of life. With more money, Crane hopes this can change. “We need to be funding research that actually tracks the outcomes that matter to people.” The bottom line is that we don’t need more mouse models of autism or of autism-like behaviors. Biomedical science has a role to play, especially in helping people manage symptoms of other autism-related health issues like epilepsy and sleep disorders — but it has claimed a disproportionately large chunk of autism research funding for too long.  Some people, especially the parents of children with intellectual and physical disabilities related to autism, argue that autistic self-advocates who push back against the biomedical research agenda are acting out of self-interest, leaving those with the most severe disabilities behind. People with different experiences of autism, Autism Science Foundation president Alison Singer argues, need different things. Specifically, she believes that people with the most severe disabilities need the kinds of pharmaceutical interventions that biomedical research aims to find — and that many autistic self-advocates want to deprioritize. Ne’eman believes the opposite is true. “Those with the most severe impairments are especially poorly served by research that does not relate back to their needs,” he said. In its statement on genetic research, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network emphasizes, “Autistic people with the highest support needs are some of the most vulnerable members of our community. They deserve good lives with the right to make their own decisions, not yet another round of ‘cures’ that will not work.” Neuroscience still has a lot to offer the autism community, but neuroscientists need to listen to the people they’re claiming to serve. Ditching outdated behavioral tests on mouse models of “autism-like behavior” might be a great place to start.

A former Democratic strategist has accused Donald Trump of seeking to emulate the rhetoric and sentiments of the Third Reich.On Sunday, MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki quizzed political consultant James Carville on why he was advising the Kamala Harris campaign to go back to their messaging that the Republican presidential candidate is “scary” following a slump in the success of Tim Walz’s trademark “weird” attacks against the Trump camp.“I did not realize when I said that that he would actually go on television and say, I’m going to use the military to round up my political enemies,” Carville responded. “When I said that, I didn’t know that he was going to schedule a rally at Madison Square Garden to mimic the Nazi rally of 10th February 1939.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

"Yes, I'm 100% a Trump supporter," Vem Miller, 49, told Fox News Digital, vehemently denying he planned to shoot the candidate he is "all-in" for.

TIME Magazine owner Marc Benioff ripped Vice President Kamala Harris for dodging his outlet's interview requests in a scathing social media post on Sunday.

The Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded Monday to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research into reasons why some countries succeed and others fail.

A 49-year-old Nevada man was arrested at a security checkpoint near former President Donald Trump's Coachella rally on Saturday, Oct. 12.

Chemistry keeps building between Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels and wide receiver Terry McLaurin, who connected for two touchdowns Sunday.

Washington soon will welcome two new giant pandas from China.

Photographs by Anna Rose LaydenOn August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.She called the police, and later that morning, a patrol officer spotted her Accord with several teenage boys in it. When the officer approached, the teens fled. As they sped down Alabama Avenue, in Southeast D.C., they collided with a city bus, then crashed into a pole. One was seriously injured. Two of the teens had been arrested for armed carjacking eight months earlier; one was still on probation. This was in keeping with what police had been regularly seeing: the same perpetrators arrested for carjackings again and again, even after getting caught.Summers took three days off from work. She kept thinking about the feel of the gun on her skin, the way those seconds had stretched on interminably, the terror of believing that she would leave her children motherless. She was too scared to sleep at night, and afraid to leave her apartment. In need of groceries, she finally forced herself to walk to Safeway. “Every teenage African American male I saw, I’d freeze up,” Summers, who is Black, told me. “I was standing in the middle of the store crying and shaking.”Now her fear was overlaid with guilt. Here she was, a Black woman who considered herself progressive, stereotyping young Black men as threats.Summers is a single mother of four who works for the U.S. Postal Service. To pay for a new car, she had to take a second job that had her working until 11 o’clock every night, after her eight-hour shift at the post office. All the while, she was consumed with fear that the suspects, who knew where she lived, would come back and hurt her in retaliation for calling the police. She moved out of the apartment she’d lived in for eight years. Shantise Summers was carjacked at gunpoint. None of her teenage assailants got jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves. What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.” (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) Two of the carjackers took a plea deal; the assistant state attorney declined to prosecute the one who had been seriously injured in the crash. This past January, at a hearing for the fourth suspect, who’d been 