It was just after 8 p.m. when Michael Waller pulled up to his home on a well-to-do block near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Waller, then 59, glanced at his phone to check his email. Within seconds, two men appeared on either side of his gray Mercedes waving Glock handguns.
The man on the passenger side opened the door and slammed his gun into Waller’s right ear and scalp, knocking him out for a moment. When he came to, he was still strapped into his seat belt, blood flowing down the side of his head.
The gunmen ordered him out of the car and commanded him to throw his phone into the bushes. As they began to drive away, one pointed his gun at Waller and threatened to kill him on the spot — prompting Waller, battered and bloodied, to duck into an alley.
“These guys knew what they were doing, and they were so smooth about it,” said Waller, a defense and foreign policy strategist at the Center for Security Policy, a conservative think tank. “They seemed like real professionals.”
The carjacking in August 2021 made no headlines. It was part of a crime wave that shook the city during the pandemic. Four years later, the capital is teeming with National Guard troops and federal officers called in by President Donald Trump, who also took over the Metropolitan Police Department after highlighting the recent attempted carjacking of an administration staffer.
The takeover has sparked a fierce debate over the state of crime in D.C. What’s beyond dispute is that carjackings exploded in Washington and several other major cities in the U.S. after 2019.
It’s a particularly brutal crime, experts say, one that often causes lasting psychological damage. And while most types of crime that surged during the pandemic have since dropped off, carjackings are one of the few that have remained well above pre-pandemic levels in certain big cities like D.C., police data shows.
“It became the crime of the pandemic,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a D.C.-based organization of current and former law enforcement officials focused on improving policing. “And the reason you still have it is because juveniles learned how to do it. That presents a lot of challenges for the justice system.”
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Author: J. Michael Waller
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