Carjacking

Carjacking is the offense of taking a motor vehicle from a person by force or the threat of force while the victim or an occupant is present, a specific and violent subtype of robbery rather than an ordinary motor vehicle theft, since the defining element is the direct confrontation with, and threat to, the vehicle's occupant rather than the taking of an unattended vehicle. Many jurisdictions enacted carjacking as its own distinctly named and separately punished offense beginning in the 1990s, following a rise in reported cases and public concern that ordinary robbery or vehicle-theft statutes did not adequately capture the particular danger of a confrontation with an occupied, moving-capable vehicle. The offense is frequently graded upward when a weapon is used, when the victim or another occupant, such as a child, is injured, or when the vehicle is taken with a driver still forced to remain inside, circumstances that most statutes treat as substantially aggravating factors. Carjacking is studied within both violent-crime and vehicle-theft criminology, since it combines the confrontational risk profile of robbery with the target-selection and resale dynamics of vehicle theft, and its prevention has drawn on situational crime-prevention research into parking-lot and traffic-stop vulnerability.