16 at the time of the offense, the judge ordered his family to pay $2,000 in restitution (which Summers says she has not received, and doesn’t ever expect to), then let him go. He walked out of court ahead of her.Summers found herself puzzled by the language of juvenile court. Kids are called “respondents” rather than “defendants.” They get found “involved” rather than “guilty.” “We’re treating them like children,” Summers told me. “But there was nothing childlike about what they did to me.” Summers believes that all four should have faced jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves,” she told me. “What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.”On a June evening about six months later, Detective Darren Dalton peered into the fading light, trying to determine the make and model of the vehicle approaching him. For the past two hours, ever since the call had gone out that a Cadillac Escalade had been stolen at gunpoint, Dalton and four other police investigators had been hunting for it.As the SUV neared, Dalton glanced down at its license plate: FH 7152. He pressed the mic on his radio.“I’ve got it,” he said.Dalton, a 15-year police veteran, is one of a dozen detectives on the new Prince George’s County Carjacking Interdiction Unit. In the District of Columbia and the surrounding area, which includes Prince George’s County pressed up against most of the city’s eastern border, this crime has become an offense committed not just by seasoned criminals but by adolescents looking to rob people, go for a joyride, and beef up their street-tough bona fides. Since early 2023, a third of the unit’s detectives have been shot at or have fired their own gun while pursuing carjackers.In 2020, the killing of George Floyd transformed the politics of policing in America. That summer, consensus solidified not just on the left but in the political center that tough-on-crime policies had had a net negative effect—and a disproportionate impact on poor Black neighborhoods. Politicians moved quickly to meet the moment. Many communities, including D.C., diverted money away from police departments and talked about directing it instead toward addressing crime’s chronic causes: the insufficient number of jobs paying a living wage, failing schools, run-down public housing.But during the pandemic, violent crime exploded around the country. This was especially true in the Washington area. By 2023, homicides in D.C. had climbed to a level not seen in a quarter century. Carjackings rose even more. They were happening everywhere, to everyone: a mother buckling in her children outside an elementary school; a food-delivery driver making his final stop of the day; a 90-year-old who watched the carjackers drive off with her late spouse’s ashes.Some of the victims were high-profile. In October of last year, three masked men carjacked Henry Cuellar, a Democratic congressman from Texas, as he arrived at his apartment, making off with his Toyota, phone, iPad, and sushi dinner. In January, Mike Gill, a 56-year-old father of three who’d served as the chief of staff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was driving his new Jeep to pick up his wife from her law office in downtown D.C. when a man climbed into his car and shot him. Gill’s wife found him in a pool of blood on the sidewalk outside her office, one foot still inside the Jeep; he would die in the hospital several days later. (Within hours of shooting Gill, his assailant successfully carried out three additional carjackings, and killed one other person.) Even law-enforcement officers have been victimized: In the past year, carjackers have attacked a police officer driving an unmarked car, stolen an FBI agent’s car—pushing her to the ground near the Capitol before making off with her Chevy Malibu—and tried to steal the car of the two deputy U.S. Marshals on protective detail near Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home. (This attempt was thwarted when a Marshal shot one of the carjackers in the mouth.)[David A. Graham: Does being a victim of crime shift a politician’s views?]Even when the pandemic abated, carjackings kept increasing. In 2019, Prince George’s County police officers investigated fewer than 100 carjackings; by the end of 2023, that number had risen to more than 500. Angela D. Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, said the community was “under siege.” “I don’t feel safe stopping at a gas station,” she said at a press conference. In Washington, the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing—to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.On that night this past June, the stolen Escalade and Dalton’s unmarked Mazda CX-9 passed each other driving in opposite directions along D.C.’s border with Maryland. Dalton didn’t want to spook the carjackers, so he waited until the Escalade’s brake lights disappeared over a hill in his rearview mirror, then made a quick U-turn. He accelerated to catch up, sliding into position about eight cars behind the stolen SUV, then slowly moved in closer, weaving through traffic until he was three cars back. Other detectives from his unit, also in unmarked cars, were heading toward him from across the county. They would take turns following the Escalade. The view from Sergeant Josh Scall’s passenger-side mirror as he drives his unmarked car through Prince George’s County, looking for carjacked vehicles (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) If the SUV turned left, staying in Maryland, the detectives could chase it. But if it slipped across the D.C. line, the officers would have a harder time getting permission to chase it. This, too, was an outgrowth of the changing politics of policing over the past decade: Communities all over