Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave

On 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.

- By Jamie Thompson - Photographs by Anna Rose Layden

On 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.