Chicago Mayor Says ‘Carjacking Crisis’ Might be Correlated with Remote Learning, School Closures


Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot suggests the city’s carjacking “crisis” and rise in violent crime could be a result of “remote learning.”

The Democrat spoke with reporters this week when she was asked to comment on growing questions over safety and security in the Windy City.

“We are seeing an inordinate number of juveniles that are the perpetrators of these carjackings. I think in Chicago we have consistently seen 50 percent or higher of the people that we are arresting are juveniles,” said the Mayor of the country’s third largest city.

“We started seeing this rise in cases in 2020. And I’ll be frank and say in Chicago there was a correlation we believe between remote learning and the rise in carjackings,” she explained. “Having talked to state attorneys who are dealing with these cases in juvenile court and others, a lot of parents went to work during the day thinking their teenagers were logged on for remote learning, only to find something else. And I ask, ‘Is there some new market for stolen cars?’ And unfortunately the answer was no — that for many of these kids, some of whom had no prior involvement in the criminal justice system, this was pure boredom.”

“No resident in the city of Chicago or the Chicagoland area deserves to live in fear of violence,” Lightfoot concluded. “But the sad reality is that in the last year and a half in particular, there is a very real and pervasive fear of carjacking across our city, our region and our state. And in actuality carjackings have become a national crisis.”

Read the full report at Fox News.

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