the country had placed new restraints on police departments’ ability to aggressively pursue criminals. There were good reasons for these reforms—tragic examples of police overreach and outright abuse, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods, were common. But police say this sudden overhaul had serious unintended consequences: more murders, more carjackings, and more violent crimes of other sorts, most of them in the very communities that the police reforms had ostensibly been aimed at protecting.Among the new limits placed on police in D.C. was an effective ban on high-speed car chases, which too often end up killing innocent bystanders, or the police officers themselves. But the spike in carjackings had been so extreme that by now, in 2024, the city had been compelled to loosen its restrictions a bit. Still, Dalton and his fellow detectives weren’t sure they would be able to get permission, so they were hoping the Escalade stayed on the Maryland side of the border.Dalton followed for two more miles, to the intersection of Southern and Branch Avenues. A crucial moment.“Left turn onto Branch,” Dalton said into the radio. The car was staying in Maryland.At a stoplight, Dalton pulled up next to the Escalade and finally got a look inside. The driver wore a blue surgical mask and a hoodie cinched tight around his face. The front-seat passenger was wearing a black ski mask, with only his eyes showing.In the distance, a police helicopter thumped across the sky, positioning itself overhead. As Dalton steadied his breathing, a fleet of patrol cars converged, preparing to give chase.Stealing cars is as old as making them; as soon as Henry Ford’s factories began churning out Model T’s in the early 1900s, people began swiping them. But over time, car alarms and anti-theft systems made them harder to steal. You could no longer take most vehicles just by pushing a screwdriver into the ignition or manipulating wires. Which is partly why, in the 1980s and ’90s, another type of car theft exploded: stealing occupied cars at gunpoint. In 1991, Scott Bowles, a police reporter for The Detroit News, wrote a story about Ruth Wahl, a 22-year-old drugstore cashier who’d been shot and killed after refusing to give up her Suzuki Sidekick. Bowles described this crime as a “carjacking.”The word would soon be inscribed in the American consciousness because of stories like this one: On a September morning in 1992, Pam Basu, a 34-year-old chemist, left her Maryland townhouse to take her 22-month-old daughter to her first day of preschool. When she pulled up at a stop sign, two men forced Basu out of her BMW. As she tried to grab her daughter from her car seat, screaming “My baby!,” the suspects took off. Basu, caught in a seat belt, ran alongside the car, then tripped and bounced on the pavement. The suspects dragged her for about two miles, leaving behind a trail of flesh, clothing, and blood. Basu, who died from her injuries, “looked like a rag doll,” a witness later told jurors. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” A neighbor found the car seat in the road, the toddler uninjured. Stories like Basu’s helped fuel the ’90s panic about vicious “superpredators” and led to the passage of the federal Anti Car Theft Act of 1992, which made carjacking a federal crime, punishable by a possible life sentence.Criminologists found carjackers to be different from traditional car thieves, most notably in their willingness to commit violence. As Bruce Jacobs, a former criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, has put it, a carjacking is “a Hobbesian standoff where fear reigns and brute force is the medium of communication.” Not every criminal has the temperament for it.Carjacking violence can be wanton, even gratuitous. In March 2022, after an Uber driver named Juan Carlos Amaya drove two men to Southeast D.C., they put guns to his head and demanded his keys. Amaya quickly obeyed and got out of his car. One of the men shot him in the leg anyway. “They already had the car and the key,” Amaya told a local TV station. “They just had to leave.”Major Sunny Mrotek noticed the uptick in carjackings in Prince George’s County the month that COVID lockdowns began, in March 2020. By the end of that year, the county police department had logged a 183 percent increase over the previous year. Most of the carjackers in the area were going unpunished—roughly 70 percent of cases go unsolved. The majority of those caught are younger than 25, and about two-thirds of those arrested for carjacking in D.C. from 2020 to 2024 were juveniles, many of them from predominantly Black neighborhoods hollowed out by economic neglect.Mrotek believed that the pandemic had created an environment ripe for crime. With schools, malls, and recreation centers closed, and in-person access to various social services diminished, more young people were unsupervised. The first pandemic year was bad. “But then came 2021, and we just got crushed,” he told me. By year’s end, carjackings in Prince George’s County had jumped another 49 percent. And for the first time, the number of juvenile carjacking arrests surpassed adult arrests. Mrotek, who had been a cop for three decades, had never seen anything like this.In response, the county’s new police chief, Malik Aziz, created the agency’s Carjacking Interdiction Unit, centralizing investigations in hopes of improving arrest rates and successfully resolving more cases. Starting in the fall of 2021, a lieutenant, two sergeants, and 12 detectives would handle all carjackings, under Mrotek’s supervision.Mrotek handpicked his investigators. He needed officers who had a detective’s mind—part thinking cop, part street cop, with the skills to piece together complex cases; to surveil suspects; and, when necessary, to engage in risky chases by car or on foot. They would wear plain clothes—not suits and ties, like homicide detectives—and drive unmarked cars.The carjacking crisis came at a time when police departments were already struggling to hire officers. The Prince George’s County Police Department, budgeted for 1,786 sworn officers, has about 350 open positions, leaving the force the smallest it’s been in a dozen years. (In 2012, according to Aziz, nearly 8,000 people applied to be police officers in the county; in 2022, only about 800 did, most of them unqualified.) D.C. has lost nearly 500 sworn officers since 2020, leaving the force at a half-century low of 3,285. Many officers who remained were hesitant to do proactive police work, preferring simply to respond to 911 calls. “The general feeling was If you’re not going to fund me, acknowledge me, or appreciate me, I’m going into self-preservation mode,” Mrotek told me. To Mrotek and his colleagues, the relationship between the retreat from aggressive policing and the explosion of violent crime seemed obvious.Around this time, Mrotek and other detectives noticed that they were arresting the same kids again and again; more than a few wore GPS monitors on their ankle from previous arrests. “Why are we locking up the same people every time?” Mrotek wondered.His unit was judged by its numbers: how many cases it closed, how many cars it recovered. So he wanted to see data on what was happening to offenders after they were arrested. Were they getting locked up or released? What was the recidivism rate?Mrotek, who retired this year, found himself frustrated by what he viewed as the “coddling mindset” of the juvenile justice system. To better understand what was happening to kids as they went through the system, he began tracking the aftermath of every arrest his team made. He was stunned by what he found: dozens of cases in which teens were arrested for armed carjacking, pleaded to this or to lesser charges, and were released on probation. Kids found to be involved in carjackings rarely seemed to get any significant time in juvenile detention. He compiled a list of what he called the “top offenders”—teens on probation for carjacking who went on to be charged with additional carjackings. Suddenly, explaining the county’s carjacking problem seemed simple: If there were no meaningful consequences for committing a crime, kids would just keep committing it. “This isn’t brain surgery,” Mrotek told me. Kids would say to detectives, “ ‘I’m a juvenile—I’ll be home later today.’ ” Christina Henderson, a member of the D.C. city council, told me she would hear about offenders committing multiple carjackings. “That tells me that when he didn’t get caught after the first one, there was a feeling of invincibility—Nothing is going to happen to me; let me keep going.”Mrotek is a father of two. He doesn’t think that a single impulsive decision should derail a kid’s future. But some crimes, he believes, are bad enough to require serious consequences, even for minors. “If you’ve just finished working 10 hours, stop at a gas station, and two juveniles pistol-whip you and drive off in your car, should they get only probation?” he said. “If we’re not punishing people for having a gun and violently assaulting people, what’s left? Murder?”I talked with an assistant principal of a 1,200-kid middle school in the metropolitan D.C. area who shares this concern. “I don’t care who you are,” Ateya Ball-Lacy told me. “If you are in the community carjacking and putting a gun to somebody’s head, you need to be in a restricted environment. Period. Is it jail? Is it juvie? I don’t know, but clearly you need to be somewhere you can get help.”Ball-Lacy grew up in Southwest D.C. during the crack epidemic. Several of her cousins died. “I never agreed with ‘defunding the police,’ ” she said. “When that conversation happened in my school district, we were very clear: That’s insane. If we don’t have police, who is going to break up the fights? I have a permanently torn rotator cuff as a result of breaking up fights. We cannot pretend that we are not in this place.”Mrotek proposes a fix that he believes could solve the carjacking problem: If a juvenile pulls a gun during a carjacking, they serve a mandatory three years—one-tenth of the maximum sentence for adults.“I guarantee you the numbers will drop real fast,” he told me.Some people say that society can’t arrest its way out of a crime problem. “Yes, we can,” Mrotek said. “It’s actually very simple.”As the sun set, Detective Sara Cavanagh joined Detective Dalton in tailing the Escalade, following it into an apartment complex. The SUV stopped in front of an apartment; two suspects got out of the car and disappeared inside.Cavanagh sat behind the wheel of her unmarked Chevy Equinox and waited. Four other detectives parked nearby, each in a separate unmarked car. Patrol vehicles began lining up along a side street. If the suspects tried to flee in the Escalade, officers would deploy a spike strip—Teflon-coated metal spikes arrayed along a cord that cops can throw onto the road—to flatten its tires. The police department’s helicopter circled above. If Cavanagh and her colleagues had to give chase, the helicopter would serve as “the eye,” with a spotter calling out directions. Left: Detective Darren Dalton, of the Prince George’s County Police Department carjacking unit, spotted a carjacked Cadillac Escalade this past June, leading to a chase and an arrest. Right: Detective Sara Cavanagh is the only female member of the Prince George’s County carjacking unit. Her experience has led her to conclude that carjacking is among the most heinous of crimes, behind only rape and murder. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) Cavanagh is the only woman in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, which tends to attract rough-and-tumble, testosterone-driven types. Her squad’s resident gym rat, Rusty Ueno, can bench-press 450 pounds. Many of the detectives have elaborate tattoos, samurai and lions swirling across their biceps, and they fish, hunt, and drink beer together on the weekends. Cavanagh, who is 29, has taken on the role of little sister. She bounces into the office every day, ponytail swinging, chattering nonstop. “She makes us say hello to her,” her sergeant, Matt Milburn, grouses. But she has the unit’s respect. She is the only woman in the entire department certified to carry a rifle, and many times she is the first to arrive at a crime scene. A former Division I soccer player, Cavanagh can beat anyone in her squad in a foot chase.For Cavanagh, carjacking ranks behind only murder and rape in the hierarchy of awful crimes. She has seen the terror in victims’ eyes. The ones that affect her the most are the elderly women. Like the old lady who had been unloading groceries in her driveway when four suspects approached and demanded her car. The woman put up a fight and screamed for help; as she tried to run, one of the men tackled her, breaking her foot. Or the woman in her mid‑80s who was assaulted while parked at an ATM. Three adolescent boys grabbed her cash and pushed her while taking her car keys; she tripped backwards over a concrete parking barrier and hit her head on the ground. When Cavanagh’s unit later arrested one of the boys, in a grocery store, they discovered that he was only 12.During the arrest, the kid said something to Detective Dalton about a bullet.“You have a gun on you?” Dalton asked.“No, a bullet in me,” the kid said.“What are you talking about?”“I got shot two weeks ago,” the kid said.He’d been a victim in a triple shooting. A bullet was still lodged in his back.Cavanagh later went to search the house where the kid lived. She found cockroaches everywhere, an empty refrigerator, 10 people crammed in two rooms, old takeout rotting beneath a bed. “I really didn’t want to like this kid—he’d just carjacked an old lady,” Cavanagh told me. “But I felt sorry for him.”After every arrest, Sergeant Milburn looks up the suspect’s prior contact with the criminal-justice system. He estimates that in at least half of the unit’s juvenile cases, the suspect has had previous interactions with the police as a victim—of physical or sexual abuse, for example, or of neglect by a parent or family member. Milburn searched the 12-year-old’s history, and sure enough: He’d allegedly been physically abused at 6 years old. “Most of these kids don’t stand a chance,” Milburn told me. “I can’t tell you how many times we notify parents and they say, ‘I don’t care,’ or ‘Just send his ass to Cheltenham’ ”—the county’s juvenile detention center. “That happens more times than not.”Cavanagh kept her eyes on the Escalade in the gathering dusk. The two suspects emerged from the apartment. “Carjacking 14,” she radioed, announcing herself by her call sign. “I’ve got two people on foot.”The suspects climbed into the Escalade and headed toward the complex’s exit. Just past the gate, officers were hiding between two cars, where they’d laid the spike strip. Once the vehicle had passed over it, the officers would quickly yank the strip out of the road, to spare the tires of pursuing police cars.From the sky, the helicopter spotter called out the Escalade’s movements: The suspects were coming around the corner, approaching the gatehouse. As the Escalade bumped over the spikes, air hissed out of its tires. It wobbled but kept going.The line of patrol cars emerged from the side street, sirens wailing. Cavanagh joined the chase, crossing into a residential neighborhood, bouncing over speed bumps at 40 miles per hour.As the carjackers sped down a hill on their busted tires, they lost control of the Escalade, which veered off the road and smashed into the front of a house. The suspects leaped out and ran. For a long moment, the police radio was quiet as officers chased them on foot.“Talk to me,” a dispatcher finally said.“Got one in custody,” a breathless patrol officer replied.The second suspect had disappeared into the trees, the vegetation too dense for the helicopter to pick up his heat signature. A supervisor called for a canine unit; perhaps a dog could pick up his scent.Cavanagh raced toward the woodline, listening for the sound of sticks breaking or leaves rustling, then slipping into the trees to search.Brian L. Schwalb, the District’s attorney general, told me he was surprised at how quickly the prevailing sentiment had returned to “Lock ’em up” when carjackings and other crimes exploded. After all the marches and protests demanding criminal-justice reform in 2020, he said, “here we are four years later, and it’s as if that conversation never happened.” Frightened residents suddenly became less interested in hearing about root causes and long-term solutions, saying in community forums across the region that they felt unsafe and wanted something done now. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C., found himself suddenly being attacked as “soft on crime,” sometimes by the very same people who just months earlier were deriding him and other federal prosecutors as “mass incarcerators.” As soon as people start feeling unsafe, Graves told me, calls for reform are replaced by a desire to “lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible.” Evidence of this dizzying shift can be seen in the 2024 presidential election: Kamala Harris now embraces the prosecutor’s background she attempted to distance herself from during the 2020 primary campaign.In 2014, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to a wave of police reforms across the country. The killing of George Floyd intensified that wave. But as violent crime rose sharply across D.C. over the past few years, many of those reforms suddenly seemed ill-conceived. A new narrative took hold, even among frightened liberals: The city’s progressivism had prompted a descent into lawlessness. Juvenile criminals were facing no consequences. Young people were out of control. Politicians backpedaled, prosecutors promised to get tough again, and police officers said smugly to one another, What did they think was going to happen?The D.C. city council’s decision to trim the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget in 2020 led to a hiring freeze that Peter Newsham, D.C.’s police chief from 2016 until early 2021, believes contributed to the spike in crime. “If you look at our data during that time period, crime almost immediately went in the wrong direction, particularly violent crime,” Newsham told me. “To reduce the size of the police department was, in my opinion, irresponsible.”Newsham doesn’t dispute that policing needs to reform and evolve. But Washington’s police department has been evolving for decades, he said, under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Justice. “We’re not the Derek Chauvins of the world,” he told me, referring to the police officer who killed George Floyd.Newsham is now the police chief for nearby Prince William County, Virginia, which has been averaging only a dozen or so carjackings a year. He says that if you were to place a red dot on a map everywhere across the region where a serious crime has occurred, most of those dots would be concentrated in D.C. and some of its adjoining Maryland neighborhoods. “As soon as you go into Virginia, there are very few red dots,” he says. “How do you explain that?”He answered his own question: “It’s the lack of consequences in D.C. If you want to stop violent crime, you have to separate violent criminals from society. They’re just not doing that. We’re so concerned about the freedom of the violent offender that we’re putting everyone else in jeopardy.” (The poverty rate is also lower in Prince William County than in Washington.) Newsham says criminals in D.C. have told him they know not to commit a crime in Northern Virginia because they know punishment there “is going to be swift and certain.”The carjacking fever seems to finally be breaking; this is the first year since 2019 in which carjackings are down—by more than 50 percent in D.C. and roughly 26 percent in Prince George’s County through August. Police leaders attribute the decline in part to their specialized carjacking task forces, which have gotten better at solving cases—and also to a public sentiment that has shifted back in favor of more aggressive policing and prosecution. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney, ascribes the decline in carjackings partly to his office’s successful prosecution of multiple cases that resulted in lengthy prison sentences. Christina Henderson, the city-council member, concurs. “I think the growing number of prosecutions has helped curb some of this behavior,” she said. Sergeant Scall surveils a stolen Toyota Corolla. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) But Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center, says the panicked return to a draconian tough-on-crime approach is misguided. “We’re revisiting failed policies from the 1990s,” such as youth curfews and longer pretrial detention, he told me. “We’re bringing back policies that we know did not work and that actually created a lot of harm.”“When crime rises, the reaction has always been to get tough on crime,” Emily Gunston, who worked as first assistant attorney general for D.C. under Schwalb, told me. But “all of the studies show that putting kids deeper in the juvenile justice system increases criminality rather than reducing it.”Ferrer noted that it’s a relatively small group of kids getting into trouble: Of the roughly 48,000 adolescents who live in D.C., fewer than 3 percent, or about 1,200, have been involved in the juvenile court system—and of those, about 1 percent, or fewer than 500, are charged with the most violent crimes: homicide, armed robbery, and carjacking. Gunston thinks the focus should be on this subset of offenders. “If we threw enough money and resources at these children,” she told me, “it would be much cheaper and more effective than what we’re doing.” Graves agrees that the most effective approach is to concentrate on the small number of people who are committing violent acts—but that the initial emphasis should be on removing them from the community.Juvenile crime rates rise and fall, but the primary root causes of the crimes don’t change, Ferrer said: Based on data from 2022, he estimates that 12 percent of the kids involved in D.C.’s juvenile justice system are homeless, 75 percent are on Medicaid, at least 45 percent have a diagnosed behavioral-health issue, and at least 50 percent have reported abuse or neglect. Many of these kids have experienced significant and complex trauma, and so have their parents. Problems that have compounded over generations will not be solved quickly.“It’s really important to hold two ideas in your brain at the same time,” Gunston said. “Carjacking is a terrible crime that has terrible effects on victims—and these are children who don’t have the same decision-making abilities as adults. A child who commits a crime like this has already been failed in so many ways.”The concerns of a community worried about safety in the face of runaway violent crime are legitimate. So are concerns about the rights and life prospects of the sometimes quite young kids committing these crimes—kids born into poverty and structural racism, many of whom were themselves victims before they became criminals. Can these concerns be balanced effectively? Ferrer said the solution is to address the root causes of crime and poverty. “Real public safety is a by-product of thriving communities,” he told me, and that’s clearly true as far as it goes. But until we achieve that, would-be criminals, even young ones, have to know that they will face serious consequences for violent behavior. On this, police, prosecutors, criminologists, and most citizens in the afflicted communities agree. It should be possible to concentrate more intensive and proactive police work, and prosecutorial follow-through, on the small core of regular violent offenders, while at the same time investing public resources more broadly in impoverished neighborhoods. Brian Schwalb, the attorney general, calls this a “both and” approach: Violent offenders must face aggressive prosecution—and communities must address root causes of crime. Rather than careening wildly from one extreme (defund the police) to the other (lock ’em up), Schwalb says the whole criminal-justice apparatus—police and prosecutors and policy makers—must constantly be calibrating minor adjustments in the balance between rehabilitation and punitiveness.Milele Drummond, who has taught in D.C. public schools for 14 years, has been struck recently by how casually some of her students talk about carjacking. “To them, it’s not a big deal,” she told me. “It’s more fun to carjack” than to be in school.Drummond, who lives in Southeast D.C., near the border with Maryland, worries about getting carjacked when she goes to get gas, especially when she has her two young children with her. But she also worries about her students. She had thought that teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye would lead to productive discussions about racism. But she’s found that an easier way to convey some of these lessons has been to talk about crime and justice in their own city. When crime is a thing that happens to other people elsewhere, she tells her classes, it’s easy for people far from the scene to express empathy toward the perpetrator, and an understanding of why a person might have committed such a crime. But when people who are used to feeling safe suddenly don’t, that empathy and understanding tend to evaporate quickly.[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]“When people of means and power and privilege start to feel afraid, everything changes,” Drummond tells her students—the response shifts very quickly from “Oh, they have a sad story” to “Lock them up.”In other words, when the threat of becoming a victim increases in their own neighborhoods, even progressive reformers are apt to suddenly become tough on crime. Which is what many of the law-abiding residents of higher-crime communities have been all along.It was now close to midnight. After chasing down the Escalade, the detectives had returned to the maze of gray cubicles on the second floor of their building. One wall was papered with flyers showing carjacked vehicles that had not been recovered. A discarded bumper with D.C. tags lay on the floor, retrieved from a carjacking scene.Josh Scall, another sergeant on the unit, walked in wearing a backwards baseball cap that read Girl Dad. He has two daughters, 6 and 8. During the car chase, his wife had been texting him, telling him that the girls, worn out from a swim meet, had gone to sleep easily.Scall looked over at a computer monitor on Dalton’s desk, which was showing live feeds from each of the four interrogation rooms down the hall. Two young suspects, arrested in a different case, were yelling to each other through an air-conditioning vent.“They’re trying to charge me with armed robbery,” one shouted.In a third room, the suspect whom the carjacking unit had apprehended that night sat in a chair, his head on a desk, his left wrist cuffed to a wall. Ueno, the gym rat, had gone in earlier to get the kid’s name, and described him as respectful. “He seemed defeated,” he told the others. (They never found the second suspect.)After George Floyd’s death, Scall, a 14-year police veteran, had questioned his choice of career. Scrolling Facebook, he’d see that everyone, including friends, had seemed to turn against his profession. But since joining the carjacking unit in 2021, he told me, he’d felt renewed purpose. His squad was doing unambiguous police work, with clear victims and villains. Every time he showed up at a scene, he’d been called there to help. He liked that. His wife thinks the job is too dangerous. But Scall feels that the unit is making a difference.Scall watched the detectives work. Cavanagh was typing up a probable-cause affidavit. Another detective retrieved a copy of the pursuit video from the helicopter hangar. A third followed the Escalade to the evidence bay for processing. Ueno hung up the phone and rolled his chair around to face the others. “All right, the juvenile’s grandmother has been notified,” he said. She had not sounded surprised to hear that her grandson had been arrested.Just after midnight, Cavanagh walked over to the microwave to warm up a container of Irish stew. As the microwave beeped, her telephone rang. It was the owner of the Escalade. “They ran from us and ended up losing control and hit a house,” Cavanagh told him. “So your car has some serious front-end damage.”After Cavanagh hung up, she went back to the affidavit. She was charging the juvenile with 13 criminal counts, mostly felonies. In a little while, she’d drop him off at a youth detention center. With no prior arrests, he’d likely be released later that morning.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Catching the Carjackers.”

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Alaska’s glaciers are melting at a record rate due to global warming. | Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Hi, I’m Paige Vega, Vox’s climate editor. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Joseph Lee, a New York City-based journalist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, on a series exploring Indigenous solutions that address extreme weather and climate change. And today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’ve published the project’s latest feature, a story that takes us to Idaho, where the Coeur d’Alene Tribe is undergoing a sweeping, multi-decade effort to restore an important wetland on the reservation. Their restoration, guided by the return of ancestral food sources, could serve as a model for the rest of the country. You can read it here.   Stories like the Coeur d’Alene’s highlight the value of Indigenous solutions as we face increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters and navigate the brutal effects of the climate crisis.   Around the world, Indigenous people have the smallest carbon footprint, according to the United Nations, but are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change because they disproportionately live in geographically high-risk areas.  At the same time, these communities are also key sources of knowledge and understanding on climate change impacts, responses, and adaptation. Their traditional knowledge — focused on sustainability and resilience, from forecasting weather patterns to improving agricultural practices and management of natural resources — has increasingly gained recognition at the international level as a vital way to tackle climate change. I talked with Lee about the process of exploring several tribes’ climate dilemmas, and why the alternative posture they’re taking can offer us uniquely humble, approachable, and nature-first holistic approaches — something we could all take to heart.  Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Paige Vega: Let’s talk about the project Changing With Our Climate and how it came to be. What were some of the goals you had — things you really wanted to hit home through these stories? Joseph Lee: We wanted to look at different ways Indigenous people are adapting to climate change and extreme weather. For years, I’ve been hearing a lot about how Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate change and that Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship are good for the environment, so we wanted to explore in depth what that actually looks like in different Indigenous communities. In each story, we really wanted to focus on a specific community, to show the diversity of Indian Country, the challenges tribes are facing, but also the range of creative solutions they’re working on.  How do you draw on your own perspective and life experiences as well as your professional experiences reporting on Indigenous communities?   Writing this series gave me a lot of opportunities to think about my own tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag. For example, in writing about the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s water potato harvest, in our story that published on Vox today, I was reminded of my tribe’s annual cranberry harvest, which I just attended. Or when I visited the Shinnecock Nation in August, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between their tension with their wealthy Hamptons neighbors and my tribe’s experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I think my personal experience can help me think about what questions to ask, but my background doesn’t give me any sort of secret code to understanding other tribes. Every tribe is different, and my goal for this series was to show the specific situations facing each featured community.  What is the value of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous solutions? What can all communities learn from the distinct way that tribes grapple with extreme weather and climate change? Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge is based on generations of experience with land and environment. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, for example, relied on a beloved elder’s memory when they began reconnecting old stream channels in their wetlands restoration project. And in our first piece [about how an Alaskan tribe dependent on sea ice is adapting to rapid warming], Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, an Iñupiaq researcher, told me how she is gathering local observations about the climate in the Alaskan Arctic to help leave a detailed record for the future. That’s what Indigenous knowledge is, she said — an understanding developed over years and years. All of these stories show how it’s about constant evolution and looking forward. Indigenous knowledge has never been set in stone, and in the face of climate change, Indigenous people are adapting more than ever.  What were some of the highlights or unexpected insights that blew you away? One of the things that struck me is that Indigenous people have been saying and doing these things for years, so the question becomes what’s been stopping them [now]. Sometimes colonialism can seem abstract, but there are so many clear examples, whether that’s systemic racism in the Hamptons against the Shinnecock Nation or the legacy of allotment policies on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. Government policies have made it that much harder for tribes to adapt to climate change. Threats to tribal sovereignty can also be seen as threats to climate adaptation.  On the other hand, despite the legacy of colonialism, some of these solutions are really straightforward ideas, like bringing good fire [also known as controlled burns] back to the land after decades of fire suppression policies. There’s a lesson here that we don’t have to overcomplicate these ideas, we just have to not just listen to people who have been doing the work for generations, but support them or get out of their way.  What’s one lesson or takeaway that you’d like to leave readers with? There are two things that I kept hearing while reporting these stories. The first is that we can’t control nature, that trying to impose our will on the environment has never worked. For the Shinnecock Nation on Long Island, for example, they understand that no matter what they do, they can’t stop the water from rising. So they are working with that knowledge to find a solution that will work for their community.  The second is that we need to be thinking more long-term. The real change is going to take generations. A number of the Indigenous people I spoke to for this series talked about how they don’t expect to see the results of their work in their lifetimes, but they believe in it anyway. People in the Coeur d’Alene Tribe talked about how the previous generation of tribal leaders fought for legal justice but never saw the fruits of their labor, and now this generation understands they may not be around to see the salmon fully return, or their wetland restoration completed.  I think that kind of commitment to an effort that you may never see completed is something we could all learn from.